I'm of no relation to the OP, but simply from my own frustrating experience of trying to slog through their API documentation, I'd have to agree with the overall point that Sun has done no one any favours when it comes to clarity.
Say, for example, that you're trying to whip up a simple script to munge some text in a Writer document. After considerable reading around, you might discover that you need an object of type TextCursor to work with Writer text. So you dig into the API docs to try to find out what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.
Please, read the TextCursor API page linked above, and then see if you can quickly understand what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.
If the OOo source code and related documentation are at all similar to the API documentation, then I must say that I'm frankly flabbergasted that the project has made any progress at all.
Let's talk basic functionality -- word count. Many different important word processor use cases, professional and academic, absolutely require sensible word counts -- counts that include just the selected text, or that include the whole document, or that count everything except footnotes and endnotes, for example. OOo's word count functionality is bare-bones in the extreme, and doesn't offer anything but counts of selected text, and the whole document. For that matter, it doesn't even count mixed Asian-Western text properly, meaning that no one dealing with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (the CJK languages) can use OOo for anything beyond casual use (i.e. why bother).
I would dearly love to avoid the MS tax and ditch MS Office, but OOo leaves me unable to do so. (Thankfully, IBM has stepped up to the plate with Lotus Symphony, but that's both closed-source and a bitch to install...) And it's not for lack of bug reporting -- I've known for blooming years that OOo is a sick, dysfunctional project simply from the number of brain-dead bugs that linger and linger and linger and linger and linger, with no signs of progress or even any forecast of when they might be fixed.
Take the word count bug, Issue 17964. This has been on the books since 2003, FFS, with no real progress -- all they've done to address any of the details described is to add Word Count to the Tools menu. Or take the related enhancement of allowing word counts of selected text as opposed to just the whole document, Issue 4568. This was first posted in May 2002, and took until November 2007 to be implemented. This is absolutely required basic functionality for any word processing program intended for professional or academic use (i.e. almost any word processor at all), and it took over five freaking years for the OOo devs to get around to it.
I simply have to ask, what in the devil's briefcase are Sun and the OOo devs doing? They make Vista look like development time well spent.
This is a real deal-breaker for lots of people. Relying on server-based software, especially when the servers are controlled by a third party, unnecessarily increases complications, possible failure modes, and exposure to unnecessary risks. One of the core tenets of any sort of project management is to eliminate or ameliorate risk wherever possible. This makes server-based software a complete non-starter for many different situations.
I'm sure I could come up with more reasons, but the one above is so compelling, that's as far as I'm going to go for right now.:)
Yah, I'm not sure why, but the Slashdot devs never made the site Unicode-compatible. Not even regular Latin accented characters work properly unless entered as the HTML entities, like "á" instead of just "á", which can make copy-and-paste from other threads a bit tricky. And then some entities fail outright, like "ā", which just vanishes when rendered by slashcode: "". I suspect it might have something to do with string processing and maybe how their DB backend works, but that's just a shot-in-the-dark theory.
From your post, I'm guessing you might find Thirty-Thousand.org to directly address your concern (although more with regard to representatives than senators).
The basic premise is that US congressional representative districts have become so blooming huge in population terms that it's simply impossible for normal (i.e. non-mega-rich non-corporate) constituents to have much real impact on what representatives do. The group argues that it's way past time to increase the number of representatives in congress (artificially capped at 435 since 1939) in order to reduce the constituent / representative ratio. This averaged 40K in 1804, and now averages around 700K -- a 17.5x difference. Boosting the number of representatives and shrinking representative districts would bring constituents into closer contact with their representatives, and thereby allow for (shocking, perhaps) actual representation.
Fair enough, thank you for the thoughtful reply, and for explaining your viewpoint. You're correct about my interpretation, and now that I better understand your reading of the text, I wonder which one was intended? More matter for a May morning...
Cheers,
Different traditions and theories, same sci method
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Hello giacomo007 --
Please re-read my posts. I think you and I might agree more than your post implies. I'm not defending any notion of "non-Western science" -- science, as best I understand it, is science -- observing the world as objectively and quantitatively as possible, and deriving theories to describe these observations as accurately as possible. I fully agree with you about there only being one science. I am also wary of orientalist or exoticist proclivities, which I have observed first-hand while living in Japan and wondering why some of my fellow ex-pats seemed to view everything Japanese, no matter how distasteful (sometimes even to other Japanese folks), through rose-tinted glasses.
