Apathy Sketchpad

The Church of England have launched a rather silly new website called sayoneforme.com. The site mostly consists of a big friendly green box into which you type a prayer. Then you click the button underneath, which I swear is marked ‘Amen’. A cynic might (and did) suggest that for all the difference it would make this might simply delete the text and say God’s read it, but instead the prayer is emailed to a selection of bishops who will pass it on to God for you if you’re too lazy to pray manually or if perhaps you don’t know how.

There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

To discover how honest homeopaths are, here is a passage from the Society of Homeopaths’ website, edited for accuracy:

Homeopathy simply explained: What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is an effective system of healing which assists the natural tendency of the body to heal itself. It recognises that symptoms of ill health are expressions of disharmony within the whole person and that it is the patient who needs treatment not the disease.

In 1796, a German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann, discovered a different approach to the cure of the sick which he called homeopathy (from the Greek words meaning ’similar suffering’). Like Hippocrates two thousand years earlier, he realised there were two ways of treating ill health: the way of opposites, most commonly used by conventional medicine and the way of similars.

Hahnemann discovered that diluting and succussing (shaking) remedies, which homeopaths call potentisation, not only produced fewer side effects but also produced better results. Homeopathic remedies are drawn from the natural world and prescribed on the principle of treating “like with like” or the way of similars.

How does it work?

Scientists cannot yet explain the precise mechanism of action for homeopathy but there is published evidence of its efficacy. It is believed that homeopathic remedies work by stimulating the body’s own healing abilities and that this stimulus assists your own system to clear itself of any expressions of imbalance. For more details on research evidence, please see the Society’s website at www.homeopathy-soh.org.

That’s not too bad. I’ve crossed out very little by homeopathic dilution standards.

A theme I’ve heard a lot about from alternative medicine types is “choice”. Homeopaths in particular are extremely keen that everyone be given a choice between ‘conventional’ and homeopathic medicine. Choice is, of course, a good thing. People should have a choice wherever possible. But the way alternative medicine practitioners use the word is disingenuous at best.

I’m going to skip over the argument for choice within the NHS, as I think that’s more to do with entitlement issues and the persecution complex fringe groups always adopt when their absurd privileges are taken away — hence every ‘attack on Christianity’ news report you’ve ever read or the endless ‘put the football on the BBC’ petitions on the 10 Downing Street website. The problem with ‘choice’ as an argument for providing alternative remedies is that their practitioners are intent on taking away any choice you may have.

A particularly gutsy Deal Or No Deal contestant may find themselves offered the swap with only the 1p and £250,000 boxes in play. Their dilemma, essentially, is between the prize in box 4 and the prize in box 17. One of them is life-changing money, the other won’t cover their bus fare if they live down the road. If they call it wrong, we wouldn’t incredulously ask them why anyone would want 1p instead of £250,000. They were never given a meaningful choice.

Both extremes of the ‘choice’ argument can agree on one thing: homeopathy and evidence-based medicine do not both work. One of them cures diseases, and the other is a waste of time and money. A patient given a choice between homeopathy and real medicine is in the same position as the Deal Or No Deal contestant above: they want the medicine that will cure their disease, but they don’t know which box it’s in. The patient has no meaningful choice until they’re told which medicine works (at which point they still have no meaningful choice since one option just seems silly).

An uninformed choice is no choice at all, so the people pushing for consumer choice are the skeptics who work to disseminate evidence of efficacy or lack thereof, to expose quacks and to debunk media scare stories. They are giving people the information which enables them to make a choice. Homeopaths are effectively arguing that we are ‘anti-choice’ because we want to give people information that will make the choice so easy it will cease to exist. I think they are anti-choice because they deprive people of information that makes the choice meaningful — and often give out misinformation that makes the answer to their dilemma both obvious and wrong. When they die of a treatable condition, will the homeopath stand up in court and say ‘this is what he chose’?

Nobody is arguing that consumers should have a choice between conventional business deals and Nigerian princes who e-mail them opportunities.

This Saturday, a lot of people are going to publicly overdose on homeopathic medicine, to prove that the pills are totally inert. This is part of the ‘10:23′ campaign. Personally, I love homeopathy. Its practices read like a scathing satire of alternative medicine. Literally every part of it is wrong. Just as you think it’s done being silly, you read the next bit and if anything it gets more absurd. Allow me to explain.

