Miracle surgery for migraine?

BBC NEWS | Health | Surgery 'helps combat migraines'Coincidentally, I'd just finished an interesting CME on headache when I saw this:

Surgery and botox injections can help treat migraines, a US study says.

Researchers injected about 100 patients with botox to find out which muscles triggered the migraines and then used surgery to remove the muscles.

The surgery reduced the intensity and frequency of migraines in 92% of patients and eliminated them altogether for a third of people involved.

The research, published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery journal, also cut the number of sick days taken.

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A 33% lifetime cure for migraine? That would be miraculous. I'm skeptical. My bet:

1. This was a very select group. They had to respond to botox before surgery. The BBC reporter missed this. Since about half the population gets migraines, I'd bet this is a small subgroup who have an unusual migraine trigger. So even if it works, perhaps 1/10 to 1/20 of identified chronic migraine patients would be candidates.

2. I'd be astounded if the results will be this good in f/u studies. We know that migraine, like most pain conditions, is very susceptible to "placebo" affects. (We don't know what this "placebo" affect is -- it's very powerful and if we could master it then it would be very valuable. It's hard to manage though.) I bet a randomized placebo-controlled trial will show benefit in about 1/3 of 1/15 migraineurs (1/50!) and longtime cure in 1/10 of those treated (1/150 of migraineurs).

Ok, maybe I'm a Grinch. I knew of some neurologists years ago who were quite keen on these types of therapy, including using pre-botox interventions to kill some of these peripheral nerves. ENT surgeons, esp. in the 60s and 70s, used various similar interventions for cluster headaches (some used cocaine back then -- but it had its own problems). This wouldn't be the first time that an old intervention would be shown to have real value. And, on the other hand, we know that migraine prophylaxis drugs basically suck. (They are so ineffective that one suspects the entire value of many of them is from the placebo effect.)

We'll see ...

Dyer on the humanization of Hitler

Mass murder in the name of a principle is as human as apple pie, borsht and steamed rice. Treating the perpetrators as space aliens simply disguises the nature of the problem. The potential mass killers live among us, as they always have. They often have perfectly good manners, and some even have high ideals. And the only way the rest of us have to keep them from power is to remember always that the end does not justify the means.

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I think I wrote too harshly of Dyer earlier today. I'm reading through his 2004 material and finding quite a few gems. Evil is an everyday, human affair. Considering how awful we are now, it is chilling to think of how nasty we were when we ate Neandertal.

Credit Card Fraud: Take Two

Credit Card Fraud Page

In 1988 I was a minor victim of an international credit card fraud scam. The perps had set themselves up as a California bank, then legally purchased a large number of credit cards (banks can do those things). They then ran small fraudulent transactions (fake net porn transactions) against tens of thousands of cards around the world. They were shut down, but I doubt any of the crooks did jail time. The fraud was interesting because it foreshadowed a range of techniques that have since been deployed around the net.

At that time I also learned how very frail our credit card infrastructure is. A system built for physical person-present transactions does not migrate well to the net.

One of the recommendations I made, based on that experience, was to use AMEX and thus take advantage of a more centralized approach to fraud management.

Today, six years later, I discovered another interesting pattern of fraudulent charges on my AMEX account!

On Dec 14th/15th, and again on Dec 23/24th, there appear a series of charges that look like this:

1. DOTREGISTRAR.COM: 69230017 INET-DOMAIN NAME TRANSF
2. NEWEGG COMPUTERS: 6-7 charges of about $550.

So with two sets of the above there's about $7030.00 in fraudulent charges.

So now I'll get to see how well AMEX actually works. Thus far I'm spending a fair bit of time waiting on the phone as my call percolates through their fraud division. More updates to follow.

Update: AMEX took about a half hour to get me through to the person who managed it. They didn't ask me any questions; they marked the transactions as fraudulent and are sending me a new card. Unfortunately when AMEX sends an "expedited" card it's a temporary CC number -- pretty useless for me. So there will be a one week delay -- they should do better.

I'll post later on how well AMEX handles this.

I wonder if the DOTREGISTRAR.COM transaction was to enable a temporary mail redirect. Online vendors often use email to establish "identity". It's a frail system, and suspect the thieves probably used a throwaway domain to defeat the identity management. Looks like a pretty cookie-cutter theft, it might have been done by kids or professionals.

Update 1/17/05: AMEX took a while to answer the phone, but they dealt with the problem very quickly. They asked me about 3 questions and reversed everything. They sent an "affidavit of fraud" but didn't even bother to have me sign it.

Unfortunately even though AMEX can Fedex a card in 24 hours, it's a temporary number and hence useless for my online purchases and subscriptions. It takes them a week to send a permanent card.