Likewise, I'm no proponent of obscure secrets or la-la hokum. After careful reading and observation of my own, I do not think Chinese medicine falls into the same category as crystals and windchimes. From what I have read, Chinese medicine is not the static, dead, dogmatic tradition that you describe, but is instead a living, changing body of thought that undergoes revision as time passes -- much like Western medicine. Someone trained as a doctor in the Chinese tradition has put a lot of time and energy into their own learning, much as someone trained as a doctor in the Western tradition. I am aware that some "adherents" of Chinese medicine in the US tend more towards the exoticist hippie end of things, but I consider these people to be as much practitioners of Chinese medicine as I consider our local organic herb gardeners to be practitioners of Western medicine.
What I *am* trying to do here is point out that the same scientific method can be applied to similar bodies of knowledge (in this case, observations of disease and wellness), and produce very different theories. Some of these very different theories might even stand the test of time (and further testing), ultimately producing distinct theoretical traditions.
Just in terms of astrophysics, to take this discussion out of the apparently emotionally charged realm of medicine, we have multiple contenders for understanding the universe and possibly producing a grand unified theory of everything, such as string theory and the standard model. These are very different theories, derived by applying the scientific method to the same body of observations -- but arriving at different interpretations. This is much like the difference between Chinese medical thought and Western medical thought -- or, more allegorically, much like the blind men and the elephant.
Oh, that's just too punny -- only I'm not sure if you meant it, or just made a typo.
For those not familiar with Japanese, otaku is the word for "nerd" -- generally not in any positive sense. The word stems from the roots o-, being a generic honorific prefix to refer to things not your own (simply speaking), and taku or "residence", the underlying implication being someone who never leaves the house.
Meanwhile, tako is Japanese for "octopus".
I once heard of an idea for opening a chain of Mexican-themed seafood fast-food restaurants around Japan, called "Tako Taco"...
Sorry to be pedantic here, but your post slightly misses the mark. Here's the Constitutional quote first:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Your own writing, however, missed this key "respecting" word:
Giving tax breaks to religions that fit the official definition thereof neither establishes nor infringes.
The problem is that the Constitutional quote you use does not discuess establishing a religion, but rather respecting an establishment of religion. Giving tax breaks to a religious group would indeed seem to fall into the "respecting an establishment of religion" category, which is why many folks aren't terribly happy about it.
I assumed that the general/. audience doesn't read or understand Chinese. Moreover,/. *still* isn't Unicode compatible, so neither the hanzi nor the diacritics in proper pinyin are possible in a post. I tried to hint at the proper context:
It seems I've struck a nerve. Your post lumps several things together, some of which I did not not intend, and some I did not even say. Let me see if I can clarify:
If it has an effect, it can be measured, tested, studied.
No argument there. I fully agree that anything observable can be measured and tested, and I actually recommended as much in a separate post in this thread -- Sure, please, by all means use Western scientific methods to investigate and possibly describe chi flows -- I'm all for it. All I'm trying to say is that traditional Western medicine doesn't *currently* have a theory or set of theories in place that describes what seems to happen in Chinese medical theory.
There is no western medicine, there is just medicine.
I agree. However, I would like to point out that there is a body of medical thought that is particular to the West (i.e. Europe and historically related countries). Chi is not part of this. There is also a body of medical thought that is particular to the East (primarily China and historically related countries). Both of these traditions are approaching the same set of problems -- disease and health -- and a largely similar set of observations regarding disease and health, but from very different directions. Both traditions make use of the scientific method -- they've just come up with different descriptions for what they've each seen.
Herbal medicine is understood to be untested 'natural' remedies.
Is it? I see no such mention in the review. Perhaps the book makes this definition more clear? Fair enough, as I haven't read the book. And what kind of "testing" do you mean -- only that carried out by major pharmaceutical companies? Or also that carried out by practitioners over the course of the past few centuries?
It bugs the bejeezus out of you becasue...
Since it is not scientific, then it falls into sloppy terminology becasue they avoid definition.
I think you're letting your emotional response run away with you. What bugs me about the review is that the terminology of the review (and possibly the book) is sloppy. Clear definitions are needed, or confusion is the only likely outcome.
Hopefully the book wither defines the terms in it's context, or at least refers to the common SCAM terms in the media and on the web today.
I, too, hope so. My concern, which led to my original post, is that loosey-goosey definitions and assumptions about what people mean by various terms could lead to the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak -- there is a heck of a lot of snake oil for sale, but sometimes even snake-oil salesmen can wind up selling something good by accident. I would dearly love to see more solid, evidentiary, scientifically evaluated study of all manner of herbs and treatments. Some things that I personally discounted in the past as completely la-la, like reiki for instance (heck, even the first Wiki paragraph sounds out to lunch), have been shown upon evaluation to actually have something interesting going on. Sample article. I'm not sold by any means -- I certainly wouldn't rely on any of this for my own health -- but I do think there's enough of *something* going on to warrant more study, rather than just dismissing all of this wholesale. Even if all we discover is that it's the placebo effect, we will have still learned something.