The way homeopathy works — I say ‘works’. The way homeopathy is thought to work — I say ‘thought’. The way homeopathy is believed to work is by a principle called ‘like cures like’. So you cure a disease using something that causes the same symptoms (even though they tell you that homeopathy treats diseases, not symptoms unlike, they say, something which they call ‘allopathy’ and which everyone else calls ‘medicine’). So, for example, say you have fractured limbs. As any player of Theme Hospital will tell you, Fractured Limbs is caused by falling from high places onto concrete, so you might get some concrete, put it in a glass of water and call it medicine. That’s a rather facetious example, but you can genuinely buy homeopathic remedies made with dolphin song or the light of Venus. The light of Venus? What disease does that cause? I think if you’re exposed to significant amounts of Venus-light then the terrible heat and the atmosphere of sulphuric acid will be what does for you. Homeopaths work out what diseases to flog these esoteric tinctures for by giving them to healthy people and writing down what it does to them. In case nothing happens, they omit such extravagances as a control group or any statistical tests, so they get the same guaranteed results as the N = 1 science of Braniac. They call these experiments ‘provings’, which is a bit like me writing ‘working’ on my timesheet when I was actually doodling: it is what I would like people to believe I was doing.

Anyway. You take your medicine, which you’ve carefully selected to be the worst possible thing you could give the patient, and dilute it. This, homeopaths conveniently assert, reduces its harmful effects while amplifying its presumed healing properties. You take a drop of the water with your medicine in, and put it in 10ml of fresh water, which is assumed to be about a 1:100 dilution, which they call “1C”. Then you shake it, or hit it with a book. (That obviously achieves nothing, so it can be fun to leave it out, thereby making homeopaths say amusingly daft things like ‘well of course it’s going to sound silly if you don’t mention the succussion’, which is the word they invented for hitting things with books.) Then you repeat the dilution, and succussion, so you have a 1:10,000 dilution, which they call “2C” and then again so you have a 1:1,000,000, or “3C” dilution. They call it a ‘potency’ instead of a ‘dilution’ because that sounds more like it might work, but chemists may recognise this as the technique used to remove all trace of a chemical from titration pipettes (except they’re delicate so you don’t hit them with books). Homeopathic remedies are routinely sold at a potency of “100C”, which means…

The problem with a 100C dilution is that it’s beyond analogy or satire. A 60C dilution would have to literally fill the entire universe before it had even a remotely realistic chance of containing a single molecule. When homeopathy was first imagined, we didn’t know about Avogadro’s Number, but now we know that beyond 12C there are generally no molecules left of the original medicine. It’s just a glass of water. So modern homeopaths have invented a thing called the ‘memory of water’. Some of them write long pieces of gibberish about quantum theory which read like a shooting script for one of the sillier episodes of Star Trek Voyager, but mostly they pin their meagre hopes on some kind of unspecified crystalline microstructures which they say form around molecules in water, and which heal your body somehow and don’t get damaged by being repeatedly hit with a book. Of course nobody has ever shown the memory of water effect in a laboratory or that homeopathic remedies have any therapeutic effect, but they write a lot more entertaining but merit-free quantum bullshit to explain that away. This empty water can optionally be soaked into a sugar pill if liquid medicine isn’t your thing, so my advice would be not to give hyperactive children homeopathic sleeping pills.

The problem with the ‘memory of water’ hypothesis (aside from the fact that it isn’t true) is that beyond a 24C dilution there is none of the 12C solution left either, so water would not only have to remember what it contained, but communicate this information to some future water. A 100C dilution would have had to do this at least four times. This aqueous Chinese-whispers obviously has no active ingredient, and homeopaths therefore believe that the real power of homeopathy is that it activates the body’s own healing powers, which sounds very natural and healthy but raises two rather important questions, the first of which is ‘why doesn’t the body just use those powers in the first place?’, and the second of which is ‘what environment did mankind evolve in where this was the best system?’. Developing an immune system that needs kick-starting by some water which used to have poison in it seems to me like an evolutionary mis-step.

No, the immune system evolved to try its level best to fix anything that might go wrong in the body, but it’s a bit of an ad-hoc job and doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it fails, and sometimes epically backfires and kills its owner. Modern medicine works by giving a group of intelligent people a deep understanding and knowledge of anatomy, asking them to interfere with the natural progression of a disease, and banking on their expertise to make a better fist of it than the body’s in-built system, which by the way is the same system that reckons if you don’t wash your face enough you need a load of spots that hurt to clean. It’s a slightly messy process, obviously, because there’s a finite number of options available, so we do massive amounts of research to discover every effect that every chemical and surgical procedure we can think of has on the body. Doctors look through that research to find one which will do what they need it to, and anything else it happens to do is called a ’side effect’ and the patient has to put up with them or take their chances with the disease.

