Lone Gunman

Ear­lier this year the UK’s MHRA opened a con­sul­ta­tion to help them decide how home­o­pathic prod­ucts should be labelled when sold to the pub­lic. As expected, Ben Goldacre — devoted critic of home­opa­thy, pseu­do­science and gen­eral quack­ery — sug­gested a label of his own and asked his read­ers for fur­ther suggestions.

Some of the sug­ges­tions were truly fan­tas­tic (and proved that I couldn’t come up with an orig­i­nal joke, no mat­ter how hard I tried), and so Goldacre pub­lished some of the best sug­ges­tions for home­o­pathic labelling in his col­umn for The Guardian:

On instruc­tions, we have “take as many as you like”, since there are no ingre­di­ents. The pro­posed bel­ladonna home­opa­thy pill ingre­di­ents label sim­ply reads “no bel­ladonna”, which is a con­ven­tion the MHRA could adapt for all its dif­fer­ent home­opa­thy labels. Other sug­ges­tions include “none”, “belief”, “false hopes”, “shat­tered dreams”, and “the tears of unicorns”.

For warn­ings, we have: “not to be taken seri­ously”, “in case of over­dose, con­sult a life­guard”, and “con­tains chem­i­cals, includ­ing dihy­dro­gen monox­ide”. This, of course, is a scary name for water, which became an inter­net meme after Nathan Zohner’s school sci­ence project: he suc­cess­fully gath­ered a peti­tion to ban this chem­i­cal on the grounds that it is fatal when inhaled, con­tributes to the ero­sion of our nat­ural land­scape, may cause elec­tri­cal fail­ures, and has been found in the excised tumours of ter­mi­nal can­cer patients.

The com­ments on both arti­cles are real gems for those in need of a laugh today.

via @IrregularShed

The devel­op­ment of the human brain is intri­cately linked with almost every moment of our evo­lu­tion from sea-dwelling ani­mals to advanced, social pri­mates. That is the the over­whelm­ing theme from New Sci­en­tist’s brief his­tory of the brain.

The engag­ing arti­cle ends with a look at the con­tin­ued evo­lu­tion of the human brain (“the visual cor­tex has grown larger in peo­ple who migrated from Africa to north­ern lat­i­tudes, per­haps to help make up for the dim­mer light”), and this on why our brains have stopped growing:

So why didn’t our brains get ever big­ger? It may be because we reached a point at which the advan­tages of big­ger brains started to be out­weighed by the dan­gers of giv­ing birth to chil­dren with big heads. Or it might have been a case of dimin­ish­ing returns.

Our brains are pretty hun­gry, burn­ing 20 per cent of our food at a rate of about 15 watts, and any fur­ther improve­ments would be increas­ingly demanding. […]

One way to speed up our brain, for instance, would be to evolve neu­rons that can fire more times per sec­ond. But to sup­port a 10-fold increase in the “clock speed” of our neu­rons, our brain would need to burn energy at the same rate as Usain Bolt’s legs dur­ing a 100-metre sprint. The 10,000-calorie-a-day diet of Olympic swim­mer Michael Phelps would pale in comparison.

Not only did the growth in the size of our brains cease around 200,000 years ago, in the past 10,000 to 15,000 years the aver­age size of the human brain com­pared with our body has shrunk by 3 or 4 per cent. Some see this as no cause for con­cern. Size, after all, isn’t every­thing, and it’s per­fectly pos­si­ble that the brain has sim­ply evolved to make bet­ter use of less grey and white mat­ter. That would seem to fit with some genetic stud­ies, which sug­gest that our brain’s wiring is more effi­cient now than it was in the past.

Oth­ers, how­ever, think this shrink­age is a sign of a slight decline in our gen­eral men­tal abilities.

via @mocost

As neu­ro­sci­en­tist Bradley Voytek points out, “we’re used to think­ing of our senses as being pretty shite”, and this is mostly thanks to the plethora of ani­mals that can see, hear, smell and taste far bet­ter than we can. “We can’t see as well as eagles, we can’t hear as well as bats, and we can’t smell as well as dogs”, he con­cludes… and that seems to be the con­sen­sus on every nature doc­u­men­tary I’ve ever watched.

How­ever our brain is a mag­nif­i­cent con­struc­tion (and our senses are equally as won­drous), and so Voytek tries to reverse this idea by explain­ing just how sen­si­tive and amaz­ing our senses really are:

It turns out that humans can, in fact, detect as few as 2 pho­tons enter­ing the retina. Two. As in, one-plus-one. It is often said that, under ideal con­di­tions, a young, healthy per­son can see a can­dle flame from 30 miles away. That’s like being able to see a can­dle in Times Square from Stam­ford, Con­necti­cut. Or see­ing a can­dle in Can­dle­stick Park from Napa Valley.*

Sim­i­larly, it appears that the lim­its to our thresh­old of hear­ing may actu­ally be Brown­ian motion. That means that we can almost hear the ran­dom move­ments of atoms.

We can also smell as few as 30 mol­e­cules of cer­tain substances. […]

These facts sug­gest that we all have some level of what we’d nor­mally think of as “super human” sen­sory abil­i­ties already.

