Wherefore art Thou, Homeo?

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Debates about alternative medicine tend to get bogged down in issues about faith, falsifiability, and fraud. But there's two very simple ways to know whether a system like homoeopathy works.

The first is to ask, "If the theoretical principles behind homoeopathy were true, what would the world look like? And does the world look like that?"

There are two basic principles of homeopathy. One is that a very small dose of a chemical has the opposite effect of a large dose, and the other is that the smaller the dose, if it's prepared in the right way, the larger the effect.

The correct method of preparation is to dilute the chemical in a ratio of 1:10 with pure water, shake the mixture violently, then take one tenth of the result, and dilute that in the same ratio with more water. And do this anywhere between 10 and 1500 times - the more dilutions, the more powerful the effect.

So, the caffeine in a cup of coffee will keep you awake, but the same caffeine diluted 30 times - that's a ratio of one to one thousand billion billion billion - will send you to sleep.

A few notes in parentheses at this point. After 23 dilutions, there is a 50% of the mixture containing a single molecule of caffeine, which means after 25, there's a 1 in 100 chance of the water containing any caffeine at all. One issue with making 1:10^1500 dilutions, is that there's only about 10^80 atoms in the universe, so it may be difficult to find enough pure water.

The idea is that the water retains an imprint - a memory - of anything dissolved in it, and this memory grows stronger with successive dilutions, if accompanied by violent shaking. So, water cascading down a waterfall will dissolve salt and other chemicals from the rocks, while being shaken up. And it gets shaken up many more times, possibly over years, before it reaches your tap. Which means common tap water is an extremely powerful homeopathic preparation of sodium chloride.

Now, salt raises your blood pressure, but in homeopathy reduces it. So a drink of water from the tap will send your blood pressure through the floor, and kill you in seconds.

Of course, the water has also absorbed hundreds of other chemicals, which also have the opposite of their usual effect. Some are poisonous and some necessary for life, so your tap water is both killing you and giving you vibrant health, each hundreds of times.

I'm not sure whether a homeopathic preparation of water would make you die of dehydration.

I said there were two simple ways, and the second is even simpler. It's to ask "What happens if I take the pill", and indeed, "What happens if I overdose?" What would happen if you swallowed fifty or a hundred homeopathic sleeping pills?.

If swallowing fifty has fifty times the effect of one, then you should be able to put yourself into a coma with them. If the principle of dilution applies, then licking one pill will do it. Both have been done, many times, in public by skeptics demonstrating why homeopathy doesn't work, and the effect is always the same - none.

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Nanowrimo and Nablopomo - what are they? Uninhabited Polynesian islands? Twin brothers in a Yemenite folk story? Or the active ingredients in the next wave of slimming pills on ebay?

Actually, NaNoWriMo is National November Writing Month - a challenge to write a whole 50,000 word novel over November. The idea is not so much to produce a masterpiece, as to produce a completed work. It's now past the halfway mark, and there's a lot of writers caught between stress at the pace and joy at the results.

NaBloPoMo is the somewhat easier blogging equivalent - National Blog Posting Month. You just have to post something significant every day on your blog for a month. This one has the grand prize of a year's free internet hosting, and smaller prizes of caps and mugs.

Bert Weedon encouraged you to learn a song a day. Some musicians try to write one song a day. Short story workshops sometimes give you an hour to fill a few sheets of paper with plot. SongFight even used to run a challenge to compose and record an album in one day. I've got some books which tell me how to absorb a complete textbook in an hour - and one day I'll get around to reading them.

There's a culture and a mindset where faster is by definition better - and if it produces reasonable novels and songs by not giving the writer time for self doubt or sidetracks, maybe it is sometimes. We need a word for this process of forced accelerated development. Fasttracking? Quickening? RapidWrite? How about zipping?

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So far on the old videotapes: All three episodes of Oliver Stone's Wild Palms, a worthy but dull documentary on racism in children under 5, an episode of Father Ted, the films The Wedding Banquet and Mouse on the Moon, and a lot of other stuff I haven't seen yet.

A month ago I threw half a dozen porn videotapes in the bin because I thought I'd never get the chance to watch them. Well, that and they were extremely boring.