10 O'Clock Live

I was really looking forward to 10 O'Clock Live, Channel 4's new comedy / satire / news show on Thursday nights. However, 10 minutes into the first episode I couldn't stomach any more of Jimmy Carr's rent-a-gag schtick (or moon face) and switched off.

But I've given it another chance, and I'm really glad I did. Thanks to the Internets if you watch it on 4OD you can skip forward all of the Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne and just enjoy the genuinely brilliant David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker.

There is a broad consensus that with 10 O'Clock Live Channel 4 were aiming for a British version of The Daily Show after mercilessly cutting that show from weekday evenings on More4. They've almost done it: Charlie Brooker's monologues are as cutting and funny as Jon Stewart's and David Mitchell's observations and interviews are as good as any Daily Show correspondent. Cut the show down to these two, and try to make the audience and studio look slightly less like "The Word" and Channel 4 might be right on the money.

So for now I'll carry on enjoying the genuinely brilliant bits thanks to 4OD's fast forward button.

Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed. - Roger Ebert's Journal

Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed. - Roger Ebert's Journal: "So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?"

UPDATED AGAIN: UPDATED: WH Smith: E-Commerce not so much done wrong, but not done at all

Hey WH Smith! Your website sucks! Seriously. I'm not just ranting. I mean it's absolutely, hands-down, unusably terrible. Not only do you hardly stock anything worth reading (ghost written celebrity biographies and reprints of tabloid newspaper "columns" do not qualify as books) but your checkout server, secure.whsmith.co.uk just plain doesn't work. I've been trying for a week. From the UK via Telehouse and from a VPN in New York. The server just doesn't respond. I can barely route to it.

Of course, I asked for Amazon vouchers for Christmas. Not that I'm ungrateful (you know who you are, relative who shall remain nameless, and don't expect me to get you anything nice for Xmas 11), but I always knew getting something decent from Smith's was going to be difficult for the aforementioned reasons. I just didn't think it was going to be technically impossible.

I finally found something I want to spend my gift voucher on. I wasted hours trawling through the dross to find something I actually want from your awful, awful site. Have you just given up because your site is so terrible compared to the competition? That's no excuse! Please Smith's, make your secure server work, just for me, just this once. I won't bother you again, I promise.

UPDATE! I got the checkout to work. I spent my gift voucher. Managed to find some Richard Feynman books I'd like to read. Okay, they said 5-7 days delivery but I can wait. I checked out. Then I got an email saying everything is out of stock with their supplier (who the hell is that? Waterstones?) and that one of them is out of print! Smith's: Your website is shit and your stock status is made up. And now my gift card has disappeared into the ether! F**k you WH Smith! F**k you with a fake beard!

FURTHER UPDATE! All of the books have been dispatched. Why is your stock status so misleading? Anyway, thanks. Sorry I got so cross motherf**kers!

Michael Gove gets his ass handed to him on Radio 5 Live

Thanks, BBC for making this snippet of joy available online. Someone with very sensible ideas about education (and a fantastic grasp of the correct way to hold an argument) tears into Michael Gove over his English Baccalaureate.

BBC News - Michael Gove in fiery debate with caller over Baccalaureate

His expenses claims are just as amusing.

Is bad homeopathic advice putting travellers at risk?

In a word: Yes. In this fantastic bit on Newsnight, BBC Science correspondent Pallab Ghosh interviews a man who ignored his doctor's advice and took a homeopathic anti-malaria treatment before travelling to Africa. He very nearly died.

Pallab Ghosh does a very neat visual illustration of the method behind the production of homeopathic "remedies". I've attempted to write up my own explanation, but Ben Goldacre (of Bad Science and The Guardian) does such a good job I thought it better to quote him:

“The typical dilution is called ‘30C’: this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their ‘What is homeopathy?’ section, they say that ‘30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.’

“This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 100^30, or rather 1 in 10^60, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or – let’s be absolutely clear – a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

“To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths’ terms, we should say: “30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance.”

“At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.”

Basically, aside from placebo effect, there is no physical way such pills can create a physiological change in your body.

The poor chap who contracted malaria admits he was "a bit of an idiot". Perhaps he's not entirely to blame, because in the UK a culture of acceptance exists for this ridiculous quackery. Licensed pharamacies are peddling homeopathic products (including Boots). They're also available on the NHS (paid for by your taxes!). Looked at objectively, it seems completely insane that a treatment that's so obviously unscientific is still being accepted and practiced. Perhaps GPs should be prescribing leeches, or prayers instead?

If you want to personally believe in homeopathy, and fill yourself up with sugar pills, be my guest. But in purveying this culture of acceptance of something that cannot prevent or cure an illness, we are risking the health of real people. Of course there are companies making these tablets because there's a market for them. And there's so much fear, uncertainty and doubt put about in the papers about science, medicine, and especially vaccines, that some parents feel they have to consider alternatives. Cynically peddling homeopathic treatments actively endangers lives.

There was a glimmer of hope towards ending this madness last February when the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report urging the withdrawal of funding from the NHS and licensing from the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) of homeopathy. Following an extensive inquiry the committee concluded that there was absolutely no evidence of the efficacy of homeopathy and so it should no longer be funded by the NHS, and also that as it was "not a medicine" it should not be licensed by the MHRA. The report was endorsed by doctors attending the British Medical Association (BMA) annual conference, who said homeopathic remedies should be banned on the NHS and taken off pharmacy shelves where they are sold as medicines.

What was the result of this report? Health minister (at that time) Anne Milton said complementary and alternative medicine "has a long tradition" and very vocal people both in favour of it and against it. In other words, politicians don't go around making decisions based on evidence, just in case we offend some part of the voting public. The report was filed and nothing changed. Homeopathy is still available on the NHS, or on the shelves of your local Boots store.

It's worrying that a supposedly modern democratic government can be so on the fence about evidence based science, especially concerning medicine. As a group of experts that can analyse facts and produce unbiased reports, it's a wonder the Science and Technology Committee hasn't been disbanded yet by the new coalition.

Sources: Daily Telegraph 26/7/2010 and Bad Science. Do yourself a favour and buy Ben's book if you haven't already.

BBC Streams in Banshee

Recent version of Banshee don't include a list of Internet radio stations because, according to the developer, the list was difficult to maintain (too many stations, some of which often go off air or change their streaming URL). So how do you find decent radio to listen to, when you need to block out all that office noise and get some work done? (Or really concentrate on Kingdom of Loathing).

Step forward bbcstreams.com, which has kindly half-inched the streaming URLs of most (if not all) BBC Radio stations, apparently for the purposes of streaming them on iPhones and iPads. But they work very happily in Banshee as well. Just in case the site gets taken down by the Beeb's legal eagles, click through for a few handy URLs...

Oh yeah...

Happy New Year and all that. What are we celebrating again? Another year closer to our inevitable rendezvous with death? Or just the fact that we've made it through? Cheese and biscuits, that sounded melancholy. Perhaps it's a pre-emptive celebration of how great we going to make the coming year. We really do set ourselves up for a fall don't we?

I've already linked to the best image/memes of 2010, so for those with a greater attention span, here's Ben Goldacre's fantastic take on the year in nonsense.