But what the hell? If I can sup­pos­edly see a can­dle from 30 miles away, why do I still crack my frakkin’ shin on the cof­fee table when it’s only slightly dark in my liv­ing room?

It may not sur­prise you to hear that the answer to that ques­tion is atten­tion.

* For the Euro­peans among you, that’s more than a fifth longer than the Chan­nel Tun­nel’s under­wa­ter sec­tion (or Hyde Park to Stansted Air­port for the Londoners).

Regard­ing all the foods that we con­sume as a drugs is a won­drous way to exam­ine and com­pre­hend the com­plex inter­ac­tions and sub­tle forces behind how every­thing we put in our mouths affects “how our neu­rons behave and, sub­se­quently, how we think and feel”.

In a com­pelling arti­cle that sug­gests our shared evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory with the plants and ani­mals that we eat is the root cause of them hav­ing an affect on our body’s behav­iour, Gary Wenk, author of Your Brain on Food, briefly describes how some of the chem­i­cals present in ‘drugs’ such as choco­late, bananas, alco­hol and nut­meg affect us:

We have all expe­ri­enced the con­se­quences of our shared evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory with the plants we eat. For exam­ple, unripe bananas con­tain the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter sero­tonin. When you eat an unripe banana, its sero­tonin is free to act upon the sero­tonin neu­rons within your diges­tive tract. The con­se­quence is likely to be increased acti­va­tion of the mus­cles in the wall of your intestines, usu­ally expe­ri­enced as diarrhea.

Many plants con­tain com­pounds that should be able to enhance your brain’s per­for­mance. For exam­ple, pota­toes, toma­toes, and egg­plants con­tain sola­nine and α-cha­co­nine, sub­stances that can enhance the action of acetyl­choline, a chem­i­cal in your brain that is vital to mem­ory for­ma­tion. Your mood might be enhanced slightly by eat­ing fava beans because they con­tain L-DOPA, a pre­cur­sor to the pro­duc­tion of dopamine, the reward chem­i­cal in your brain. Whether these food-borne com­pounds actu­ally affect your brain depends upon how much you con­sume and your own per­sonal phys­i­ol­ogy. This might explain why some peo­ple find it quite reward­ing to eat pota­toes or eggplants.

Morphine-like chem­i­cals capa­ble of act­ing upon the brain are pro­duced in your intestines when you con­sume milk, eggs, cheese, spinach, mush­rooms, pump­kin, and var­i­ous fish and grains. Dairy prod­ucts in par­tic­u­lar con­tain a pro­tein known as casein, which enzymes in your intestines can con­vert into beta-casomorphin. In new­borns, that beta-casomorphin can eas­ily pass out of the imma­ture gut and into the devel­op­ing brain to pro­duce euphoria.

There’s much more like that in the arti­cle, con­cluded with Wenk argu­ing that this shared evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory is why plants and ani­mals from other plan­ets will prob­a­bly not harm or sus­tain us if we ever travel to dis­tant, Earth-like bodies.

Under­stand­ing prob­a­bil­i­ties is hard (viz.) — and it’s espe­cially so when we try to under­stand and take ratio­nal deci­sions based on very small prob­a­bil­i­ties, such as one-in-a mil­lion chance events. How, then, to com­mu­ni­cate risks on a sim­i­lar level, too?

The answer is to use a more under­stand­able scale, such as micro­morts; “a unit of risk mea­sur­ing a one-in-a-million prob­a­bil­ity of death”. Some activ­i­ties that increase your risk of death by one micro­mort (accord­ing to, among other sources, the Wikipedia entry):

• smok­ing 1.4 cig­a­rettes (can­cer, heart disease)
• drink­ing 0.5 liter of wine (cir­rho­sis of the liver)
• liv­ing 2 days in New York or Boston (air pollution)
• liv­ing 2 months in Den­ver (can­cer from cos­mic radiation)
• liv­ing 2 months with a smoker (can­cer, heart disease)
• liv­ing 150 years within 20 miles of a nuclear power plant (can­cer from radiation)
• drink­ing Miami water for 1 year (can­cer from chloroform)
• eat­ing 100 charcoal-broiled steaks (can­cer from benzopyrene)
• eat­ing 40 table­spoons of peanut but­ter (liver can­cer from Afla­toxin B)
• eat­ing 1000 bananas, (can­cer from radioac­tive 1 kBED of Potassium-40)
• trav­el­ling 6 miles (10 km) by motor­bike (accident)
• trav­el­ling 16 miles (26 km) on foot (accident)
• trav­el­ling 20 miles (32 km) by bike (accident)
• trav­el­ling 230 miles (370 km) by car (accident)
• trav­el­ling 6000 miles (9656 km) by train (accident)
• fly­ing 1000 miles (1609 km) by jet (accident)
• fly­ing 6000 miles (9656 km) by jet (can­cer from cos­mic radiation)
• tak­ing 1 ecstasy tablet

Issue fifty-five of Plus mag­a­zine looked at micro­morts in more detail, thanks to David Spiegel­hal­ter (the Win­ton Pro­fes­sor of the Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Risk at the Uni­ver­sity of Cam­bridge) and Mike Pear­son, both of Under­stand­ing Uncer­tainty.

via Schneier on Security