Cheers,
There is more in this world, Horatio...
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Western medical theory is also incomplete -- what causes schizophrenia? how does the placebo effect work? etc. etc. Also, how many studies have been run on needle placement and effect (not affect)? How imprecise must one be before an acupuncture treatment is not effective? Acupuncture practitioners (at least, the Chinese-trained ones that I've spoken with) are happy to describe how everyone's body is slightly different, and that therefore it only makes perfect sense that needle placement would have to be different for each different body... Or do you mean something different?
Moreover, bear in mind that Chinese medicine in general, and acupuncture as well, aims for a gradual realignment rather than an immediate fix, and so more than a single treatment might be necessary to see any easily observable changes. For that matter, Western pharmaceuticals in some areas are coming to a gradual similar realization -- sometimes it's better to nudge the system back onto an even keel (smaller maintenance doses), instead of hitting it with a sledgehammer (one big wallop). We see this some in chronic treatment areas such as allergy medications or birth control.
The point of evidence based medicine is that if you test a treatment, and it does not match the facts, it is false.
Forgive me for maybe being pedantic, but this isn't entirely accurate, and it looks like you need to refamiliarize yourself with the scientific method. The facts are the facts. There's no matching of facts to facts at all. Perhaps you mean something more like, if you test a treatment and it shows no effect, then that treatment is not effective -- no argument there.
Alternately, if you test a treatment and it has an effect, but that effect is not allowed for by existing scientific knowledge, then that simply means that the effects of the treatment lie outside the bounds of existing scientific knowledge, and that more hypothesizing and testing is required to develop a theory that describes the observations. This is no surprise, and is, in fact, how science is supposed to work.
Cheers,
"Chi" theory a description, much like "gravity"
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And the four bodily humours represent a complete medical theory independent of modern Western medical thought.
Indeed. And just as someone only versed in modern Western medicine has trouble understanding Chinese medicine, so too would someone only versed in the theory of four humours have trouble understanding either of the other two.
If you mean to equate the theory of humours, which has no present currency, with the whole of Chinese medical thought, which is quite current, I must disagree and suggest that you've missed your mark. Western medicine tried on the theory of humours to see if it fit, and discarded it when it was found wanting. Chinese medicine has likewise tried on different theories and set aside those that do not work. Massive famine and resulting disease at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing dynasties, around the 1630s through the 1640s, prompted a major rethinking of then-current Chinese medical thought on disease and its causes. Current Chinese medical practitioners no longer follow discounted theories any more than Western doctors do.
The problem with Chi is that it's made up. It's a story. A fairytale. It might be entertaining, but it doesn't advance your knowledge at all.
I think you sell Chinese medical thought a bit short. The body of Chinese medical knowledge is no more "made up" than the body of Western medical knowledge. The concept of "chi" is a theory, much as the Western medical concept that electrical currents in nerve fibers lead to various perceptions is a theory. One might be more familiar than the other, but both are ultimately simply our (as in, the scientific consensus "our" for the respective communities) best-effort attempts at describing the observed phenomena.
I'm not a Chinese medical practitioner. Frankly, Western or Chinese, I don't give a rodent's posterior so long as it works. I'm merely trying to point out that other systems of thought exist -- and that Chinese medicine is indeed a *system of thought*, not just a pipe dream some hobo had on a sunny day. Chinese medical theorizing has been going on for many centuries more than Western medical thought even existed. Europeans were busy burning witches when Chinese doctors were trying to establish a comprehensive theory of illness.
Re-reading your post, I must ask, what constitutes a "scientific medical treatment"? I ask because I really don't know very well what you mean by this term. If you mean Western medicine in general, sadly I must point out that no, it doesn't always work. If you mean medical treatment on the basis of careful evaluation of known facts and observations combined with a hypothesis for the patient's current symptoms (i.e. diagnosis), Chinese medicine (when properly practiced by someone actually trained in the art) can be every bit as scientific as Western medicine.
Cheers,
Re:To modern *Western* medicine
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Hello Derek --
As Yuuki Dasu notes, it seems you might have missed my point -- I don't mean at all to imply that chi is somehow not scientifically testable, and I apologize if my lack of clarity led you to think that this was my intent. I mean rather that *current* Western medical theory doesn't have a theoretical understanding for how chi works -- much as traditional Chinese medical theory (so far as I'm familiar with it) doesn't have a theoretical understanding for how microbial infections work.
Sure, please, by all means use Western scientific methods to investigate and possibly describe chi flows -- I'm all for it. All I'm trying to say is that traditional Western medicine doesn't *currently* have a theory or set of theories in place that describes what seems to happen in Chinese medical theory. It's a translation problem, essentially, only more one of theories and modes of understanding rather than just language.:)
Wherever you go in the world, you're not going to have to look too hard to find someone with some useable level of ability in English, you can't say that about Chinese.