Thinking about the scam, it's probably what's known now as an 'eBay operation'. Get the goods and sell them on eBay.

On the evolution of reality

Natural selection acts on the quantum world

Looks like the anti-Darwinists will have to put their stickers on physics texts after their done with the economics library.

Natural selection acts on the quantum world
Philip Ball, Nature.com Dec 23, 2004

A team of US physicists has proved a theorem that explains how our objective, common reality emerges from the subtle and sensitive quantum world....

... certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states.

If it wasn't for quantum darwinism, the researchers suggest in Physical Review Letters, the world would be very unpredictable: different people might see very different versions of it.

... Because, as Zurek says, "the Universe is quantum to the core," this property seems to undermine the notion of an objective reality. In this type of situation, every tourist who gazed at Buckingham Palace would change the arrangement of the building's windows, say, merely by the act of looking, so that subsequent tourists would see something slightly different.

... The Los Alamos team define a property of a system as 'objective', if that property is simultaneously evident to many observers who can find out about it without knowing exactly what they are looking for and without agreeing in advance how they'll look for it.

Physicists agree that the macroscopic or classical world (which seems to have a single, 'objective' state) emerges from the quantum world of many possible states through a phenomenon called decoherence, according to which interactions between the quantum states of the system of interest and its environment serve to 'collapse' those states into a single outcome. But this process of decoherence still isn't fully understood.

"Decoherence selects out of the quantum 'mush' states that are stable, that can withstand the scrutiny of the environment without getting perturbed," says Zurek. These special states are called 'pointer states', and although they are still quantum states, they turn out to look like classical ones. For example, objects in pointer states seem to occupy a well-defined position, rather than being smeared out in space...

...Now, Zurek and colleagues have proved a mathematical theorem that shows the pointer states do actually coincide with the states probed by indirect measurements of a system's environment. "The environment is modified so that it contains an imprint of the pointer state," he says.

Yet this process alone, which the researchers call 'environment-induced superselection' or einselection, isn't enough to guarantee an objective reality. It is not sufficient for a pointer state merely to make its imprint on the environment: there must be many such imprints, so that many different observers can see the same thing.

Happily, this tends to happen automatically, because each individual's observation is based on only a tiny part of the environmental imprint. For example, we're never in danger of 'using up' all the photons bouncing off a tree, no matter how many people we assemble to look at it.

This multiplicity of imprints of the pointer states happens precisely because those states are robust: making one imprint does not preclude making another. This is a Darwin-like selection process. "One might say that pointer states are most 'fit'," says Zurek. "They survive monitoring by the environment to leave 'descendants' that inherit their properties."

"Our work shows that the environment is not just finding out the state of the system and keeping it to itself", he adds. "Rather, it is advertising it throughout the environment, so that many observers can find it out simultaneously and independently."

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I know I read a science fiction novel recently, written by a physicist, that basically covered this terrain in the guise of fiction. Of course I say "basically" as though I understood any of this article. I'm looking forward to the Scientific American article. I particularly want to know if this has any relevance for "spooky action at a distance" -- a now "commonplace" macro-phenomena that continues to disturb me.

Next up -- experiments that show one can bias the evolution of reality ...

Doctorow on Digital Rights Management

Boing Boing: Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM

Cory (boing boing) Doctorow rants against Wired's sell out on DRM.

On the one hand, I think Doctorow is a bit extreme. I like my iPod, but I don't buy DRM protected music. I buy CDs, which I legally "rip" onto my iPod for my use. The AAC file format is MP4, and is not fundamentally DRM protected.

Anyway, Wired can't "sell out"; it never had any non-mercenary principles to begin with.

On the other hand, if there's anything that might get me streaming BitTorrent files, it's the intent of Microsoft and Hollywood to embed DRM deep into the fabric of everything we own -- from music to batteries (yes, hardware too). I'd probably still pay for the DRM version (why steal when you can afford not to?), but I'd use the DRM-free pirate version.

Hollywood/Microsoft/Palladium's version of DRM will build the Pirate Legions like nothing else.

Dyer article on the Cumbre Vieja tsunami-to-come

Unstoppable Gee-Gees

"Gee-Gee" is a cute name for "global geophysical event". If Cumbre Vieja erupted today, the resulting tsunami would wipe out about 100 million people, and destroy many US coastal cities. This is not new. I read about this a couple of years ago, and Dyer wrote this piece last August. It's been resurrected because of the Sumatra tsunami.

Problem is, we don't know when this will happen. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in 10,000 years. We don't have the technology to handle this type of disaster; although we do have the technology to perhaps mitigate Sumatra-style disasters.

