... but my favorite mouse ever was just a branded plain-ol' two button, roller-ball mouse. Branded with the underrated 90's Nickelodeon cartoon character Cat-Dog. A Cat-Dog Mouse.
Right enough in principle, but my first thought in response is, "yeah, like deer have evolved the behavior of not running out in front of cars." Compared to the actual number of bats, the evolutionary pressure exerted on tiny localized populations of them by not-very-numerous wind turbines is probably negligible.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15989.shtml...sez a 2000 Chevy Impala (6-cyl, 4sp automatic) gets around 21 mpg. If you're making a bald assertion that you can get 50 mpg+ out of that car, seriously, dude, you gotta provide some data, or expect people to just flatly disbelieve you.
If the measure of success the game company values most is sales, and therefore the game designs that are emulated most closely in subsequent generations are the ones that sold the best, then these kinds of features (that 'reel in more suckers' by playing on psychological predilections) will evolve whether or not the game designers are conscious that they're using OCD triggers. Just, as the phrase goes, sayin'.
I took it to mean 'feel' - and I agree. Many keyboard have lousy, ugly feel, not conducive to fast, steady typing. Mushy, indistinct, distracting.
Coincidentally, I just found an IBM Model F clicky keyboard last week (for all of two dollars and fifty cents), and had hoped to be able to use it, but it turns out that it's almost certainly not an AT-type (so a simple adaptor won't help), maybe not even an XT-type (so even an only slightly expensive adaptor/converter will help), and the connector isn't even really a DIN5, but some weirdo variant on that with the pins spaced out further. There's basically no hope of being able to use it on a current machine, and it was probably custom built for some kind of dedicated terminal back in 1980-bloody-5. Which is a shame, 'cos the typing feel of it is just spiffy.
Usually, not *interestingly* enough to keep me going. I get bored by the lack of self-reflection and examination, of analytical-ness, that usually results, and I get distracted by something more immediately compelling. I don't really care to force, or even suggest, that any given person change or lose their own faith - it just doesn't much matter to me - but I *am* occasionally interested in at least making sure they understand the elucidated process by which I've come to my total lack of faith, which understanding is almost totally lacking in true believers.
The understanding of that process is a nice complement to scientific-method thinking and the philosophy inherent in *politics* of having to determine what course of action to apply in general across populations. Which, at the risk of flogging a dead and decaying horse, is the dividing line between personal faith (anyone whose individual one I don't have standing to care about) vs. civil authority's imposition of a prescribed faith or direct extensions thereof onto the populace at large (which I damn well DO care about).
Pretty similar experience here. I've come up with some interesting responses when I follow up with the line of thought of, "Okay, suppose your religious doctrine was different in only one way: No promise of an eternal afterlife in heaven. All the other things were exactly the same - everything Jesus said was good was still good, all the stuff about treating other people as you wish to be treated, loving your neighbor, every rule that prohibited something he said was bad, was still a rule. All the stories that illustrate various kinds of behavior were still the same. Etc., etc., etc. Just, no heavenly reward in the end. Would you still believe it?"
Depending on the answer there, you may be able to follow up with, why is a set of [stuff] LESS believable when it lacks [the one biggest, most preposterous, most unprovable single item among that stuff]?
No time to RTFA, but were any of the kids polled members of high school bands, or musicians on their own? As a drummer for 25+ years, I know the first thing I noticed about poorly encoded MP3s was how crappy the cymbals sounded. And I knew that primarily on account of knowing exactly how a real, live cymbal really sounds, in person, with the naked ear. Having been in a high school band, I know that the experience changed my own understanding of how all the instruments should really sound, as contrasted starkly against how they sound on many recordings, even pre-MP3 era.
Yeah, maybe I could have phrased that more like "almost as bad as," - but then again, at least with Rog, you can always point behind him and say, "Oh, is that Margeret Thatcher?" or "Look, a sale on black shirts, black pants and dark sunglasses!" and he'll be momentarily distracted. The click-track is relentless.