I say, "Just look for the Chinese restaurants." No, really, I'm being serious -- I've done some globetrotting, and everywhere I've gone, I've found Chinese restaurants. It's kinda funny, really, when even on remote tiny non-touristy islands in the Spanish-speaking part of the Caribbean, or on the tiny islands of the Pacific Northwest, you can find at least one Chinese restaurant somewhere.
This reminds me of a true story of a friend of mine. He's an interesting bloke -- his dad sounds like the punchline to a weird joke, as an Iraqi Jew living in Singapore and running a Cajun pork BBQ restaurant...
But anyway, let's call my friend Andy. He grew up partly in China, and speaks fluent Chinese and English. He was in Mexico City visiting some friends, and was walking across part of town to visit some other friends for a party. Only he'd gotten lost, and didn't speak a lick of Spanish. So what does he do? He finds the local Chinese restaurant. He walked up to the counter and asked, in flawless Chinese, how to get to XYZ address.
The Chinese proprietor and cash register girl just stood their with their mouths wide open for a moment, before finally getting out, "Why are you speaking Chinese to us?" To which Andy replied, "Because I don't speak Spanish." "Oh. Well, you take a right here and a left there..."
So seriously, knowing Chinese could also be extremely useful for international travelers. If you ever get lost, just find the local Chinese restaurant.
Cheers,
To modern *Western* medicine
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The problem with Acupuncture is that the practitioners still prescribe to the theory that the needles redirect a person's Chi and whatnot. To modern Western medicine this is about as useful as describing a treatment that restores balance to the four bodily humors.
Without adding that key word "Western" in there, you're missing an important point -- the whole concept of Chi is based on a complete medical theory independent of Western medical thought. So basically yes, describing Chi flows to someone trained only in Western medicine would be about as productive as talking in Chinese to someone who only understands English. Both languages deal with information, but in radically different ways. Both may be perfectly valid, but analyzing the one from the perspective of the other is going to be an arduous affair.
The main problem I see with the book, based just on the review here, is that it lumps many different things together. What exactly do they mean by "herbal medicine"? (And what the heck is "herbal" about tiger bone or rhino horn? Those are animal products, not herbs.) "Herbal medicine" is an exceedingly broad category, and could potentially include Native American shamanistic practices, experimental hippie salad recipes, strictly controlled German and Swiss herbal pharmacopoeia, doobie brownies, and Chinese apothecary traditions all in one big indiscriminate mess.
Likewise, what is "alternative medicine" as the authors intend? It sounds from the review like they mean everything that doesn't normally happen in a Western hospital, which again is an obscenely broad over-generalization. Some things are probably completely la-la -- "oh sure, my neighbor ate nothing but oranges while standing on his head for two days and it cured his sinus cold!" -- while other things are backed by many centuries of refinement (Chi theory, yoga, etc.).
The reviewer also notes,...alternative therapies are scientifically impossible, and often will violate fundamental scientific principles. "Scientifically impossible" suggests a misunderstanding of science -- science is about looking into things as objectively and quantifiably as possible, and deriving theories that best fit the observed phenomena. "Theoretically impossible" would certainly make sense -- but it would also imply the need for more study, and if XYZ "alternative" treatment were shown to be effective, then perhaps existing theories need modification. But that is a matter for further research, and thus lies outside the scope of this book.
Frankly, although the reviewer mentions a disdain for garbage science, such indiscriminate verbiage in the book sounds to me like a big factor in producing garbage science. Clearly defined terminology is a must for any productive hypotheses or research.
Just my two bits as a professional translator. Sloppy terminology just bugs the bejeezus out of me.
And, incidentally, a pound and a pint are basically the same thing, as are a tun and a ton -- assuming 16oz of water volume-wise weighs 16oz (not a bad working assumption for human-scale tolerances -- see more at Liter):
1 pint = 1 pound
1 gal = 8 pounds
1 cask = 128 pounds
1 barrel = 256 pounds
1 hogshead = 512 pounds
1 butt = 1024 pounds
1 tun = 2048 pounds ~ 1 ton (2,000lbs short, 2,240lbs long)
The imprecision and arbitrariness of the old English units used in the US can be maddening, but the binary nature does make them rather appealing in some ways.
Bingo! And there you have one *very* important distinction between an engineer and a craftsman -- the engineer deals more with theory and should-bes and measured reproduceability, while the craftsman deals more with practicalities and what is right in front of them. An engineer's approach to cabinetry would be very different, but when it comes to furniture, FWIW I'll take the craftsman's work any day.:)
I like how the Dutch have done it, as described some by A. Coward in this post. Simply speaking, the pound was redefined as 500mg, and the pint as 500ml. Both new definitions are only minor adjustments from the previous ones, as a pound is already precious close to half a kilo, and a pint to half a litre. (The only oddball conversion-wise was the ounce, which in the Netherlands is now 100mg -- 16ths don't translate very well into decimal systems.:) Perhaps something similar would work in the UK?
