The ramblings of a modern Christian shaman.

I really wish New Hampshire passes this law too. [boston.com]

The electoral college system is horribly broken, and we should do away with it immediately. I think these people [nationalpopularvote.com] have the right idea.

There have been reports here and there that have probably escaped the casual news observer’s attention. Private Bradley Manning was arrested and has been detained in Kuwait for leaking a set of confidential documents to the online and largely underground whistleblowing service Wikileaks [wikileaks.org]. The Wikileaks group released a video from this collection of data showing troops shooting down a bus containing kids and some journalists.

If you’re not familiar with this news – no problem. Google for ‘Bradley Manning’ and you’ll get some useful info to help you get up to speed, if you’re interested.

I have been casually watching the stories go by on this because Manning’s release of data has prompted a number of discussions on government transparency, wartime conspiracy and cover-ups, and the legality and morality of whistleblowers. A lot of good technical discussion, some of which I thought about posting here but never got around to doing.

What changed my mind is that Sunday, Wikileaks released a large set of data that they obtained from an unknown source (I believe it’s Manning, but that’s just a guess), which contains the records of day-to-day operations in the Afghanistan war. They call this data set the Kabul War Diary [wikileaks.org]. The data totals around 75,000 transcripts – military recordings of combat engagements, prisoner transfers, psychological warfare, friendly fire, and so on, and all the details that go with each event. They also use Google maps to track the locations of events. News reports detailing the release of this data state that there are records showing that forces will cover up accidents and downplay or escalate the nature of various incidents depending on how it makes them look (so, basically expected human behavior), although in a very brief amount of time browsing the records I couldn’t find anything that would suggest this. All the data is available on the web and for download.

I hope this will bring discussions around transparency to the forefront. Personally, I can’t say that every act of whistleblowing is good, as it may put lives in danger, but Wikileaks appears to recognize that. In general I think that less concealment is better.

Perhaps this will also spark some public awareness of what is going on in this war, and that it is time to end it.

So you may have seen them – you can type “exercise ball” into your favorite search engine and see many pictures of what they look like.

They are often used at my workplace as secondary seats for people who need to work on a problem at someone else’s cubicle. Many of them sit well and provide good motivation not to stay in one position for too long.

This past week I had one show up in my cubicle and no one knows how it got there. I have now claimed it.

In a manner similar to my post on chopsticks [archpaladin.net], I have also found a reliable dealer in teas [teavana.com].

My wife and I went to their brick-and-mortar store this past weekend. Good stuff. I think that perhaps a chopstick collection and a tea collection will both be good.

Sorry if this comes across as advertising.

I have a formulas professor that teaches above the level of the students.

It’s not that the material is too complicated to learn. It’s really more that there is so much of it, and she requires an exacting level of detail. There is simply not enough time to learn the material. I’m not sure how previous students did it.

Well, I think I know how they did it. They probably weren’t working full time.

I have finally found a vendor [everythingchopsticks.com] that carries metal chopsticks. By the look of the site, they carry a lot of other chopstick-related things too.

Perhaps I should start a collection.

John 5:39 & 40 (NASV):

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.”

Best statement contradicting legalistic Scriptural interpretation that I have read.

The topic of my Patient-Provider Relationship class yesterday was on breaches of ethics during interactions between both parties. I found it interested to see (a) what was considered an ethical breach, and (b) which ones got the most class response.

Least/Almost no reaction: Patient brings up political views in an unexpected manner when unprompted, and irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Some reaction: Patient and/or provider makes overtly sexual comments to the other party. The patient might make an advance toward the provider, or the provider makes an advance before or during an acupuncture treatment.

Most reaction: During treatment, the provider quietly asks a terminally ill patient, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

Judging by the above, at this point religion is far more taboo than sex in America.

Two days ago there was a publication [nature.com] of a study in Nature Neuroscience stating that acupuncture works by the stimulation of adenosine – one of the body’s many painkilling drugs. If you want a summary of the article but don’t want to read the obtuse science language, Ars Technica has a decent one [arstechnica.com].

I was interested in reading some of the comments to the various mainstream publications for this article (the Ars Technica one specifically), and not quite surprisingly, I found not only the article but also the research and entire healing practice lambasted by a number of skeptics. Please note that I’m not just talking about people who have a dose of skepticism in them, but rather those who self-identify as skeptics or as part of the skeptical movement. Such people tend to respond agreeably only to things that have been demonstrated repeatedly in rigorously defined scientific studies, and only then for branches of science that are considered ‘hard science’, by researchers who are well known, in peer-reviewed scholarly journals that are widely accepted, and so forth often with a long list of criteria. (Personal disclosure here: I tend to find people in the skeptical movement to be some of the most recalcitrant people on Earth.) In short, not the kinds of people you would catch actually trying acupuncture, even if they were dead.

So, as an acupuncturist in training, let me give you a slightly more informed opinion: To date, most all research on acupuncture is poorly designed, if not outright crap.

Why is that, you might ask? The problem is that for any of the study designs that exist, those that are considered rigorous involve comparing what it is that the researchers want to test (eg. acupuncture), with some other process whose effects and outcomes we know (eg. a drug, or physical therapy, or a placebo). In this way, we can identify how acupuncture compares to the other method. But there are a couple of problems when you try and apply this approach to acupuncture.

The one most often encountered is when researchers try and compare acupuncture against some placebo. Researchers will spend a lot of time trying to develop ways to fool people into thinking that they’ve been stuck with needles, when in fact they haven’t. They’ll use toothpicks, or specially designed sham needles, or some other contraption. The problem here is that researchers who use a placebo of a fake needle have made the assumption that the reason acupuncture works is because you’re using a needle in the first place. But this is not true. There are methods of practicing acupuncture in Japan that involve using needles that don’t pierce the skin – effectively the same as using a toothpick or sham control. This makes comparing acupuncture against a placebo incredibly difficult if not impossible, because anything you develop as a placebo is likely going to be a valid treatment method somewhere in acupuncture’s history.

The second problem is that many other studies will try to identify a mechanism of action for acupuncture that exists solely in the problem domain of a single field of knowledge. The study just released falls into this trap. Scientists will say that acupuncture works because it promotes the release of a certain type of neurotransmitter or hormone, or that it alters neural communication somewhere else in the body, or that it breaks up tangled muscle fibers, or some other single cause that describes the whole of the therapy. This is an understandable statement from research specialists who are used to describing very specific things, but it is incredibly shortsighted as a whole. Acupuncture is likely (I say likely, because we don’t have any definitive mechanisms understood yet) working through all of those functions plus many others that are yet to be understood. To try and break the therapy down into smaller pieces – as we do in all other areas of knowledge – presents the risk that we will jump to conclusions before all the facts are in. I personally don’t have much trust in scientific study (particuarly when in the hands of the skeptical movement) that we will avoid making such premature leaps.

So I admit that I’m not quite a fan of the study that was just released, but I cannot agree with the comments of many others, and particularly from those who shout the loudest. For those who are legitimately skeptical – as opposed to the staunchly skeptical – if you wanted evidence as to whether or not it works, my advice is that the best way to learn is through personal experience.

My wife and I have recently discovered Big Lots.

Random furniture and storage equipment? Check.
Oversized tribal- and possessed-looking Garden Gnomes? Check.
Hammocks? Fail.

No matter, I found some elsewhere.

Incidentally, while wandering around today I thought that everywhere just smelled vaguely of cooking – as if the entire city were having a barbecue in their backyard. I thought this was humorous, being Memorial Day after all. Only later have I found out that what I was really smelling was a forest fire. [seacoastonline.com]