Homeopaths, on the other hand, insist their medicine has no side effects. Much like the Daily Mail, they see the world as divided into ‘healing’ and ‘disease-causing’ things, and like the Daily Mail put everything on both lists. It’s just a pathetic piece of magical thinking which belies a complete lack of understanding of how the world works. It’s not divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things; things are right or wrong for a particular purpose. It’s this kind of thinking that leads to people putting deisel in a petrol engine, assuming they haven’t ruined it already by using 100C unleaded.

And obviously people are perfectly free to think this way and to spend many a happy afternoon pointlessly diluting glasses of water and hitting them with books. Probably the ritual will make them feel better. But if people rely on this voodoo nonsense instead of real medicine, they die. And when they promote it over real medicine, they kill. Boots the Chemist have admitted in Parliament that there is no evidence that homeopathic medicines work, but they sell them anyway, alongside the real medicine, because “[their] customers think they work”. Campaigns like 10:23 are important to minimise the harm these things do.

Homeopaths will tell you that 10:23 does nothing to disprove homeopathy. The stunt is for loads of people to each chug an entire box of pills all at once to demonstrate that nothing happens. Such homeopathic overdose stunts have been done before, and homeopaths have got their excuse down pat by now: they say that any non-zero number of pills, if swallowed all at once, is the same as one pill. (I agree, apart from the ‘non-zero’ part.) They can say this, and indeed anything they like, because once you’ve effectively invoked magic, all bets are off. But the point isn’t to convince homeopaths — they’re far too invested to quit now — but to show everyone else how silly it is. If you have a bit of a cold and someone suggests you try homeopathy, and you do and you get better because it was only a cold, that can be quite convincing. But if we can goad the homeopathic community into publicly saying something as patently absurd as “one hundred pills is the same dose as one pill” then that’s a valuable victory. Anyone who’s seen that will think twice before entrusting their health to a homeopath. It also raises questions about why the packaging of these pills says to take a dose of two. That’s the business plan of a dodgy plumber.

That’s the point: we don’t need to disprove homeopathy. Aside from the fact that it is the homeopaths’ responsibility to prove their theory, all you need to do to homeopathy is hand it enough rope. A public awareness campaign is exactly the last thing homeopaths need.

Games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto come in for a lot of stick, from simpletons who assume we’ll be violent in real life after playing them, and from moralistic fools who think we shouldn’t be playing them anyway because it’s ‘wrong’ to press a button that makes a machine draw a picture of how it imagines a man killing a prostitute would look.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?

There is a law which states that you can’t discriminate according to religious beliefs. In principle I think this is a bad law, because the idea that someone can’t be refused employment on the basis that they’re delusional is absurd, but pragmatically I think it’s necessary. Relatively few people choose their religious beliefs and people whose parents have inducted them into cults have it bad enough without having a tough time getting a job.

The pragmatic necessity, though, doesn’t extend to any old nonsense. This week, there have been two weird uses of this law. The first was Tim Nicholson, who won a judgement about unfair dismissal after he was sacked for hectoring his company about green issues.

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

This was best summed up, I think, by David Mitchell on the News Quiz, who essentially said that it’s good these ideas get respect but that it’s bad that the way they do so is to be more like religions. He said that arbitrary religious reckonings musn’t be questioned but scientific facts backed by evidence are fair game and that that was the wrong way around.

More recently,

Alan Power, a trainer with Greater Manchester Police, will rely on a previous judgment that found his belief in mediums who contact the dead is akin to a religious or philosophical conviction. In an unpublished judgement in Mr Power’s favour seen by The Independent, the employment specialist Judge Peter Russell said that psychic beliefs are capable of being religious beliefs for the purpose of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

If you need convincing that this is perverse, read this:

Judge Peter Russell… said: “I am satisfied that the claimant’s beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society”

Really? I would say they’re worthy of mockery, and I’d further say that they’re a very good reason to sack him if

Mr Power told the court that he had a belief in psychics and their “usefulness in police investigations”.

According to a blog,

The judge said that a later hearing would have to establish whether Power was ‘dismissed for the possession of religious or philosophical beliefs or for his alleged inappropriate foisting of his beliefs on others’.

But then, according to the Times,

Mr Power, who worked for Greater Manchester Police for three weeks in October last year, was sacked over his work with neighbouring police forces and his “current work in the psychic field”, the tribunal heard.

If Power wins the second hearing then this would effectively shepherdus into the fictional world of Rob Grant’s Incompetence. This is a book set in a dystopian future in which it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of incompetence, and therefore everyone does the job they want and most of them are terrible at it.