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't've said it better myself.
Sadly,
I'm of no relation to the OP, but simply from my own frustrating experience of trying to slog through their API documentation, I'd have to agree with the overall point that Sun has done no one any favours when it comes to clarity.
Say, for example, that you're trying to whip up a simple script to munge some text in a Writer document. After considerable reading around, you might discover that you need an object of type TextCursor to work with Writer text. So you dig into the API docs to try to find out what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.
Please, read the TextCursor API page linked above, and then see if you can quickly understand what properties and methods a TextCursor object has.
If the OOo source code and related documentation are at all similar to the API documentation, then I must say that I'm frankly flabbergasted that the project has made any progress at all.
Cheers,
Let's talk basic functionality -- word count. Many different important word processor use cases, professional and academic, absolutely require sensible word counts -- counts that include just the selected text, or that include the whole document, or that count everything except footnotes and endnotes, for example. OOo's word count functionality is bare-bones in the extreme, and doesn't offer anything but counts of selected text, and the whole document. For that matter, it doesn't even count mixed Asian-Western text properly, meaning that no one dealing with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (the CJK languages) can use OOo for anything beyond casual use (i.e. why bother).
I would dearly love to avoid the MS tax and ditch MS Office, but OOo leaves me unable to do so. (Thankfully, IBM has stepped up to the plate with Lotus Symphony, but that's both closed-source and a bitch to install...) And it's not for lack of bug reporting -- I've known for blooming years that OOo is a sick, dysfunctional project simply from the number of brain-dead bugs that linger and linger and linger and linger and linger , with no signs of progress or even any forecast of when they might be fixed.
Take the word count bug, Issue 17964. This has been on the books since 2003, FFS, with no real progress -- all they've done to address any of the details described is to add Word Count to the Tools menu. Or take the related enhancement of allowing word counts of selected text as opposed to just the whole document, Issue 4568. This was first posted in May 2002, and took until November 2007 to be implemented. This is absolutely required basic functionality for any word processing program intended for professional or academic use (i.e. almost any word processor at all), and it took over five freaking years for the OOo devs to get around to it.
I simply have to ask, what in the devil's briefcase are Sun and the OOo devs doing ? They make Vista look like development time well spent.
Frustratedly,
Oh, so that's why Bill's address isn't widely available!
(Laugh, it's a joke.)
Cheers,
This is a real deal-breaker for lots of people. Relying on server-based software, especially when the servers are controlled by a third party, unnecessarily increases complications, possible failure modes, and exposure to unnecessary risks. One of the core tenets of any sort of project management is to eliminate or ameliorate risk wherever possible. This makes server-based software a complete non-starter for many different situations.
I'm sure I could come up with more reasons, but the one above is so compelling, that's as far as I'm going to go for right now. :)
Cheers,
Yah, I'm not sure why, but the Slashdot devs never made the site Unicode-compatible. Not even regular Latin accented characters work properly unless entered as the HTML entities, like "á" instead of just "á", which can make copy-and-paste from other threads a bit tricky. And then some entities fail outright, like "ā", which just vanishes when rendered by slashcode: "". I suspect it might have something to do with string processing and maybe how their DB backend works, but that's just a shot-in-the-dark theory.
Cheers,
Nice sig, Kenshin, but for one minor quibble -- osake means booze in general, *including* beer. If you just mean rice wine, use sake instead. :)
"Ima wa, kyuuto ga nijuu paasento appu!"
Cheers,
From your post, I'm guessing you might find Thirty-Thousand.org to directly address your concern (although more with regard to representatives than senators).
The basic premise is that US congressional representative districts have become so blooming huge in population terms that it's simply impossible for normal (i.e. non-mega-rich non-corporate) constituents to have much real impact on what representatives do. The group argues that it's way past time to increase the number of representatives in congress (artificially capped at 435 since 1939) in order to reduce the constituent / representative ratio. This averaged 40K in 1804, and now averages around 700K -- a 17.5x difference. Boosting the number of representatives and shrinking representative districts would bring constituents into closer contact with their representatives, and thereby allow for (shocking, perhaps) actual representation.
Cheers,
Fair enough, thank you for the thoughtful reply, and for explaining your viewpoint. You're correct about my interpretation, and now that I better understand your reading of the text, I wonder which one was intended? More matter for a May morning...
