and gynaecologists

Whoops. I meant obstetricians.

MikeHig,

It helps that I use Linux. My geeky confidence goes all to water when I sit in front of a Windows machine. The blessing of computers is having a machine that will do what you tell it. Windows seems to turn that master/servant relationship on its head. Unfortunately, Linux seems to be trending in the Windows direction.

TinyCO2,

I brought it up but you expressed some support for it.

You misunderstood me then and continue to now.

All I said was that homoeopathy hasn't always been in vanishing dilutions. How you construe that historical point as support for homoeopathy eludes me. Little did I realise that you were storing up resentment at this "support" of the Devil's practice.

FWIW my claim was based on another of Dad's tales:

Dad was a recent medical graduate working with a Belfast physician (I believe). His brother was a young naval engineer and was troubled in the tropics with "prickly heat". He asked if there was anything could be done about it. When Dad asked his boss, he said something like "There's no official medicine, but the homoeopathic treatment might help". The treatment was a pretty dilute, but by no means zero concentration of "corrosive sublimate" in water, to be applied topically. The first chemist my uncle visited refused to make up the prescription, deeming it quackery. The next made it up without demur. On his next voyage he was not troubled with prickly heat, though other crewmembers were.

Whether or not it was a miracle cure doesn't matter. Dad's boss called the treatment "homoeopathic". The potion was dilute, but not extremely so.

you don't understand what it is because it's nothing like vaccination.

Oh for goodness sake, I was talking about the word, not the practice. Why do you think I was gibbering in Latin? I was hoping you might read between the lines, but you've jumped way outside of them. I called it "naive", "scientism" and "cargo cult". A glowing endorsement to be sure.

You didn't respond to anything I wrote about the difficulties of separating ordinary hospital patients from anyone else with it

Indeed I did. I said that this meant the system had already failed. Is it better to make a Volvo, which gives you the best chance of surviving if you hit a tree, or a Lotus, which gives you the best chance of avoiding the tree in the first place? And if you graft all the safety equipment from the Volvo into the Lotus you *don't* end up with the best of both worlds.

Since the climate sceptic community started discussing other issues

Paraphrasing Mrs Thatcher: there's no such thing as the climate sceptic community. Each member has his own range of views on various topics. It's foolish to demand that, because you agree with Tom on global warming, that Tom must agree with you on everything else. Likewise Dick and Harry. It's the turbulent stream again.

tomo,

I'll make time for 2000 Mules then, but it's risky to raise expectations saying it "won't disappoint"! I'm always suspicious of "not for profits" — what are they for then? — and (as I think I've mentioned) I have lately been treating NGOs as Near Government Organisations.

Anaesthetists deliberately deal out near-death experiences every day. I think it's between anaesthetists and gynaecologists who has the hightest medical indemnity insurance premiums of all medicos.

I had my own hiccup with an anaesthetist last year. I was in for a colonoscopy (always a fun affair). Had "assumed the position" and the anaesthetist put the mask on me and told me to "breathe normally". I gave it a go, but couldn't breathe at all. After about 15 seconds he realised I was still decidedly conscious. He hurriedly reached over to turn on the gas at the cylinder and I was able to breathe in the necessary oblivion. Seemed a pretty elementary mistake. I guess it was just the routineness of it all. As the Bowser and Blue Colorectal Surgeon song goes:

...for golf he loved to play,
but this is not quite what he meant,
by 18 holes a day.

Robert: your system is way beyond my tech abilities. To my memory, I've never used an F key..... I do cut n' paste a few things onto a file document - when I remember - but that only works on my old desktop, not when I'm on my iPad or phone.

"I don't think I've brought [homeopathy] up." Robert

I brought it up but you expressed some support for it. You demonstrated and still demonstrate that you don't understand what it is because it's nothing like vaccination. It's basically water and even if one 'active' molecule still exists, the ingredient has nothing to do with the disease it's supposed to treat. You also demonstrate you know next to nothing about medical science or practice. You didn't respond to anything I wrote about the difficulties of separating ordinary hospital patients from anyone else with it. I know Australia was mostly a separate bubble from Europe and the US but if you didn't follow what happened outside Australia, why do you think you understand the disease or how to mitigate it? How can you support a tiny handful of 'sceptics' if you don't know the mainstream arguments? A small group of Ivermectin supporters say 'look at these positive studies, Big Pharma is hiding its effectiveness against covid' but they don't mention when deep flaws in those studies emerge. They are doing what they accuse Big Pharma of - lying by omission. Being a small group doesn't mean they are more honest or deserve more lenience.

And that's what I mean about contraryism. Since the climate sceptic community started discussing other issues it has demonstrated how many disagree with everything that authority claims. The cynicism is understandable but largely unhelpful. The creeping rise in admiration for countries like Russia is a warning sign that logic has vanished. For all our faults, Russia is in a different league. That doesn't mean we have to pretend that Ukraine is innocent of everything it is accused of but the attempts to prove Russia more sinned against than sinning is perverse.

tomo,

Dan Andrews is the Victorian Premier, but maybe he's indulging his inner Putin with expansionist eyes on SA. Joking aside, I'm pretty doubtful he'd introduce anything against vegie gardeners. The federal election campaign is on: a happy time for mischief makers, but a time the major parties try to steer clear of anything controversial.

On the airliner/medical crossover, yes, surgery is an area that has benefitted from the flight deck checklist (they could have used my todo file!). It's not that I think there's nothing worthwhile to share, just that the parallels are almost always taken too far. Even surgery isn't all that repeatable. Surgeons routinely learn the common "surprises", e.g. that 20% of people have artery X running this way rather than the usual, but they also have to try to be ready for the 0.001% cases.

The big commonality is that the suppliers — big medical and big aero — are selling into heavily regulated markets and have strong incentives to do what they can to bypass the regulations. Sometimes this may just be bypassing pointless bureaucracy. Other times it is bypassing really important bureaucracy, like updating pilot training or the thorough testing of new drugs. It would be strongly in the public interest to have a preemptive purge of the pointless bureaucracy and serious consequences for any individuals who try to bypass what's left.

On a tangent, I know a junior anaesthetist. During the COVID malarkey, his boss gave him the task of converting a paper form, where they made notes about patient responses, rates of delivery of anaesthetics, etc., into a nice sterile computer-based arrangement. He was flailing a bit in this task and asked my advice about computerising. I thought any computer solution was going to be inferior to the flexibility of the jottings he showed me, so I suggested putting the form on a slab of whiteboard and using marker pens. He thought this sounded spot-on, but I gather his boss wanted a new gadget rather than real concern about maintaining a sterile theatre.

Haven't seen 2000 Mules. A bit like the Ukraine situation, I think the US election isn't really my fight. I have read enough about the doco at Jo Nova's to get the drift. Like you, I went straight to the implications of the phone records, but I might be a bit more sceptical about them. I didn't research it, but why would anyone collecting such information make it publicly available?

Australia's compulsory voting is something I've complained about for years, but I have to admit that it's a pretty solid solution to ballot stuffing. Not that it doesn't happen, but there's a lot less leeway for plausible fraud when you know that more than 90% of voters will submit a ballot.

As for your phone tracking you indoors, it's pretty impressive. Presumably there's no GPS reception, so your position is going to be determined by accelerometers and perhaps the gyroscope. Fun bit of programming, but polling those sensors constantly has to be a drain on your battery. Can I recommend the dumb phone...