Friday, August 19, 2011
Based in France, Boiron, a huge multinational maker of homeopathic-
remedies, is suing an Italian blogger, Samuele Riva, for saying
oscillococcinum, the companys featured flu medication, has no active
ingredient. Congratulations Sam, I gave up trying to get Boiron to sue me,
years ago but the Center for Inquiry, of which I'm a member, is pleading
with Boiron to sue us. "Anas barbariae hepatis et cordis extractum," is
listed as the active ingredient by the company. Its prepared at a
concentration of 200CK HPUS from the liver of the Barbary duck. The 200CK
means the solution has been diluted 1 part in 100, shaken, and repeated
sequentially 200 times. HPUS means the medication is listed in the
Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States, and prepared according to
1938 federal guidelines. Its a national disgrace that the antiquated law
sanctioning homeopathy, introduced by Sen. Royal Copeland, himself a
homeopathist, is still be on the books. The dilution claim is totally
meaningless. Somewhere around the 30th of the 200 sequential dilutions,
the dilution limit of Earth would be reached, with the entire Earth
becoming the solute. That is, the possibility of even one molecule of the
duck-liver extract remaining in the solution beyond that point would be
negligible. Long before the 200th dilution, the dilution limit of the
entire visible universe would have been reached. This is all quite
meaningless. Astronomers put the number of atoms in the visible universe
at about 10 to the 80th power. It would take many universes to get to a
dilution of 200 C.
According to Dennis Overbye in Thursday's NY Times, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency is planning to award $500,000 for a study of what
it would take to travel to another star. Actually, my class of freshman
physics-majors did that study last year, and decided they can't really go
there for any price. A reality-based study of interstellar travel would
devastate the science-fiction industry. The good news is that the Alpha
Centaurians can't, come here. So why is DARPA doing this? What we should
be talking about is not visiting extra-solar planets, but what can be
learned about them without going there. Although we can't travel at the
speed of light, information does all the time. We cant travel to other
stars, but we see what's there. We can conceive of telescopes many orders
of magnitude more powerful than the JWST will be, if we ever build the
JWST. Telescopes don't make money, so why would we bother? Maybe it could
be sold to reality television.
The US has finally launched its ambitious project to systematically monitor
the environment. The result will be an enormous database that scientists
can search to answer big questions, such as how global warming, pollution,
and land use affect ecosystems across the country. It may not make good
reality television.
Skepticism about climate change seems to have has joined opposition to
regulation, as the tenets of Republican orthodoxy. But because of the
faltering economy, they are embraced with extraordinary intensity this
year. High fuel prices, the Tea Party passion for smaller government and
an activist Republican base that insists on strict adherence to the partys
central agenda seem to be behind it.
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