Cheers,
Hello giacomo007 --
Please re-read my posts. I think you and I might agree more than your post implies. I'm not defending any notion of "non-Western science" -- science, as best I understand it, is science -- observing the world as objectively and quantitatively as possible, and deriving theories to describe these observations as accurately as possible. I fully agree with you about there only being one science. I am also wary of orientalist or exoticist proclivities, which I have observed first-hand while living in Japan and wondering why some of my fellow ex-pats seemed to view everything Japanese, no matter how distasteful (sometimes even to other Japanese folks), through rose-tinted glasses.
Likewise, I'm no proponent of obscure secrets or la-la hokum. After careful reading and observation of my own, I do not think Chinese medicine falls into the same category as crystals and windchimes. From what I have read, Chinese medicine is not the static, dead, dogmatic tradition that you describe, but is instead a living, changing body of thought that undergoes revision as time passes -- much like Western medicine. Someone trained as a doctor in the Chinese tradition has put a lot of time and energy into their own learning, much as someone trained as a doctor in the Western tradition. I am aware that some "adherents" of Chinese medicine in the US tend more towards the exoticist hippie end of things, but I consider these people to be as much practitioners of Chinese medicine as I consider our local organic herb gardeners to be practitioners of Western medicine.
What I *am* trying to do here is point out that the same scientific method can be applied to similar bodies of knowledge (in this case, observations of disease and wellness), and produce very different theories. Some of these very different theories might even stand the test of time (and further testing), ultimately producing distinct theoretical traditions.
Just in terms of astrophysics, to take this discussion out of the apparently emotionally charged realm of medicine, we have multiple contenders for understanding the universe and possibly producing a grand unified theory of everything, such as string theory and the standard model. These are very different theories, derived by applying the scientific method to the same body of observations -- but arriving at different interpretations. This is much like the difference between Chinese medical thought and Western medical thought -- or, more allegorically, much like the blind men and the elephant.
Cheers,
Oh, that's just too punny -- only I'm not sure if you meant it, or just made a typo.
For those not familiar with Japanese, otaku is the word for "nerd" -- generally not in any positive sense. The word stems from the roots o-, being a generic honorific prefix to refer to things not your own (simply speaking), and taku or "residence", the underlying implication being someone who never leaves the house.
Meanwhile, tako is Japanese for "octopus".
I once heard of an idea for opening a chain of Mexican-themed seafood fast-food restaurants around Japan, called "Tako Taco"...
Cheers,
Sorry to be pedantic here, but your post slightly misses the mark. Here's the Constitutional quote first:
Your own writing, however, missed this key "respecting" word:
The problem is that the Constitutional quote you use does not discuess establishing a religion, but rather respecting an establishment of religion. Giving tax breaks to a religious group would indeed seem to fall into the "respecting an establishment of religion" category, which is why many folks aren't terribly happy about it.
Cheers,
I assumed that the general /. audience doesn't read or understand Chinese. Moreover, /. *still* isn't Unicode compatible, so neither the hanzi nor the diacritics in proper pinyin are possible in a post. I tried to hint at the proper context:
Cheers,
Hello geekoid --
It seems I've struck a nerve. Your post lumps several things together, some of which I did not not intend, and some I did not even say. Let me see if I can clarify:
No argument there. I fully agree that anything observable can be measured and tested, and I actually recommended as much in a separate post in this thread -- Sure, please, by all means use Western scientific methods to investigate and possibly describe chi flows -- I'm all for it. All I'm trying to say is that traditional Western medicine doesn't *currently* have a theory or set of theories in place that describes what seems to happen in Chinese medical theory.
I agree. However, I would like to point out that there is a body of medical thought that is particular to the West (i.e. Europe and historically related countries). Chi is not part of this. There is also a body of medical thought that is particular to the East (primarily China and historically related countries). Both of these traditions are approaching the same set of problems -- disease and health -- and a largely similar set of observations regarding disease and health, but from very different directions. Both traditions make use of the scientific method -- they've just come up with different descriptions for what they've each seen.
Is it? I see no such mention in the review. Perhaps the book makes this definition more clear? Fair enough, as I haven't read the book. And what kind of "testing" do you mean -- only that carried out by major pharmaceutical companies? Or also that carried out by practitioners over the course of the past few centuries?
I think you're letting your emotional response run away with you. What bugs me about the review is that the terminology of the review (and possibly the book) is sloppy. Clear definitions are needed, or confusion is the only likely outcome.
I, too, hope so. My concern, which led to my original post, is that loosey-goosey definitions and assumptions about what people mean by various terms could lead to the baby being thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak -- there is a heck of a lot of snake oil for sale, but sometimes even snake-oil salesmen can wind up selling something good by accident. I would dearly love to see more solid, evidentiary, scientifically evaluated study of all manner of herbs and treatments. Some things that I personally discounted in the past as completely la-la, like reiki for instance (heck, even the first Wiki paragraph sounds out to lunch), have been shown upon evaluation to actually have something interesting going on. Sample article. I'm not sold by any means -- I certainly wouldn't rely on any of this for my own health -- but I do think there's enough of *something* going on to warrant more study, rather than just dismissing all of this wholesale. Even if all we discover is that it's the placebo effect, we will have still learned something.
