Reflecting on paint jobs

Watts Up With That?: Bad Paint Job = Rising Surface Temperatures?

It seems that weather stations shelters known as Stevenson Screens (the white chicken coop like boxes on stilts housing thermometers outdoors) were originally painted with whitewash, which is a lime based paint, and reflective of infra-red radiation, but its no longer available, and newer paints have been used that much different IR characteristics.

Why is this important? Well, paints that appear "white" and reflective in visible light have different properties in infrared. Some paints can even appear nearly "black" and absorb a LOT of infrared, and thus biases the thermometer. So the repainting of thousands of Stevenson screens worldwide with paints of uncertain infrared characteristics was another bias that has crept into the instrumental temperature records.

Yes it's Prozac time again

Fluoxetine is coming up to its 20th birthday which is a great excuse to drag out the Prozac cuttings again and indulge in some lazy, journalism.

First up is someone called Anna Moore, writing in The Observer yesterday: 'Eternal sunshine'.
She pastes together a typical bit of Sunday supplement lite-reading with
'20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world'. It's an undemanding jog around all things Prozac but, as usual, amongst the throwaway stuff about parrots on Prozac and Tom Cruise, there are serious errors which perpetuate the old anti-Prozac fallacies.

It's sold as happiness in a blister pack - a cure-all that has changed the way we think about wellbeing. -

Well, she got one thing right, it is sold in a blister pack.

'Depression has deepened'

- I don't even know what that sentence is supposed to mean.

'In 1971, when LY110141 - the compound that became Prozac - was developed, depression was rarely discussed and antidepressants largely restricted to the psychiatric unit.'

- just plain wrong, but then I suspect Ms Moore was just an egg sitting in mummies tummy in 1971 so she wouldn't be aware of the horrible, ineffective drugs that were used then in an attempt to treat depression. Why are Prozac and similar drugs prescribed so often now? Because they work! And you don't have to suffer three month's of unpleasant side-effects before you get any positive results.

Serotonin was not well known 20 years ago. Now, if you ask the person sitting beside you what it is, he or she may tell you it is linked to happiness, that levels get low in depressed people ... that Prozac tops them up...

- Prozac doesn't 'top-up' serotonin and nobody has suggested that it does. It works by inhibiting the re-uptake of serotonin, big hint in the term coming up, Ms Moore, SSRI - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

And so she goes on. The usual guff. It doesn't work for some people, a woman in Michigan had weird thoughts after taking it, celebrities take it so, well you know..., it was in Michael Hutchence's bloodstream when he committed suicide/killed himself in a wanking experiment that went wrong, and to top it off, this: Anna Nicole Smith died after what is thought to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs - including Prozac. Five months earlier her son Daniel had died after mixing two SSRI antidepressants with methadone. (emphasis mine)

If Ms Moore had been concerned about deaths from widely available drugs she could have written about Nurofen and other NSAIDs, on which thousands of people are dependant and which cause hundreds of deaths a year. I wouldn't normally wish depression on anybody but I'll make an exception for Ms Moore. If it does hit her I hope her GP follows the anti-Prozac line and offers her Frosties, chocolate, yoga or a long walk in the park, anything, that is, but a 'happy pill'.


In today's Times there is another article on the same subject - Britain becomes a Prozac nation  Geddit? Jeez, what happened to sub-editors?

It's by David Rose who hedges somewhat by quoting others without comment, including well known anti-Prozac campaigner and one-time ECT practitioner Professor David Healy who 'said that while the drugs were of benefit to patients with severe depression, the risks outweighed the benefits in those with less serious problems.'  Which is the exact opposite of what supporters of Prozac claim. The SSRIs were found to be effective in cases of mild to moderate depression and it is at this group of patients that Prozac is targeted.

Whenever I read the opinions of psychiatrists I always think of Dr Garth Wood who wrote 'The Myth of Neurosis'. Rich, good-looking, Harrow and Cambridge educated, one-time mercant banker, Harley Street practioner to the rich and famous, Wood thought we should all pull our socks up and try what he called 'Moral Therapy'. 'He maintained that all these so-called disorders indicated a person's failure to live correctly, caused by mistakenly expecting life to be easy and by confusing unhappiness with mental illness.

He killed himself in 2001 after avoiding treatment for depression for several years.

Boom, boom!

Time for 'Fair Trade' cocaine?

'Every last gram of cocaine is soaked with innocent blood' **

"People need to know there are consequences. They should, in this time of ethical trade, give a thought to what happens in order for that drug to get to their dinner table. It's politically and morally irresponsible." - GILL WOOD, SCDEA.

SCOTTISH police forces have launched a new strategy to deal with growing cocaine use, urging middle-class recreational users to "boycott" the drug.

**Well legalise it then, arseholes.

What a drag

Is the smoking ban a good idea?

