The Skeptic versus the Astrologer

Channel 7’s Sunrise  had skeptic and host of Australia’s The Skeptic Zone, Richard Saunders and Australia’s leading astrologer and psychic Milton Black talk about astrology on the show this morning. I think the poor presenter David Koch was thoroughly confused by the end of it.

What I found most interesting is that Richard has thrown down the gauntlet to Milton Black to prove that astrology is accurate.  I look forward to the test that Richard devises and seeing how accurate Milton’s astrology charts really are.

What is your opinion of the interview?  Did Richard do a good job of discrediting astrology or did Milton prove that astrology is accurate?

Shame on you Fairfax!

Today newspapers all over the world published a single editorial calling on the world leaders to take action on climate change at the summit being held in Copenhagen this week.  The editorial was also supposed to run in the Fairfax owned newspapers Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, but at the last minute the editors decided not to run the piece.  The reason why, according to The Guardian, is because of the election of Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal party “recast the country’s debate on green issues”.

If this is truly the reason why Fairfax didn’t run this piece, then shame on them!  One measly vote that got Tony Abbot elected should not influence Fairfax in calling for action on climate change at Copenhagen.  Australia is the world’s largest polluter per capita in the developed world and already we have seen the effects of climate change causing widespread drought across the country.  Should the viewpoint of a couple of politicians in Canberra triumph over the masses of scientific evidence showing that man is responsible for climate change? According to Fairfax, it should.

If you wish to read the editorial that should have been in Australian newspaper today, head over to New Matilda. It’s a fine piece of journalism.

Special thanks to Warlach who posted the link to the editorial on Twitter.

Does Arnica really help bruises heal faster?

Since I do martial arts and my girlfriend Lelak does CrossFit, we both manage to get a large number of bruises between the two of us.  Therefore a very common question heard in our household is “have you put arnica on that?”.  Coming home from training last night sporting some lovely new bruises made me wonder if arnica really does make bruises heal faster than doing nothing at all and if any scientific studies have been done on the effectiveness of arnica.

Arnica is a genus with about 30 perennial, herbaceous species, belonging to the sunflower family, Asteraceae. Within this genus, several species, such as Arnica montana and Arnica chamissonis, contain helenalin, which is a a major ingredient in anti-inflammatory preparations, mostly used to treat bruises.

A bruise is caused by the capillaries bursting open and blood spilling into the surrounding tissue.  As your body attempts to heal itself, it sends white blood cells to the area to clean up the spilt blood.  Arnica is said to increase the number of white cells sent to the area causing the blood to be cleaned up faster and your bruise to fade quicker.  But does this actually occur?

Scouring PubMed for studies into the effectiveness of arnica, I could find only one that related to arnica’s effectiveness in treating bruising. This was a study from August 2002 in Dermatologic Surgery titled Effects of topical arnica gel on post-laser treatment bruises by Alonso, Lazarus & Baumann. In this study the authors had 19 patients in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study where half the patients applied a cream containing arnica to one side of their face and another cream containing no active ingredient to the other side for two weeks before laser treatment.  The other half of the group did the same thing but for two weeks after laser treatment.  The results- no difference whatsoever in the prevention or healing of the bruising on the side of the face treated with the arnica compared to the side of the face without it.

However, just one study with a small number of patients doesn’t prove conclusively that arnica isn’t effective, so I went looking for more evidence, this time on Medline Plus.  In their article on the first aid treatment for bruises from the Mayo Clinic, it doesn’t mention using Arnica at all.  Instead, they recommend that you apply ice to the area several times a day for the first 2 days and use Tylenol or Ibuprofen for pain relief.  The only sites I could find promoting the use of Arnica were natural therapy sites which contained no references to any studies done proving that Arnica is effective in healing bruises faster than if you did nothing at all.

Based on my research, I am not convinced that Arnica decreases the healing time of bruises.  In my opinion what probably does decrease the healing time is actually rubbing the bruised area.  This would increase blood flow to the area thus bringing more white cells to the area to assist in cleaning up the blood and reducing how long it takes for the bruise to fade.  Arnica has nothing to do with it at all.

Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

Once again, the Big Picture are doing their annual Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar.  Every day in December a brand new, awe-inspiring picture from the Hubble Space Telescope will appear on the site.

This was yesterday’s picture

And this is today’s

Aren’t they just bone-achingly beautiful?

You can check out all the pictures from last year’s Advent Calendar whilst you are waiting for tomorrow’s picture to be uploaded.

Post NaBloPoMo Analysis

National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) is over for another year and this year I managed to post every single day for the month of November.  I also changed the focus of this blog a little bit and started blogging more about skepticism, science and pseudoscience as well as my usual “anything goes” blog posts.  I was curious as to how this affected the amount of traffic coming to my blog.  Were people interested in my daily ramblings and the topics I was posting about or were they turned off by the whole thing?

To my surprise, I found that over the month my daily traffic increased by 100%.  Now before you think that I am now getting an amazing amount of traffic, this 100% increase took my traffic levels from embarrassingly low to just very low.  No amazing amounts of traffic here.  My total month’s traffic was also up by 46% over last month.  All good signs, but still I have a long way to go in getting a decent amount of traffic.