Cheers,
Western medical theory is also incomplete -- what causes schizophrenia? how does the placebo effect work? etc. etc. Also, how many studies have been run on needle placement and effect (not affect)? How imprecise must one be before an acupuncture treatment is not effective? Acupuncture practitioners (at least, the Chinese-trained ones that I've spoken with) are happy to describe how everyone's body is slightly different, and that therefore it only makes perfect sense that needle placement would have to be different for each different body... Or do you mean something different?
Moreover, bear in mind that Chinese medicine in general, and acupuncture as well, aims for a gradual realignment rather than an immediate fix, and so more than a single treatment might be necessary to see any easily observable changes. For that matter, Western pharmaceuticals in some areas are coming to a gradual similar realization -- sometimes it's better to nudge the system back onto an even keel (smaller maintenance doses), instead of hitting it with a sledgehammer (one big wallop). We see this some in chronic treatment areas such as allergy medications or birth control.
Forgive me for maybe being pedantic, but this isn't entirely accurate, and it looks like you need to refamiliarize yourself with the scientific method. The facts are the facts. There's no matching of facts to facts at all. Perhaps you mean something more like, if you test a treatment and it shows no effect, then that treatment is not effective -- no argument there.
Alternately, if you test a treatment and it has an effect, but that effect is not allowed for by existing scientific knowledge, then that simply means that the effects of the treatment lie outside the bounds of existing scientific knowledge, and that more hypothesizing and testing is required to develop a theory that describes the observations. This is no surprise, and is, in fact, how science is supposed to work.
Cheers,
Indeed. And just as someone only versed in modern Western medicine has trouble understanding Chinese medicine, so too would someone only versed in the theory of four humours have trouble understanding either of the other two.
If you mean to equate the theory of humours, which has no present currency, with the whole of Chinese medical thought, which is quite current, I must disagree and suggest that you've missed your mark. Western medicine tried on the theory of humours to see if it fit, and discarded it when it was found wanting. Chinese medicine has likewise tried on different theories and set aside those that do not work. Massive famine and resulting disease at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing dynasties, around the 1630s through the 1640s, prompted a major rethinking of then-current Chinese medical thought on disease and its causes. Current Chinese medical practitioners no longer follow discounted theories any more than Western doctors do.
I think you sell Chinese medical thought a bit short. The body of Chinese medical knowledge is no more "made up" than the body of Western medical knowledge. The concept of "chi" is a theory, much as the Western medical concept that electrical currents in nerve fibers lead to various perceptions is a theory. One might be more familiar than the other, but both are ultimately simply our (as in, the scientific consensus "our" for the respective communities) best-effort attempts at describing the observed phenomena.
I'm not a Chinese medical practitioner. Frankly, Western or Chinese, I don't give a rodent's posterior so long as it works. I'm merely trying to point out that other systems of thought exist -- and that Chinese medicine is indeed a *system of thought*, not just a pipe dream some hobo had on a sunny day. Chinese medical theorizing has been going on for many centuries more than Western medical thought even existed. Europeans were busy burning witches when Chinese doctors were trying to establish a comprehensive theory of illness.
Re-reading your post, I must ask, what constitutes a "scientific medical treatment"? I ask because I really don't know very well what you mean by this term. If you mean Western medicine in general, sadly I must point out that no, it doesn't always work. If you mean medical treatment on the basis of careful evaluation of known facts and observations combined with a hypothesis for the patient's current symptoms (i.e. diagnosis), Chinese medicine (when properly practiced by someone actually trained in the art) can be every bit as scientific as Western medicine.
Cheers,
Hello Derek --
As Yuuki Dasu notes, it seems you might have missed my point -- I don't mean at all to imply that chi is somehow not scientifically testable, and I apologize if my lack of clarity led you to think that this was my intent. I mean rather that *current* Western medical theory doesn't have a theoretical understanding for how chi works -- much as traditional Chinese medical theory (so far as I'm familiar with it) doesn't have a theoretical understanding for how microbial infections work.
Sure, please, by all means use Western scientific methods to investigate and possibly describe chi flows -- I'm all for it. All I'm trying to say is that traditional Western medicine doesn't *currently* have a theory or set of theories in place that describes what seems to happen in Chinese medical theory. It's a translation problem, essentially, only more one of theories and modes of understanding rather than just language. :)
Cheers,
You say,
I say, "Just look for the Chinese restaurants." No, really, I'm being serious -- I've done some globetrotting, and everywhere I've gone, I've found Chinese restaurants. It's kinda funny, really, when even on remote tiny non-touristy islands in the Spanish-speaking part of the Caribbean, or on the tiny islands of the Pacific Northwest, you can find at least one Chinese restaurant somewhere.
