The best way to find out is to follow these simple steps:
Gather 2000 people who have the common cold
Split them randomly into two groups of 1000
Give vitamin C to one group, and a sugar pill (the placebo) to the other
Make sure the people receiving the pills and those dispensing the pills don’t know which is which (to make your trial double-blind)
Wait a bit
See if the Vitamin C group gets over their colder faster than the other group
You will of conducted a double-blind placebo controlled scientific trial.
Luckily for us, we don’t have to do it ourselves. Several of these trials have already been done. Enough trials, in fact, that one can do a Meta analysis, a statistical review and summary of all the trials.
A comprehensive meta analysis, by an unbiased organization, is the gold standard of scientific inquiry; it is our best chance of knowing the truth.
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international not for profit organisation set up 15 years ago to create transparent, systematic, unbiased reviews of the medical literature on everything from drugs, through surgery, to community interventions. And I have a cold. I read their review to find out whether Vitamin C or Echinacea would be effective in treating it.
Thirty trials involving 11,350 participants suggest that regular ingestion of vitamin C has no effect on common cold incidence in the ordinary population.
It reduced the duration and severity of common cold symptoms slightly, although the magnitude of the effect was so small its clinical usefulness is doubtful.
Nevertheless, in six trials with participants exposed to short periods of extreme physical or cold stress or both (including marathon runners and skiers) vitamin C reduced the common cold risk by half.
The failure of vitamin C supplementation to reduce the incidence of colds in the normal population indicates that routine mega-dose prophylaxis is not rationally justified for community use. But evidence suggests that it could be justified in people exposed to brief periods of severe physical exercise or cold environments.
Echinacea preparations tested in clinical trials differ greatly. There is some evidence that preparations based on the aerial parts of E. purpurea might be effective for the early treatment of colds in adults but the results are not fully consistent.
Beneficial effects of other Echinacea preparations, and Echinacea used for preventative purposes might exist but have not been shown in independently replicated, rigorous RCTs.
In response to monkeys stealing his coffee beans, an Indian farmer observes: If you start shooting monkeys, you’ll spend the rest of your life shooting monkeys.
The cooking instructions for my Tandoori Chicken Breast microwave lunch, are to cook…
…until internal temperature reaches 74C (165F).
How many office kitchens have a cook’s thermometer? Score nothing for usability.
Should you for any reason attempt to sue the manufacturer, it will rapidly become apparent that you didn’t follow the cooking instructions. Score one for legal.
I have been playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or OpenTTD on and off for a while, but I confess I only understood train signals very recently. The game gets a lot more fun once you can have complex track layouts, so here’s a tutorial on train track layout and signaling for complete beginners.
Building tracks the wrong way
If you’re anything like I was, all your train layouts probably look like this:
When I was 16, I wrote a computer game, called Micro Zooides. It was called that partly because on Windows .EXE files all start with the two characters MZ, and partly because it was about small creatures. Micro-Zooides was going to be about humanity’s progress, it was going to be Civilization, which didn’t exist yet.
The game had a splash screen of a Far Side comic, then a short video of me tromping through the woods like a Neanderthal, which my Dad filmed and which I digitized with a very early video capture card.
In Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 I wrote a basic graphics engine to display the tiles of the world, and an event loop so I could move the main character around the world. I drew sprites for a proto-human (the micro zooid), dirt, rocks and sticks. He could walk around the world, and pick up and put down rocks or sticks.
Then I took a break to plan. I have a proto-human, rocks, and sticks. How do I get to civilization?
I’ve been using Picasa to edit my pictures for a long time, and it’s an excellent program. Recently however I’ve started shooting RAW, and I’d like control, so I’ve started using GIMP. It’s more powerful and more complicated than Picasa, so to start myself off I went through all the features of Picasa and made notes on how to duplicate that operation in GIMP. Here are those notes.
Most of what Picasa does can be replicated with the Colors / Levels or Colors / Curves tool. It’s well worth spending a little time experimenting with both of those (the documentation is very good too).
Crop
In the Toolbox, click the Rectangle select tool
In its options (beneath the tools), tick ‘Fixed: Aspect Ratio’
Enter 6:4 ratio (for 1.6 sensor, most DSLRs)
Tick Highlight.
Draw a rectangle on the image that you want to crop to.
Image menu / Crop to Selection
Los Angeles is under attack, by trigonometric functions! OMG! Trigo-what? If I wanted to do maths, I’d go to San Francisco!! You, like, totally gotta save L.A man. Enter your name, then move your tank.
Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate, the forward and back arrow keys to move. The barrel of the tank is the little black line. That’s the front.
No, your tank can’t fire. Avoid the mathematical blobs. YEAH!
The longer you live, the more points you get. A score above 100 is, like, totally AWESOME! Good luck Bro.
Let me know in the comments how much you score.
Joshua-Michéle Ross at O’Reilly Radar writes about the money the American taxpayer (government) is giving Genera Motors, Chrysler and Ford to save them from bankruptcy:
This is the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss.
The very concept of “Too Big To Fail” points to a deeper truth: the U.S.’s auto industry does not operate within the “free market” at all. Far from it. As their moniker suggests, the “Big Three” are an oligopoly with a long record of eschewing innovation ( electric cars, hybrids etc.), killing off alternatives like mass transit and bullying public policy (lobbying against CAFÉ standards, environmental and tax policies [Hummer owners get a $34K tax credit!], the threat of relocating factories etc.) all in an effort to conform the not so “free market” to its lumbering non-strategies of pursuing short-term profit.
The consensus in the comments to that article is that if the government is saving a company that is too big too fail, it should be split up into several smaller companies, so that we only ever have to save it once.
For many months now I have been making and receiving telephone calls from my computer. There are two advantages:
It is very cheap. Calls within the United States are about $1/hour!
It makes your phone number virtual, and configurable, which means for example that my phone number will forward to my cell phone if my computer is offline. It also means you don’t have to be in the same country as your phone number.
I am running Ubuntu Linux on a Thinkpad, but most of this should apply to Ekiga on all platforms, and the principles apply to all Softphones.
Please note that this is a general indication – the origin of the wine and process used (such as aging) may change the order of this list. See Somm’s comment below.
I have recently moved all my photos from a Gallery 2 instance I ran myself, to Flickr. This means I don’t need to keep my Gallery2 install up to date, it frees up lots of disk space on my server, and allows me to more easily share pictures with friends and family. Here’s how I did it:
The silence around here is because I have been traveling for two months. I should be back in December. In the meantime you can keep up with our adventures on our other site.
From the 9th to the 15th May 2004, I went on the Fundamental Bushcraft course with the Ray Mears School of Bushcraft, in the Kent countryside. Here’s what happened:
The reason new world wines use the grapes they do, is because those are the grapes from the big French wines. But which grapes from which wines ? To find out, you could go to the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine and read the text of each appelation. There are over 300. Or there’s the Wikipedia list of French wine Appelations. Or there’s the handy guide below on which grapes are in which French wines. Happy sipping !
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