Still traffic is not the whole story, people may come if I yell from the hilltops (or Twitter in this case) that I have a new post just to see what the fuss is all about, but they may not like what they see.  People liking what they read is the true testament as to whether I’m connecting with people rather than just making noise.  On this score, I really don’t know how I am doing.  A grand total of 3 people subscribed to my RSS feed this month bringing my number of subscribers to 33.  The lovely big number in my RSS feed total is due to the fact that when you friend someone on FriendFeed you automatically subscribe to their RSS feed – I don’t class these as actual subscribers cause I don’t know who actually reads my feed via FriendFeed.  Then again, do people still subscribe to blogs via RSS feeds or do most people prefer to read blogs when posts are announced via Twitter?  I really don’t know.

Basically, I have no idea whether people are enjoying my blog posts, so I am just going to ask you all with a poll, cause I find if you ask people to comment they get all shy.

If you want to elaborate on your poll choice or make any other criticisms/suggestions etc, please do so in the comments.

TAM is coming Down Under

TAM, as The Amaz!ng Meeting is affectionately known, is on its way to Australia for the first time ever in November, 2010. For those of you who have never heard of TAM, it is basically the Skeptics equivalent of Comic Con. It’s a celebration of critical thinking and skepticism featuring lectures by the most brilliant skeptical minds and from all accounts by people lucky enough to go to one, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

The Australian Skeptics made the official announcement at their national convention this weekend and there is already a list of confirmed speakers – the entire cast of ‘The Skeptics Guide to the Universe’ podcast (Dr Steve Novella, Jay Novella, Bob Novella, Evan Bernstein and Rebecca Watson), the skeptical author and podcaster of ‘Skeptoid’, Brian Dunning and singer George Hrab with more speakers to be announced in the coming months.

I am really hoping that Phil Plait will be amongst the speakers to be confirmed as it was through his blog Bad Astronomy that I first discovered the skeptical movement and having seen a few of his lectures on You Tube, he is someone I would love to see speak live.  I would also love to see Adam Savage from the Mythbusters and, given the huge rave he got a TAM London, Tim Minchin grace the guest speaker list as well.

Still no word yet on when tickets go on sale, but given that TAM London sold out in 15 minutes, I will be keeping an eagle eye out of any announcements.

Exhaustion

Tired. So very tired.  I think I am still trying to catch up on lost sleep from Friday night when Rory was sick.  I shouldn’t be blogging.  I should be in bed and will be once I hit publish.  However, it is day 29 of NaBloPoMo and I’ll be damned if I don’t finish this – hence this post.

Rory is continuing to do very well.  Her puffy head has now reduced down to a slightly puffy nose and her gastro seems to have run its course.  Caleb is doing an excellent job checking up on her to make sure she is okay.  He is a very good canine nurse and very devoted ‘brother’.

Ok, bedtime.  Hush, I know it is only 8pm but read the blog title – I’m exhausted.

Two Trips To The Vet In 8 Hours

Today started abruptly at 2am with Rory (my beagle) throwing up multiple times coupled with  a bout of diarrhoea and extreme discomfort.  This continued until about 4am when finally she was able to settle down and get some sleep.  I think we all got about 4 hours of sleep in total.

At 7am Rory was bright and bouncy, barking at the front door and hunting for food.  She had what she would class as the worst breakfast in the world (dry Z/D food) whilst Caleb (my GSD x Husky) got chicken mince.  All was going well until about midday when I checked Rory’s anal glands (she suffers from impacted anal glands that need to be expressed weekly) and I found blood.  We headed down to the vet clinic straight away as blood is never good sign.

The diagnosis was infected anal glands with a dose of gastro.  We got some antibiotics and headed back home to prepared for a dessert afternoon for Lelak’s birthday.

Wonderful desserts were eaten whilst enjoying good company.  The dogs played beautifully with the toddler in attendance and all was good until 6pm when we noticed that the left side of Rory’s face was swollen.  She looked like she had turned into Bull Terrier/Beagle hybrid.  Still she was bright and bubbly and ate her dinner with much gasto.

After our friends left around 8pm, Rory’s face was still all swollen, so we decided to call the vet to see what we should do.  We were told to bring her in immediately.  Thus began our second vet visit of the day.

Whilst taking Rory’s temperature, the vet discovered bloody faeces on the thermometer and a rectal exam confirmed much more bloody faeces.  The gastro with infected anal glands was upgraded to haemorrhagic gastroenteritis – a rather nasty version of gastro that has no known cause.  The vet gave Rory an anti-histamine shot for her swollen face – suspected to be the result of a run in with a wasp, and we waited for 30 minutes to make sure everything was okay. After 30 minutes, we got another exam and a blood test to make sure nothing nasty was going on with Rory’s blood as haemorrhagic gastro can cause dogs’ blood to become sluggish and begin to clot where it shouldn’t.

Fortunately, Rory’s bloods looked good so we were able to take her home.  She is on Z/D (bland allergen free dog food) for the next week and hopefully the bloody diarrhoea should pass in 36 hours. It has not been a good day for anyone.  We are all exhausted and tired. We are all hoping for a good nights’ sleep tonight and an uneventful Sunday.