What is this ad telling me?

I really don't get this one. Quattro technology helps me when I'm driving over birds, clutching a bar of soap, exercising my grip, and preparing to throw a stone at a pedestrian? Or is it some kind of play on "a bird in the hand ...?"

Vorsprung durch Technik, by the way, translates to Projection/lead by technology. A better tag line might be, "Wir benötigen eine neue Anzeigenagentur," or "We need a new ad agency."

Veterinary Homeopathy

Here's a cheerful note from the Feedback section of the October 18th New Scientist. I'm just going to quote it -- you can draw your own conclusions.

AN EMAIL from Andrew Rankine raises concerns about Dr Frank's Pet Pain Spray, a homeopathic treatment for cats and dogs suffering from arthritis. It set us ferreting around, and we soon found a discussion of the spray on James Randi's quack-busting website. Here we came across a notion that hadn't previously occurred to us, despite it being so obvious. Perhaps homeopathic treatments for animals are said to "work" not because the animals report feeling better - how could they? - but because their owners and the homeopaths who treat them report that they are better. It's the placebo effect again, but the effect is vicarious, working on the owners and homeopathic veterinarians, not the animals.

By way of an anecdotal example, a link on the Randi site takes us to a case report on the website of the wonderfully named British Veterinary Voodoo Society. Here "a veterinary surgeon from East Sussex" reports on a client who brought in a dog with a skin problem, but who refused to allow the vet to do the requisite tests. Instead, he announced he was "off to see the local homeopath". A couple of months later he returned with the dog, saying: "I just wanted to let you see what a brilliant job the homeopath did when you were completely useless."

The vet comments: "What could I say? The dog stood there, to my eyes actually slightly worse than it had been on the day I'd last seen it. Frankly, it looked just awful. But in the owner's eyes there had been a massive improvement. I think this is how homoeopathy 'works' in quite a lot of cases. Somebody wants to believe the animal is better, so it is better."

There is, however, a further possibility which is raised by one of the contributors to the Randi discussion. If the owner is happy because they believe a homeopathic treatment has made their dog better, then perhaps their happiness will make the dog feel happier too - and as the vicarious placebo effects bounce back and forth, perhaps all this happiness will assist the dog's recovery from the condition it is being treated for. So perhaps homeopathy for pets can sometimes "work" after all.

Or not. What would "work" would be criminal charges against the owner, in my opinion, same as we do when dietary extremists let their children starve to death.

Disappointing

I was doing my usual thing on airplanes, sitting quietly with my eyes closed, wishing the flight crew would shut up about tampering with the smoke detectors, when a neologism came to me: we have architects (people who design buildings) and starkitects ("...architects whose celebrity and critical acclaim have transformed them into idols of the architecture world and may even have given them some degree of fame amongst the general public." says Wikipedia). How about architects who deliberately design inconvenient or ugly buildings because they're pissed off about something: snarkitects.

Unfortunately, you google it and you get 173 hits already. Missed the boat again. But I'm going to put it on Urban Dictionary, anyway.

A great headline

An otherwise not especially interesting article, but with a great headline. Would have been better if they'd been talking about pharmaceuticals.