The only time I use a metronome is when I'm drumming on my own, to improve my own performance, but I could never play a whole song with the invariable click in my ears (actually that's not true, there is one song where I used a metronome, but only because I had a continuous snare drum pattern and was (am?) just not good enough to keep the rythm).
I've toyed with the idea of creating a "whoosh" track, a less fucking annoying and more forgiving version of a click-track, to help my own occasionally shaky rhythm-keeping. Dig, with something like a white-noise swell whooshing in time instead of the click. I truly don't mind playing with headphones on, even if usually just to give me a mix of everyone else's monitors that can compete with my own volume, but, man, that unforgiving click is worse than having Roger Waters glaring at you balefully.
I pretty much agree with you. Another aspect of this that I just feel like blathering about is that the process of developing/educating/training (especially rock/popular) musicians is a lot more methodical and business-like than it used to be, too.
The Beatles learned to play their instruments in their bedrooms, parlors and grungy little clubs in very dubious neighborhoods, fueled by adrenalin, speed and demanding crowds, in ten-or twelve-hour shifts. Everybody who bought that particular Velvet Underground album then picked up a guitar and learned to make it work on their own. A lot of today's bands who may even cultivate a garage band look, well, didn't. Look up the various Musician's Institutes - and even the real Paul Green School of Rock - and check out some of the musicians who have come through those backgrounds. Virtuosos, to be sure, and a lot of them I really like - but there are a few who are just essentially robots - they probably don't need click-tracks 'cos they're just that disciplined and precise, and sometimes this has some of the same soul-draining effect as click tracks.
Not to come across as calling this all a bad thing, all the theory-chops and all, 'cos sometimes it's just amazing, and I do love me some math-rock,... Find any footage of, to pick a drummer example, Virgil Donati in action, maybe with Planet X. The guy is just inhuman - his arms look like a helicopter behind a kit, and it strains credulity that so many things can be hit so fast and with such precision. And I've seen and heard him live, so I know it's not studio effects. Ditto Mike Mangini (both he and Donati have played behind Steve Vai) - who can operate more simultaneous time-signatures than anyone I've ever seen.
It'd be even more unobtrusive if it had some more power outlets on its back - y'know, to look like a pass-through device, like some nightlights. It certainly doesn't need a whole outlet's capacity for itself, and if you had another device or two plugged into IT, who'd ever look twice at the wart itself?
Agreed totally. It's not that I wouldn't find a lot of utility in a Kindle, and it's not that I even think there wouldn't be a way around the DRM, even if, so to speak, it didn't turn out to be a factory option,...
(Heck, I have an iPod, and have not yet paid money for an MP3 in any form and honestly don't even know how to buy stuff from the iTunes music store; most of what I listen to on it is live recordings which I've either made myself [DAT or newer flash-based recorders, higher than CD quality] or acquired through P2P and converted to MP3 according to my own quality preferences.)
If someone gave me a Kindle, I'd probably enjoy it and find a fair amount of utility in it - it's halfway that I'm just a peevish sonofabitch about stupid limitations, and would get annoyed at the idea of any artificial inflexibility in getting it to conform to my whims on what to read next, what to pull out of the stacks, what randomly noticed thing that caught my eye on a store shelf that I'd never have *thought to seek out otherwise* would I then miss out on by dint of being portaled through one method of acquisition. Especially having paid hundreds of dollars up front for the privilege. Or something like that.
One thing that *might* be cool to implement via Kindle - are there back issues of volumes and volumes of periodicals available in suitable formats? I'd love to have the run of, say, Scientific American and not have it take up the space of the magazines sitting on my basement shelves, nor subject to sump-pump malfunctions,...
Library sales - shit, man. Gotta love 'em, though I haven't found a good one for years.
Exactly, and moreover, as someone whose personal library (easily several thousand books, 'bout half of which I've read) came mostly from USED bookstores, specialty dealers, random online sources, yard sales, etc., the idea that I don't have an option of buying used/wholesale/opportunistically-on-sale is pretty much a deal-killer for me.
