Author Archives: Tom Bell

Dentists: a follow up

Posted on by
2

My post on dentists generated a fair bit of interest, and some heated arguments with dentist friends on Facebook.

The defence was predictable: dental disease is common and routine check-ups help to catch and fix problems early, preventing worse problems later. But that completely misses the point of my argument. I accept that routine check-ups have a benefit. The issue is that routine check-ups for other body parts and conditions would have a benefit too, so why do we prioritise dentists as the only specialism which gets to do them? An annual colonoscopy wouldn’t be much more uncomfortable than the average appointment with a dental hygienist, and it would help to prevent some of the 15,000+ deaths from bowel cancer in the UK each year. Even an annual nurse-administered physical inspection for testicular or breast cancer would be quicker, easier, cheaper and more effective at saving lives than having a fully qualified dentist on £100,000+pa count your teeth once a year.

On a related note, Corsodyl’s current advertising campaign shows a woman bleeding from her eye, with the strap line, “you wouldn’t ignore this” – implying that we shouldn’t ignore bleeding from our mouth when we clean our teeth (and we should use Corsodyl mouthwash to solve whatever problem is causing the bleeding). But Corsodyl is wrong. We probably would ignore bleeding from our eyes, if we were all socially conditioned to scrub our eyes with an abrasive tool twice a day.

Useless product innovations #1

Posted on by
1

And now for a new regular feature of the blog: Useless Product Innovations.

Water filter jugs are a pretty straightforward product. You pour water into the chamber at the top of the jug, it trickles down through the replaceable filter cartridge, and the filtered water sits in the bottom part of the jug, ready to pour. It’s not the most essential item, but it has a clear and simple purpose, and provides some value: if you’re in a hard water area, it does make tap water taste less minging, and reduces limescale in other appliances like kettles and irons.

Continue reading →

I don’t believe in dentists

Posted on by
1

Of course, I’m not saying I don’t believe dentists exist. I’ve experienced enough sensory data to be pretty sure they do.

Nor am I saying that I don’t believe we need dentists. Obviously, dental problems happen and we need specialist tooth doctors to deal with them.

What I don’t believe in is the paradigm which holds dentistry to be of such preeminent importance. The paradigm that says we need quite so many dentists. That says dentists should operate independently of the rest of the medical system. That says they should provide their own first line inspection function. That says we need routine dental check-ups whether or not we have any reason to believe we have a dental problem.

Continue reading →

New Year’s resolutions 2014: mid-period review

Posted on by
Reply

I announced four New Year’s resolutions for 2014 on this blog at the start of the year. Now we’ve reached the halfway point of the year, I thought I’d review how they’re going.

Continue reading →

Stereoscopic photographs of India

Posted on by
Reply

When I was in India last year, I did a bit of experimenting with stereoscopy.

Stereoscopy is a technique for creating 3D images. By taking one photograph of a subject, then moving position very slightly to the left or right, and taking a second photograph of the same subject, you end up with a stereoscopic pair of pictures. This pair replicates the two slightly horizontally displaced versions of the world seen by each of your eyes. All you need to do then is place the two photographs side by side, and cross your eyes so that one eye is looking at one image, and the other eye is looking at the other one. Your brain then combines and interprets the two images in the way it normally does, to reproduce a 3D perception of the subject.

I used to play about with this technique when I was younger, and visiting some of the forts and ruins of India, I realised they might be particularly good for stereoscopy. I’ve just got around to editing the photos into pairs, so here they are.

Continue reading →

Rachel Reeves and the end of policy

Posted on by
1

In the 1960s, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell declared the ‘end of ideology’. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been a time of big, competing ideas about how to organise human society, but these were exhausted; centrist free-market democracy had won.

The concept took a few decades to come to fruition. The world was still divided by the Cold War, a real and dangerous instantiation of competing ideologies. Even within UK politics, ideology was still alive in the 1980s, when Thatcherite free-market economics faced off against a diverse but identifiable left wing, comprising a mixture of militant Trotskyists, restless unions and mainstream social democrats.