In medicine we're taught not to seek data that we don't know what to do with -- it usually causes anguish without an upside. This is the same problem on a much larger scale.

It may make sense to sit on this problem for a few decades. We're not going to forget about it. We will face huge challenges in the next 50 years, if we survive those with an intact civilization, then Cumbre Vieja may be a relatively trivial problem.

Gwynne Dyer Returns

New Page 1

Yes, "New Page 1" is the title of the web page with Dyer's 2004 articles. Dyer may have finally more-or-less decided that the web isn't going to go away, but that doesn't mean he's become a guru. It looks like he's doing his own web pages.

Dyer is a historian and journalist. I read him as a young-un in the Montreal Gazette. Canadian by heritage he's lived in Europe for several years. He's a bit of an egomaniac, and I suspect he's not the most agreeable person to meet (though I've never met him), but he's an interesting, albeit sometimes irritating, writer. For a while you could read his stuff in the International Herald Tribune, but the link I used for that broke some years ago. Now he's on the net, seemingly to stay.

Dyer was a better writer in the 1970s and 80s. In the past 20 years he's seemed more petulant and he sometimes indulging in irrational anti-American sentiment. (Dyer would have preferred the US come to terms with the Taliban and bin Laden -- a strategy as unlikely as GWB becoming a rationalist.) Even so, cranky and irrational Dyer is still better than most commentary.

I'll add this link to my news page. Maybe he'll add a syndication feed!

Why have all the top-rated cordless phones been discontinued?

Amazon.com: Electronics / Categories / Telephones / Cordless Telephones / AllOur Panasonic 900 MHz cordless phone is dying. The cheapo buttons don't work any more. Annoying. I don't love the phone, but it has worked well. I would, of course, have paid more for higher quality, but I know I'm the only consumer willing to do that.

So I go to Amazon and review all the top-rated cordless phones. All are 900 MHz range, and none of them are sold any longer.

I don't want a 2.4GHz phone -- that would mess up our 802.11b WLAN.

The 5.8 GHz phones have relatively poor ratings -- looks like the technology isn't quite done yet. High power drain, poor range, susceptible to microwave interference (guess that blasts everything).

So 900 MHz was a well understood technology that interoperated with wirless LANs and worked well. Except it's no longer sold. No phone currently sold by any vendor has comparable ratings to those discontinued phones. Of the currently higher-rated phones, Uniden, Panasonic and Motorola all appear to have equally horrible quality control and customer service.

So maybe I should buy a VOIP phone? Or shop around the dusty back of out-of-favor electronics stores looking for a vintage 900MHz cordless phone?

No Virginia, progress is not guaranteed.

I wish an economist would research this one.

A meteor to track - Torino Level 4

Impact Probability

I came across an obscure reference to this asteroid. As of 12/23 it has a 1/45 chance of impact.

The Orbit of 2004 MN4
Don Yeomans, Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas
NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office
December 23, 2004

A recently rediscovered 400-meter Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) is predicted to pass near the Earth on 13 April 2029...

December 24 Update: 2004 MN4 is now being tracked very carefully by many astronomers around the world, and we continue to update our risk analysis for this object. Today's impact monitoring results indicate that the impact probability for April 13, 2029 has risen to about 1.6%, which for an object of this size corresponds to a rating of 4 on the ten-point Torino Scale...

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The next level on the Torino scale would require governmental contingency planning.

Update 1/05: It's a clear miss!

IE crashing -- is it the google toolbar? My, how strange would that be ...

Google Toolbar

IE has started crashing on me. It's never done that before. Maybe IE feels bad that I've left it for Firefox?

Or is it the Google toolbar? Last time IE crashed, it kindly told me, as a part of the post-crash report, that I had the Google Toolbar installed. It didn't say I should remove it. Of course IE has never before had a problem with the Google Toolbar. The only way that COULD happen would be if one of those endless IE patches had, as a most unfortunate side-effect, an incompatibility with the Google Toolbar.

Nahhh. Microsoft has never done anything like that before. Have they?

[cue: evil, diabolical, echoing, laughter]

Creating the happy life - in retrospect

Faughnan's Notes: Editing -- the secret to a happy life ...

I'm still thinking about my above post, and the Onion satire that inspired it. We don't do scrapbooks, but we have about 1500 images that cycle through our computer screens. This will probably grow to over 20,000 images over the next decade with new additions and by the incorporation of 40 years of analog images. Current selection algorithms are very crude, but with a bit of metadata one could script quite an interesting perspective on a life. For now images are "randomly" selected.

The pictures are strongly biased towards positive and happy events. Not everyone in the images is still with us or even still alive, but the times that the images were taken they were very much with us and very much alive. Unlike the traditional world of photo albums, we see them all the time. Each viewing triggers (or recreates!) old memories.