As a socially leftist libertarian, McCain had long been one of the few Republicans I thought I could have stomached voting for, precisely for some of those reasons you mention, because he hadn't, for a long time, sucked up to the religious fringe elements. He'd even made some pointed comments about, was it Bob Jones University, or Falwell?, being a divisive force, and I really admired him for saying some of those politically inexpedient things. The specific instant in time when I knew he had decided to run for the presidency, though, was also the instant he lost a big chunk of that respect - when he folded and went sucking up to - again, was it Bob Jones U, or Falwell, or one of the other of that ilk? - making nice after his prior direct, valid criticisms.
Nothin' particularly much to add to the discussion, but I couldn't resist replying to mention of the SL-1200MKII's. I worked at a radio station in college, and those of course were the standard. I can still feel that big rectangular button and visualize the start-up time of a cued-up LP sitting on one.
In all this discussion of downloading and the RIAA, I very rarely see any mention of the kind of downloading I do - pretty much exclusively NON-commercially-released live recordings. I'm closing in on 12,000 shows (so, surely 100,000+ songs/tracks, though many many duplicates of songs across different performances), and *almost* not a damn one of 'em has ever been available for sale legitimately.
(A *small* handful are out of print commercial releases - ten or fewer, an example being not even strictly an album, but the apparently-never-to-be-released-on-DVD movie of Tom Waits' Big Time.) *Many* of the live recordings are of bands who actively encourage trading of their live recordings.
Do I have any confidence that, if the RIAA's hired guns were to come across my collection of DVD-Rs/hard drives, that they'd bother to make the distinction? Nope.
Re:you can thank Patron Saint Orrin Hatch for this
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
Aspirin: Very, very easy to make (hell, easy enough to discover that it didn't take a pharma company to do it, in the 1800's, fercryinoutloud), no research costs to recoup, low production costs compared to other, ridiculously complicated molecules, practically non-existent marketing costs 'cos everyone already knows what it is and what it's for, and sold in large quantities, reliably: Enough of a margin even at a low price to be profitable *enough* to continue making it.
What? Find a new use for it? Great! Not much in the way of additional research costs to speak of, since a large bit of the statistics behind that specific use comes from meta-studies on real-world users (i.e., not paid human trial subjects, in managed controlled studies at research institutions),... just ramp up production to meet the higher demands (demand which would be there even if there were only a hint of the new usage's validity - aspirin is not a PRESCRIPTION drug and there's no consideration of on-label vs. off-label prescriptions having to come from a doctor, or being claimed by the manufacturer.
Your own example doesn't support the conclusion you think it does, when you take the rest of the real-world factors into account.
Re:My favorite "Alternative Medicine" story
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
You rock! You fucking rock! That is all I have to say.
Re:you can thank Patron Saint Orrin Hatch for this
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is a bit of cynicism speaking, but also decades of career in the pharmaceutical industry.
Even if tongue of newt cured the flu, tongue of newt isn't easily patentable, being that there's millennia of prior art by newts in creating it. So there's not as much of a motive for an FDA-regulated company to go through the testing and approval process (which costs, when all the accounting is done, on the order of magnitude of a billion dollars for each novel molecule that actually becomes a commercially available product; it costs a LOT more money than you probably think to get 100 people and run a controlled study,... which in reality involves usually thousands of animals, several phases of toxicology testing, piloting production processes, and many et ceteras before those human trials even get approved,...).
Of course, if you call it a "dietary supplement" and are cagey about what claims you make for it, you aren't subject to FDA requirements for testing for purity, safety, identity or quality, let alone effectiveness and controlling for dosage, and it is many orders of magnitude cheaper to bring it to market with those considerations out of the way.
One could be much sloppier, in terms of real-world meaning, than equating "medicine vs. alternative medicine" to FDA-approved vs not FDA-approved, provided you get the implications of that FDA approval process.
I could imagine a proposed mechanism along the lines of a) "needle inserted into skin -> body responds by releasing endorphins which relieve pain," and not feel that's too unreasonable.
But b) "needle inserted into skin -> flow of qi through critical nexus points corrected, cosmic balance restored" is a whole 'nother thing.