Hitchens (C) versus Hoggart (S)

CH:
The victory of the control-freaks, and of people who just know they are right, is an old story. Various restraints inhibit me from overusing the word "Nazi" or "fascist", which ought never to be employed except against those who live for violence. But I did notice a wonderful moment in the brilliant German film Downfall, about the last days of the Third Reich. Those in the Führerbunker who found the situation becoming a little too tense, and who wanted a drag to relieve the strain, were required to step outside into the garden, amid the rain of Red Army shells. A good way to prolong your life. And several historians have described the moment, just after the suicide of Hitler, when the surviving occupants could and did gratefully light up out of sheer relief. How amazing that we now have a minister who would quite humourlessly say that it was the latter group that was setting the bad example.

SH:
Smokers do not regard the ban as an infringement of their ancient liberties. They think of it as a helpful way to help them help themselves. And if they must, they can always smoke at home, or in the street, or under the patio heater outside the pub. In America I saw this sign in an office: "My pleasure is beer, and this creates urine. Your pleasure is smoking, and this creates poisonous fumes. Don't pollute my air space, and I promise not to piss on your desk." Precisely.

Precisely?!

No woman was ever beaten up or raped because some guy had too much to smoke. The pools of vomit I see on Union Street every Sunday morning aren't caused by overindulgence of Lambert and Butlers. And as for pissing. Check out the urine-stained doorways in any major town centre. Almost all the wooden doors in Aberdeen's main street suffer from piss-rot.

Precisely.

Select no-spin cycle

Former BBC correspondent Nicholas Jones on Gordon Brown and the media

Gordon Brown, who is signalling that he will turn his back on the spin culture of the Blair era, has an unparalleled opportunity to transform the way information is shared with both the media and the public. Government departments and public authorities can now communicate instantly not just with news media but also with pressure groups, bloggers and individual citizens. All these disparate interests can have access to the same information at the same time via websites and email; what is lacking is any sign of a coordinated response from officialdom

Ensuring equal access would bring immediate gains: all sections of the news media would be on an equal footing and so would campaigners and the like. By striving to reduce the deliberate and often authorised leaks and tip-offs which have become so common in Whitehall, there would be fewer hiding places either for the journalists who take advantage of the anonymity of their sources or those who seek to sabotage their colleagues' exclusives with malicious or bogus stories...

Thanks to the increasing dominance of the internet and the enthusiasm with which the traditional news media have embraced interaction with readers, viewers and listeners, there is now an ideal opportunity to match the pioneering work of Clem Attlee in promoting what he always hoped would be the people's "conscious and active participation in public affairs". But where, oh where, is the vision of the postwar Labour government?

As seen on TV

BBC splashes £100,000 on Cherie: The Documentary

Licence payers money pays for public relations for the 'First Lady'.

Linda McDougall, who made a TV documentary about Mrs Blair in 2001, said Number 10 had done everything it could on that occasion to prevent anyone talking on camera about the Prime Minister's wife. Mrs Blair was also said to have claimed she did not want a programme to be made about her. But Miss McDougall said she was not surprised Mrs Blair had now decided to reveal more of herself. "When she leaves Downing Street she will be cashing in like crazy, and this will help to keep up her profile," she said.

The show could be shown in America, Canada and Australia, either on the BBC's subscription channels or on indigenous stations. This would give Mrs Blair vital exposure in the countries where she makes most of her money from public speaking.

Life - Cheap at half the price

Tom Engelhardt: The Nearly Two Million Dollar Gap

• The value of an innocent civilian slaughtered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 to his or her family: $1.8 million.

• The value of an innocent civilian slaughtered at Haditha, Iraq, by U.S. Marines: $2,500.

• The value of an innocent civilian slaughtered by U.S. Marines near Jalalabad, Afghanistan: $2,000.

Never say that the U.S. government is incapable of putting a price on the deaths of innocents.

'I live an engaged life'

Amy Alkon gets angry. I sympathise. I do it all the time. My wife is sure I'll get arrested one day (again!).

Don't Forget Tonight It's...

Dance of the Knights

Via Neatorama

It's The Scum but it's still a great headline

The Sun - Jail's luxury food scandal

PAMPERED murderers at Broadmoor Hospital have cooked up a row over the amount of CHICKEN in their tikka. The patients demanded extra meat in the curry sauce, more expensive bread and their ham trimmed of fat by chefs. And they moaned they sometimes went without their favourite fizzy drinks, as the vending machines were not refilled frequently enough.

Gordon Bennett # 137

Zimbabwe to chair major UN body

Zimbabwe has been elected to head the UN's commission on Sustainable Economic Development (sic) despite strong objections from Western diplomats. They had said Zimbabwe was unsuitable because of its human rights record and economic problems. It is suffering food shortages and rampant inflation. But Zimbabwe has dismissed such criticism, calling it an insult. Zimbabwe's Ambassador to the UN, Boniface Chidyausiku, said before the vote that his country was entitled to hold the chairmanship. "It's our right. We're members of the United Nations and we're members of CSD, and the Africa group did make a decision and endorsed Zimbabwe," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

"They're making a storm out of a teacup."