This is part of the wider problem of religion: it demands that we respect ideas that range from slightly odd to downright idiotic, but doesn’t properly define which ones, so any attempt to mandate that respect is doomed. You can’t build an internally consistent set of rules if you have to accommodate the mandatory respect of a handful of strange beliefs. You end up having to respect any belief regardless of its merit and that leads to people being killed by elevators with buttons wired up for floors that don’t exist.

It should be illegal to fire someone because they believe in man-made climate change because that’s sensible. It should be legal to fire someone because they believe in psychic mediums because that’s stupid. Surely we have a law for that? Surely that’s what the ‘unfair dismissal’ means?

Presumably if you’re reading this you’ve heard that Alan Johnson demanded David Nutt resign as head of something called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made in a speech reproduced as a pamphlet you can download. I have read his speech. It’s quite interesting. It discusses the intentions of the drug classification system, criticises the current implementation, and offers a proposal for and justification of an alternative based on a systematic comparison the effects of a range of drugs, according to criteria decided by the public. This is complete with references, and in short exactly the sort of thing a Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology should be doing and while it’s not perfect I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would sack him for it.

Ann Widdecombe, who can always be relied upon to jump into the wrong side of any issue put before her, offered this dismal attempt at an explanation:

Look, you read your newspapers every day. Scientific advice changes almost as often as the wind.

You can hear this on iPlayer now; I heard about it from @krypto. And she’s right, of course, because the sum total of everything we know about the universe changes when we learn new things. Your choices are to go with what we know now, understanding that it could change in the future, or to make shit up and run with that. If you want to make shit up then fine (it’s called religion), but don’t foist your made up shit on me, and don’t employ a scientific advisor to make it look credible or else exactly this is bound to happen.

The Daily Mail’s A N Wilson also defended Johnson, who presumably wishes he wouldn’t, saying

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

This was accompanied by an inset photo of Hitler until The Jan Moir Police made them take it down.

While obviously Wilson’s biggest crime against reason in that quote is kidnapping the word ‘only’ and dumping it, lost and confused, in front of an idea well outside its comfort zone, he’s also quaintly ignorant. Hitler was a big fan of science in principle, but corrupted it with quackery and racist ideology, and all but banned theoretical work as ‘Jewish science’ (except secretly where it might help his war effort). Anyone caught doing science that didn’t fit the racist message was fired. One mathematician even attempted to prove quantum mechanics and Nazism were the same thing. All of this is covered in John Grant’s Corrupted Science which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.

Melanie Phillips, also of the Mail, implied pretty strongly that Nutt’s claims were simply wrong, which would at least be a legitimate defence of his sacking, were it true.

The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason.

But he is not.

She does, at least, appear to have read his speech, as she criticises it piece by context-free piece, which is perhaps as strong an endorsement as a scientific claim can get. Melanie Phillips’ views on science are almost uniformly opposed to reality. Take, for example her butchering of the Cochrane report on MMR or her support for ‘intelligent design’. Incidentally, Nutt’s speech cites the MMR fiasco as an example of harm done by ignoring evidence. Phillips doesn’t mention this. (For a better cricism of Nutt’s ideas, see the Transform blog post about the original paper.)

On what I will generously refer to as ‘the left’, Alan Johnson himself defended his actions by saying

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with … He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Widdecombe also made this case. And it’s true, although irrelevant. This was a lecture about scientific work, not a campaign. In any case, I think it’s equally well understood and established that you can’t ignore science and expect your science adviser to sit there and let you get on with it. Even if Nutt had crossed the line into campaigning, I think he would have been justified in doing so. As it is, Nutt did little more than present an alternative idea for consideration and present arguments in its favour (i.e., science). Gordon Brown believes Nutt should be fired for this, “because we cannot send mixed messages”, an argument pre-emptively demolished by Nutt himself on page 12 of the PDF transcript.

Martin at LayScience.net points out [with my annotation in square brackets] that

nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister [and it was made clear Nutt was speaking only as a scientist], so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicising research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown’s world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.

which sounds familiar but I shan’t comment on why because I’m not sure what happens if both sides of an argument are compared to Hitler.

Don’t listen to these people, and don’t listen to me. Read Nutt’s speech for yourself. If you’re a scientist, you’ll find its structure and tone familiar and start to wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, just read it and then ask yourself if you’d consider it ‘campaigning against government policy’ or ‘a man telling a class what he does at work’.

Obviously fundamentalist religion bothers me. It makes me very angry to see anyone try to enforce rules based on ideas that are unproven, much less false. But I’ve never really known what to think of the more mainstream, moderate everyday religion.