I guess it depends on whom (and how much) you're paying for the treatment. If the amount of relief you get is worth what you pay for it (taking into account any consideration like, if it's really just as easy as a), shouldn't the treatment be correspondingly cheap?), then I wouldn't bother being insulted by accusations of gullibility. But if you're paying for a lot of hoo-ha supposed knowledge about b), I'd be a tad more skeptical.
I'm not sure about the "K" in that "200CK Anas barbariae hepatis," but part of the nomenclature of homeopathic substances indicates a dilution process. A 200C dilution means that the original quantity of active ingredients is diluted by a factor of 100 (that's the C), 200 times.
That is, take the original volume of active ingredient (not sure what the usual starting point is, but I think it's 1cc; may be wrong, though), dilute it in a total volume of water to 1/100th strength (assume perfect mixing), take a portion of THAT solution, dilute again to 1/100th strength, etc., 200 times. Thus, to (1/100)^200, or 10^(-400) times its original concentration. In other words, not a single molecule left present.
Even for homeopathic remedies, this number seems extreme, though, so I'm not sure if either the citation was copied wrong, or that "K" adds some meaning I'm not familiar with, or what. Would that K reflect a factor of a thousand in one direction or another?
But presuming that description at least does refer to homeopathic dilution, you can see that the "technical" homeopathic nomenclature is really just a purposeful obfuscation of the reality that there is such a tiny amount of active ingredient present that, seriously, who would expect it to have any effect at all? I'd gladly drink a cup of 200C homeopathic anthrax, for example, and not worry about any effect on my health.
Hell, any cup of tap water is essentially a homeopathic solution of ANY ingredient that's not present in it.
If more people would find and marry mates with the same names, etc., like this, it'd actually solve some problems. US Mail meant for one would at last be more likely to arrive at the right house and get sorted out by the right people that way.
Then again, their credit reports might be a little hairier to sort out, with them having the same address and all.
Slashdot Mirror
... but my favorite mouse ever was just a branded plain-ol' two button, roller-ball mouse. Branded with the underrated 90's Nickelodeon cartoon character Cat-Dog. A Cat-Dog Mouse.
Yah, like the businesses that blast classical music to keep teenagers from loitering around their parking lots at night,...
I'm thinking Celine Dion. Drive me batshit, at least. Couldn't be too pleasant for the bats, either.
Right enough in principle, but my first thought in response is, "yeah, like deer have evolved the behavior of not running out in front of cars." Compared to the actual number of bats, the evolutionary pressure exerted on tiny localized populations of them by not-very-numerous wind turbines is probably negligible.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/15989.shtml ...sez a 2000 Chevy Impala (6-cyl, 4sp automatic) gets around 21 mpg. If you're making a bald assertion that you can get 50 mpg+ out of that car, seriously, dude, you gotta provide some data, or expect people to just flatly disbelieve you.
If the measure of success the game company values most is sales, and therefore the game designs that are emulated most closely in subsequent generations are the ones that sold the best, then these kinds of features (that 'reel in more suckers' by playing on psychological predilections) will evolve whether or not the game designers are conscious that they're using OCD triggers. Just, as the phrase goes, sayin'.
I took it to mean 'feel' - and I agree. Many keyboard have lousy, ugly feel, not conducive to fast, steady typing. Mushy, indistinct, distracting.
Coincidentally, I just found an IBM Model F clicky keyboard last week (for all of two dollars and fifty cents), and had hoped to be able to use it, but it turns out that it's almost certainly not an AT-type (so a simple adaptor won't help), maybe not even an XT-type (so even an only slightly expensive adaptor/converter will help), and the connector isn't even really a DIN5, but some weirdo variant on that with the pins spaced out further. There's basically no hope of being able to use it on a current machine, and it was probably custom built for some kind of dedicated terminal back in 1980-bloody-5. Which is a shame, 'cos the typing feel of it is just spiffy.
Pics here: http://tinyurl.com/c2kban
>How does that usually work out for you?