In the 1990s, Bell’s prediction was proven correct by global events, with the USSR swept away and replaced by free market democracy. It was further vindicated within British politics later in the decade, with Tony Blair’s reform of the Labour party. By dropping Clause IV from the party’s constitution, its commitment to an ideology of nationalisation was removed, and the party was rebranded as ‘New Labour’, a centrist free-market party occupying roughly the same political territory as moderate Conservatives.

Continue reading →

Ficks Cocktail Fortifier

Posted on by
1

An Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has raised over $40,000 for a bunch of charlatans to make what they call a ‘cocktail fortifier’: a tonic containing a handful of herbs and vitamins, which they strongly imply (although carefully avoid stating explicitly) will prevent hangovers if added to alcoholic drinks.

The product is called Ficks Cocktail Fortifier, comes in three flavours (ginger, lime and lemon) and costs $15 (about £9) for an 8 oz (240 ml) bottle. That’s almost £38 per litre, significantly more expensive than alcoholic spirits (Bombay Sapphire gin is about £25 per litre), and that’s for a non-alcoholic product, basically a mixture of ginger and vitamin B, which is probably less nutritious than a fruit smoothie and a multivitamin tablet (Tesco Red Berries smoothie, £1.20 per litre).

Continue reading →

Death for apostasy

Posted on by
Reply

It was reported yesterday that a woman in Sudan has been sentenced to death for the crime of apostasy – leaving the Muslim faith – after she married a Christian man.

It’s appalling and obscene, but unfortunately not very shocking. Sharia is absolutely clear on death as the punishment for apostasy, and surveys show worryingly high percentages of Muslims living in the UK – not ‘extremists’ but the supposedly moderate bulk of believers – agree with it.

Continue reading →

The revolution is coming

Posted on by
3

There was a bit of a buzz about six months ago around Russell Brand and his political views. A lot of the attention centred around his interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, although a clearer statement of his ideas was to be found in his article for the New Statesman.

At the time, I found the rants well-written, well-expressed, interesting and entertaining. I was glad that someone was making these arguments in mainstream media: there is such an ideological vacuum in current politics that having a genuinely passionate, radical speaker, in a primetime slot, was quite refreshing, even if it was Russell Brand.

It’s difficult to disagree with his criticism of the current, broken system, of the apathetic failure of politicians to make real changes, of their protection of corporate interests over the rights and welfare of most people. But I was more sceptical about his closing statements:

“There’s going to be a revolution. It’s totally going to happen. I ain’t got a flicker of doubt.”

Continue reading →

Board games for life skills: the bad and the good

Posted on by
Reply

The following letter appeared in The Times on Saturday.

“Sir, I am saddened to hear a leading educationalist encourage computer games as a form of learning (“Angry Birds teaches pupils life skills, says schools chief”, May 6). I agree with everything Angela McFarlane says about games, but the same is true of Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo and Monopoly – with the advantage that the life skills are not a superficial coating on an aggressive, conflict-led platform and the interaction is social and face to face.

“Nor is there a marketing strategy to get our children addicted by rewarding them with a dopamine fix every six seconds (usually when they destroy something). This erodes their attention span and their ability to persevere and to learn the value of delayed gratification. Professor McFarlane says she became hooked, ironically, on a game called Lemmings. This is what marketers employ psychologists to do – to get our children hooked. I do not want our 6-year-old to be encouraged to use computer games to develop his life skills.

“Violence and death are trivialised in so many games and we may well ask whether acquiring superficial life skills justifies anaesthetising our children to death.

“I would encourage your readers to sit down with their teenage offspring and watch Beeban Kidron’s film In Real Life to get a more balanced view of the insidious nature of these seemingly innocent “games”.

“CAROLINE SILVER
London SW6″

While I don’t necessarily disagree with Caroline Silver’s cynicism about the addictive design mechanisms of computer games, and her scepticism about their educational value, and I enthusiastically second her championing of board games as an alternative, I do find it surprising that she chose to recommend Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo and Monopoly as her examples. As a self-admitted board game nerd, this suggests to me that Ms Silver doesn’t know much about board games.

Continue reading →