We know our memories are constructed from tiny fragments of "true memory", and we know our memories can be manipulated with trivial ease. In particular, we know how easy it is to implant false memories by using false images. In this case the images are not false (or no more false than any image), but they are highly selected. They produce a partially false "impression".

Is the viewing of these images, spanning decades of life and biased towards happy moments, altering memory and perception? Are they retrospectively creating a "happy" life -- irregardless of the true balance of joy and sorrow? Is this good? How does it differ from a constitutional predilection to seeing the "bright side" of life?

Hmm. Lots of interesting questions here.

Driving merrily over the cliff of economics

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Whoops! It's 1985 All Over Again

A longish NYT article. Nothing new, but a good overview. We've been here before -- with the last president who was a deluded ideologue.

In broad schematic terms, the United States imports and the rest of the world exports; the United States borrows and the rest of the world lends. Financial flows are so lopsided that last year America soaked up nearly three-fourths of the surplus savings in the entire world.

Not surprisingly, this state of affairs is adding to the country's foreign debt. At the end of last year, the nation's financial deficit - what the United States owes the rest of the world, minus what the rest of the world owes the United States - amounted to more than $3 trillion, about 30 percent of the country's annual economic output. And it is growing. In the 12 months through October, foreigners acquired nearly $885 billion of new United States government and corporate debt.

THAT wouldn't be a problem if the world were comfortable lending ever-larger sums to the United States to pay for American investment and consumption. But this is unlikely.

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If the trend were to continue, it would require foreigners to lend the US about $1 trillion a year. That's about 75% of the savings of the entire world.

I don't care how good Bush is at defining reality and rejecting rationality. He can't define away mathematics.

I can see why they couldn't find a new treasury secretary. Who could stomach this leadership?

PS. Later in the article, this quote appears explaining how the Reagan administration blinked on the 'no new taxes' promise.

...So as he started his second term, Mr. Reagan changed course. Mr. Regan left the Treasury to become the president's chief of staff, while James A. Baker III, the chief of staff, moved to the Treasury.

One of Mr. Baker's first statements was that the Treasury's policy of nonintervention was "obviously something to be looked at." By February 1985, the United States had started intervening in the currency markets to weaken the dollar.

I think James A. Baker III, in several different ways, rescued America and the world from the disaster that was Ronald Reagan. I don't see a James Baker in this administration.

Torture is us. Not that anyone cares ...

New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread (washingtonpost.com)

The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained.

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Sure didn't take us long to sink into the gutter. I wonder if we were faster than average, or merely average. I'd bet on faster than average -- having Rumsfeld at the top of the military has cast a long and very dark shadow.

Why should stress accelerate aging?

BBC NEWS | Health | Stress 'may speed up cell ageing'

The stress of caring for a sick child can add 10 or more years to the biological age of a woman's cells, researchers have found.

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I've been puzzling about this for a while. What adaptive advantage is there for stress to accelerate aging? It seems like evolution went to some trouble to make this happen (note to creationists -- I'm speaking metaphorically).

I can't come up with value for a human adult, but unfortunately for attempts to prevent this, I can think of an explanation for children. Under stressful conditions, such as war, famine, and plague, it makes sense for a child to age faster -- to race to maturity and get out of harm's way. The adaptation may have developed very early in animal (or pre-animal?) evolution, so it may be deeply embedded in our genes.

BTW, about ten years ago I was quite interested in punctuated aging -- the idea that we age in "bursts". I based this on the note that few biological processes in the developing organism are continuous; we develop and adapt in episodic bursts. It helped that there's been a longstanding cultural belief that stress and disease aged us, and it helped that I noted my dog (Molly) seemed to age in bursts.

I wonder if stress-induced accelerated childhood aging would explain why children of the 19th century seemed to have the behavior and capability of adults today. Or why today's 25 yo male seems the biological age of yesterday's 21 yo.

GWB's kinda guy

Economist.com | Official vetting

EVEN loyal members of the Bush administration might concede that, in retrospect, Bernard Kerik didn't have the best résumé to become secretary for homeland security. New York's former police commissioner, it turns out, abandoned a Korean daughter for most of her life, accepted unreported gifts from firms doing business with New York City, was expelled from Saudi Arabia after a physical confrontation with a local police official, was fined $2,500 for assigning detectives to help research his book and, inevitably, employed a possibly illegal nanny...

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Yeah, a nanny. Suure. Enough evidence leaked out, from the press or FBI, that Kerik was probably told to shop for an illegal nanny -- or take a swim with cement fins. Bush has just the best judgment.