Usually, not *interestingly* enough to keep me going. I get bored by the lack of self-reflection and examination, of analytical-ness, that usually results, and I get distracted by something more immediately compelling. I don't really care to force, or even suggest, that any given person change or lose their own faith - it just doesn't much matter to me - but I *am* occasionally interested in at least making sure they understand the elucidated process by which I've come to my total lack of faith, which understanding is almost totally lacking in true believers.
The understanding of that process is a nice complement to scientific-method thinking and the philosophy inherent in *politics* of having to determine what course of action to apply in general across populations. Which, at the risk of flogging a dead and decaying horse, is the dividing line between personal faith (anyone whose individual one I don't have standing to care about) vs. civil authority's imposition of a prescribed faith or direct extensions thereof onto the populace at large (which I damn well DO care about).
Pretty similar experience here. I've come up with some interesting responses when I follow up with the line of thought of, "Okay, suppose your religious doctrine was different in only one way: No promise of an eternal afterlife in heaven. All the other things were exactly the same - everything Jesus said was good was still good, all the stuff about treating other people as you wish to be treated, loving your neighbor, every rule that prohibited something he said was bad, was still a rule. All the stories that illustrate various kinds of behavior were still the same. Etc., etc., etc. Just, no heavenly reward in the end. Would you still believe it?"
Depending on the answer there, you may be able to follow up with, why is a set of [stuff] LESS believable when it lacks [the one biggest, most preposterous, most unprovable single item among that stuff]?
No time to RTFA, but were any of the kids polled members of high school bands, or musicians on their own? As a drummer for 25+ years, I know the first thing I noticed about poorly encoded MP3s was how crappy the cymbals sounded. And I knew that primarily on account of knowing exactly how a real, live cymbal really sounds, in person, with the naked ear. Having been in a high school band, I know that the experience changed my own understanding of how all the instruments should really sound, as contrasted starkly against how they sound on many recordings, even pre-MP3 era.
Damn. And it'll take an act of Heisenbergian uncertainty to escape from the pun-singularity.
I've clearly not made it out yet.
At least no one outside the event horizon can see me in here.
Right? Right?!?!
Yeah, maybe I could have phrased that more like "almost as bad as," - but then again, at least with Rog, you can always point behind him and say, "Oh, is that Margeret Thatcher?" or "Look, a sale on black shirts, black pants and dark sunglasses!" and he'll be momentarily distracted. The click-track is relentless.
I've toyed with the idea of creating a "whoosh" track, a less fucking annoying and more forgiving version of a click-track, to help my own occasionally shaky rhythm-keeping. Dig, with something like a white-noise swell whooshing in time instead of the click. I truly don't mind playing with headphones on, even if usually just to give me a mix of everyone else's monitors that can compete with my own volume, but, man, that unforgiving click is worse than having Roger Waters glaring at you balefully.
I pretty much agree with you. Another aspect of this that I just feel like blathering about is that the process of developing/educating/training (especially rock/popular) musicians is a lot more methodical and business-like than it used to be, too.
The Beatles learned to play their instruments in their bedrooms, parlors and grungy little clubs in very dubious neighborhoods, fueled by adrenalin, speed and demanding crowds, in ten-or twelve-hour shifts. Everybody who bought that particular Velvet Underground album then picked up a guitar and learned to make it work on their own. A lot of today's bands who may even cultivate a garage band look, well, didn't. Look up the various Musician's Institutes - and even the real Paul Green School of Rock - and check out some of the musicians who have come through those backgrounds. Virtuosos, to be sure, and a lot of them I really like - but there are a few who are just essentially robots - they probably don't need click-tracks 'cos they're just that disciplined and precise, and sometimes this has some of the same soul-draining effect as click tracks.
Not to come across as calling this all a bad thing, all the theory-chops and all, 'cos sometimes it's just amazing, and I do love me some math-rock,... Find any footage of, to pick a drummer example, Virgil Donati in action, maybe with Planet X. The guy is just inhuman - his arms look like a helicopter behind a kit, and it strains credulity that so many things can be hit so fast and with such precision. And I've seen and heard him live, so I know it's not studio effects. Ditto Mike Mangini (both he and Donati have played behind Steve Vai) - who can operate more simultaneous time-signatures than anyone I've ever seen.