This reminds me of a true story of a friend of mine. He's an interesting bloke -- his dad sounds like the punchline to a weird joke, as an Iraqi Jew living in Singapore and running a Cajun pork BBQ restaurant...
But anyway, let's call my friend Andy. He grew up partly in China, and speaks fluent Chinese and English. He was in Mexico City visiting some friends, and was walking across part of town to visit some other friends for a party. Only he'd gotten lost, and didn't speak a lick of Spanish. So what does he do? He finds the local Chinese restaurant. He walked up to the counter and asked, in flawless Chinese, how to get to XYZ address.
The Chinese proprietor and cash register girl just stood their with their mouths wide open for a moment, before finally getting out, "Why are you speaking Chinese to us?" To which Andy replied, "Because I don't speak Spanish." "Oh. Well, you take a right here and a left there..."
So seriously, knowing Chinese could also be extremely useful for international travelers. If you ever get lost, just find the local Chinese restaurant.
Cheers,
Without adding that key word "Western" in there, you're missing an important point -- the whole concept of Chi is based on a complete medical theory independent of Western medical thought. So basically yes, describing Chi flows to someone trained only in Western medicine would be about as productive as talking in Chinese to someone who only understands English. Both languages deal with information, but in radically different ways. Both may be perfectly valid, but analyzing the one from the perspective of the other is going to be an arduous affair.
The main problem I see with the book, based just on the review here, is that it lumps many different things together. What exactly do they mean by "herbal medicine"? (And what the heck is "herbal" about tiger bone or rhino horn? Those are animal products, not herbs.) "Herbal medicine" is an exceedingly broad category, and could potentially include Native American shamanistic practices, experimental hippie salad recipes, strictly controlled German and Swiss herbal pharmacopoeia, doobie brownies, and Chinese apothecary traditions all in one big indiscriminate mess.
Likewise, what is "alternative medicine" as the authors intend? It sounds from the review like they mean everything that doesn't normally happen in a Western hospital, which again is an obscenely broad over-generalization. Some things are probably completely la-la -- "oh sure, my neighbor ate nothing but oranges while standing on his head for two days and it cured his sinus cold!" -- while other things are backed by many centuries of refinement (Chi theory, yoga, etc.).
The reviewer also notes, ...alternative therapies are scientifically impossible, and often will violate fundamental scientific principles. "Scientifically impossible" suggests a misunderstanding of science -- science is about looking into things as objectively and quantifiably as possible, and deriving theories that best fit the observed phenomena. "Theoretically impossible" would certainly make sense -- but it would also imply the need for more study, and if XYZ "alternative" treatment were shown to be effective, then perhaps existing theories need modification. But that is a matter for further research, and thus lies outside the scope of this book.
Frankly, although the reviewer mentions a disdain for garbage science, such indiscriminate verbiage in the book sounds to me like a big factor in producing garbage science. Clearly defined terminology is a must for any productive hypotheses or research.
Just my two bits as a professional translator. Sloppy terminology just bugs the bejeezus out of me.
Cheers,
Gold is just plain worth more.
(Laugh. It's a joke.)
Cheers,
And, incidentally, a pound and a pint are basically the same thing, as are a tun and a ton -- assuming 16oz of water volume-wise weighs 16oz (not a bad working assumption for human-scale tolerances -- see more at Liter):
The imprecision and arbitrariness of the old English units used in the US can be maddening, but the binary nature does make them rather appealing in some ways.
Cheers,
Bingo! And there you have one *very* important distinction between an engineer and a craftsman -- the engineer deals more with theory and should-bes and measured reproduceability, while the craftsman deals more with practicalities and what is right in front of them. An engineer's approach to cabinetry would be very different, but when it comes to furniture, FWIW I'll take the craftsman's work any day. :)
Cheers,
I like how the Dutch have done it, as described some by A. Coward in this post. Simply speaking, the pound was redefined as 500mg, and the pint as 500ml. Both new definitions are only minor adjustments from the previous ones, as a pound is already precious close to half a kilo, and a pint to half a litre. (The only oddball conversion-wise was the ounce, which in the Netherlands is now 100mg -- 16ths don't translate very well into decimal systems. :) Perhaps something similar would work in the UK?
Cheers,
Throw in a few Vern Fonk car insurance commercials and you might not need the full eighty hours.
Cheers,
Why stop there? My dream is: "RIAA jailed for contempt of court".
Cheers,