I mean, I don’t like it in principle because I think if people are going to believe something then it should be true. (And for the record, anyone who falls for Mormonism or Scientology is a fully levelled-up imbecile, with a million inexperience points and the Shield of Ignorance card.) I also object to the relativist attitude the current culture promotes. Lastly, I object to anyone identifying themselves as ‘Catholic’ because that’s an endorsement of Pope Batshit-Mental XVI, and more generally a large number of believers gives any religion’s lunatic fringe a dangerous illusion of credibility. And these are all fine objections in principle, but in practice, in reality, for the purposes of day-to-day thinking, I just find it weird.

I think I’ve essentially been an atheist ever since it occurred to me to think about religion. For years since then I’ve surrounded myself with young, middle-class, liberal science students and their ilk, so now when I meet someone I assume they’re an atheist in the same way I assume they like cake: so completely have I accepted that there aren’t any gods that it simply wouldn’t occur to me that anyone might disagree. I mean, I know religious people exist outside of churches and other countries and the Internet, but only in the same way that I know a lot of people are conservatives and I know the weekend isn’t an infinite time-bank in which I can catch up with any ridiculous amount of work I care to ignore during the week: I can remember that these things are true but they’re kind of not programmed into my internal model of the world. You know, like general relativity.

But then… there are a couple of my friends who are theists, and every so often I see a Facebook update or something* that casually mentions God or Jesus or Allah vel cetera as if it’s a real person and it just weirds me out. For one thing, I don’t know what to do when I’m invited to thank God for some meaningless turn of fortune. Anything honest seems impolite. How is that fair? They’re the one with the delusion — if anyone’s going to be in an impossible situation, surely it should be them?

In the end I just ignore them. I know if I correct them they won’t listen anyway. Although that said, I do the same thing in pub quizzes and I’ve lost out on a prize that way, so maybe I need to be more assertive. In the meantime, though, my sheepishness to correct the deluded stands me in good stead for handling the religious. Sometimes I post passive-aggressively atheist messages just to balance it out.

The feeling that it’s weird persists, though. Here, I think (in that implicit, subconscious way we do most of our low-level thinking) is a list of updates, from people I care about, to let me know what’s going on in their lives… and here’s one that also involves a fictional character that my friend genuinely believes to be real. I literally don’t know how to process that information. It’s like presenting DOS with the command “c:\make me a cup of tea”. My face just goes blank while my brain throws it the neural equivalent of an unhandled exception error and emails a crash report to Charles Darwin.

I don’t really have a point to make here about anyone other than myself. (I thought I’d wait until the end to mention that. So you’d read it.) I think I just needed to write this somewhere before it drove me crazy. I vaguely hope that any religious folk who happen across this post might understand a bit better what it’s like to be an atheist, although I suspect they might only learn what it’s like to be a socially inept geek-atheist who is procrastinating rather than write his thesis.

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*It’s always online. I assume this is either because there’s less taboo about being religious on the internet or because people rapidly learn not to invoke their imaginary friend in my company.

My PhD research makes use of CT scanning, so I’ve had to do a lot of research into that for the literature review. Here is some of the knowledge I’ve gained:

The mathematical framework that makes CT possible was all outlined in 1917 by Johann Radon. Then in the 50s, the mathematical framework was outlined again, differently, by Allan McLeod Cormack, who invented the CT scanner without having read Radon’s work. Then, in 1973, the CT scanner was invented by Godfrey Hounsfield, who hadn’t read Radon or Cormack’s work. For this, Cormack and Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize.

I’ll be honest, this somewhat undermines the importance of the literature review in my mind.

Only… I wonder what amazing stuff we’d have invented by now if we’d started inventing information technologies instead of pissing about with steam engines all that time. There should have been Discworld-style semaphore towers up and down the country in Tudor times at least. Why should a message take days to get across the country just because that’s how long paper takes? We could have had a CT scanner in the 30s, for a start. By now I’m totally convinced we’d have flying cars and moonbases.

And even given that, scientific knowledge is still trapped in PDF versions of paper journals, behind a myriad different paywalls and arbitrary institutional subscription lists. That’s a terrible system. It should be on a big database, searchable by any parameter you like. If I’ve got a question to which mankind has found an answer, I should be able to run a quick-and-dirty search and get a good idea what that answer is in about fifteen minutes.

If you want jetpacks, don’t invent the jetpack, reform scientific information handling. Because that way it’ll come with teleports and moving hologram projectors and sexy androids and other implausible future stuff.