Right. But it does explain why, or at least partly *how*, there's a croc on my fridge door now.
It'd be even more unobtrusive if it had some more power outlets on its back - y'know, to look like a pass-through device, like some nightlights. It certainly doesn't need a whole outlet's capacity for itself, and if you had another device or two plugged into IT, who'd ever look twice at the wart itself?
Agreed totally. It's not that I wouldn't find a lot of utility in a Kindle, and it's not that I even think there wouldn't be a way around the DRM, even if, so to speak, it didn't turn out to be a factory option,...
(Heck, I have an iPod, and have not yet paid money for an MP3 in any form and honestly don't even know how to buy stuff from the iTunes music store; most of what I listen to on it is live recordings which I've either made myself [DAT or newer flash-based recorders, higher than CD quality] or acquired through P2P and converted to MP3 according to my own quality preferences.)
If someone gave me a Kindle, I'd probably enjoy it and find a fair amount of utility in it - it's halfway that I'm just a peevish sonofabitch about stupid limitations, and would get annoyed at the idea of any artificial inflexibility in getting it to conform to my whims on what to read next, what to pull out of the stacks, what randomly noticed thing that caught my eye on a store shelf that I'd never have *thought to seek out otherwise* would I then miss out on by dint of being portaled through one method of acquisition. Especially having paid hundreds of dollars up front for the privilege. Or something like that.
One thing that *might* be cool to implement via Kindle - are there back issues of volumes and volumes of periodicals available in suitable formats? I'd love to have the run of, say, Scientific American and not have it take up the space of the magazines sitting on my basement shelves, nor subject to sump-pump malfunctions,...
Library sales - shit, man. Gotta love 'em, though I haven't found a good one for years.
Exactly, and moreover, as someone whose personal library (easily several thousand books, 'bout half of which I've read) came mostly from USED bookstores, specialty dealers, random online sources, yard sales, etc., the idea that I don't have an option of buying used/wholesale/opportunistically-on-sale is pretty much a deal-killer for me.
As a socially leftist libertarian, McCain had long been one of the few Republicans I thought I could have stomached voting for, precisely for some of those reasons you mention, because he hadn't, for a long time, sucked up to the religious fringe elements. He'd even made some pointed comments about, was it Bob Jones University, or Falwell?, being a divisive force, and I really admired him for saying some of those politically inexpedient things. The specific instant in time when I knew he had decided to run for the presidency, though, was also the instant he lost a big chunk of that respect - when he folded and went sucking up to - again, was it Bob Jones U, or Falwell, or one of the other of that ilk? - making nice after his prior direct, valid criticisms.
Nothin' particularly much to add to the discussion, but I couldn't resist replying to mention of the SL-1200MKII's. I worked at a radio station in college, and those of course were the standard. I can still feel that big rectangular button and visualize the start-up time of a cued-up LP sitting on one.
In all this discussion of downloading and the RIAA, I very rarely see any mention of the kind of downloading I do - pretty much exclusively NON-commercially-released live recordings. I'm closing in on 12,000 shows (so, surely 100,000+ songs/tracks, though many many duplicates of songs across different performances), and *almost* not a damn one of 'em has ever been available for sale legitimately.
(A *small* handful are out of print commercial releases - ten or fewer, an example being not even strictly an album, but the apparently-never-to-be-released-on-DVD movie of Tom Waits' Big Time.) *Many* of the live recordings are of bands who actively encourage trading of their live recordings.
Do I have any confidence that, if the RIAA's hired guns were to come across my collection of DVD-Rs/hard drives, that they'd bother to make the distinction? Nope.
Aspirin: Very, very easy to make (hell, easy enough to discover that it didn't take a pharma company to do it, in the 1800's, fercryinoutloud), no research costs to recoup, low production costs compared to other, ridiculously complicated molecules, practically non-existent marketing costs 'cos everyone already knows what it is and what it's for, and sold in large quantities, reliably: Enough of a margin even at a low price to be profitable *enough* to continue making it.
What? Find a new use for it? Great! Not much in the way of additional research costs to speak of, since a large bit of the statistics behind that specific use comes from meta-studies on real-world users (i.e., not paid human trial subjects, in managed controlled studies at research institutions),... just ramp up production to meet the higher demands (demand which would be there even if there were only a hint of the new usage's validity - aspirin is not a PRESCRIPTION drug and there's no consideration of on-label vs. off-label prescriptions having to come from a doctor, or being claimed by the manufacturer.
Your own example doesn't support the conclusion you think it does, when you take the rest of the real-world factors into account.
You rock! You fucking rock! That is all I have to say.
This is a bit of cynicism speaking, but also decades of career in the pharmaceutical industry.
Even if tongue of newt cured the flu, tongue of newt isn't easily patentable, being that there's millennia of prior art by newts in creating it. So there's not as much of a motive for an FDA-regulated company to go through the testing and approval process (which costs, when all the accounting is done, on the order of magnitude of a billion dollars for each novel molecule that actually becomes a commercially available product; it costs a LOT more money than you probably think to get 100 people and run a controlled study,... which in reality involves usually thousands of animals, several phases of toxicology testing, piloting production processes, and many et ceteras before those human trials even get approved,...).
Of course, if you call it a "dietary supplement" and are cagey about what claims you make for it, you aren't subject to FDA requirements for testing for purity, safety, identity or quality, let alone effectiveness and controlling for dosage, and it is many orders of magnitude cheaper to bring it to market with those considerations out of the way.
One could be much sloppier, in terms of real-world meaning, than equating "medicine vs. alternative medicine" to FDA-approved vs not FDA-approved, provided you get the implications of that FDA approval process.
Dunno. *How* do you think it works?
I could imagine a proposed mechanism along the lines of a) "needle inserted into skin -> body responds by releasing endorphins which relieve pain," and not feel that's too unreasonable.
But b) "needle inserted into skin -> flow of qi through critical nexus points corrected, cosmic balance restored" is a whole 'nother thing.
I guess it depends on whom (and how much) you're paying for the treatment. If the amount of relief you get is worth what you pay for it (taking into account any consideration like, if it's really just as easy as a), shouldn't the treatment be correspondingly cheap?), then I wouldn't bother being insulted by accusations of gullibility. But if you're paying for a lot of hoo-ha supposed knowledge about b), I'd be a tad more skeptical.
I'm not sure about the "K" in that "200CK Anas barbariae hepatis," but part of the nomenclature of homeopathic substances indicates a dilution process. A 200C dilution means that the original quantity of active ingredients is diluted by a factor of 100 (that's the C), 200 times.
That is, take the original volume of active ingredient (not sure what the usual starting point is, but I think it's 1cc; may be wrong, though), dilute it in a total volume of water to 1/100th strength (assume perfect mixing), take a portion of THAT solution, dilute again to 1/100th strength, etc., 200 times. Thus, to (1/100)^200, or 10^(-400) times its original concentration. In other words, not a single molecule left present.
Even for homeopathic remedies, this number seems extreme, though, so I'm not sure if either the citation was copied wrong, or that "K" adds some meaning I'm not familiar with, or what. Would that K reflect a factor of a thousand in one direction or another?
But presuming that description at least does refer to homeopathic dilution, you can see that the "technical" homeopathic nomenclature is really just a purposeful obfuscation of the reality that there is such a tiny amount of active ingredient present that, seriously, who would expect it to have any effect at all? I'd gladly drink a cup of 200C homeopathic anthrax, for example, and not worry about any effect on my health.
Hell, any cup of tap water is essentially a homeopathic solution of ANY ingredient that's not present in it.
If more people would find and marry mates with the same names, etc., like this, it'd actually solve some problems. US Mail meant for one would at last be more likely to arrive at the right house and get sorted out by the right people that way.
Then again, their credit reports might be a little hairier to sort out, with them having the same address and all.
Makes my brane hurt.