I think he likes it

The baby slept in his recycled cot for the first time last night. He woke at 1am and 5am, and he was asleep again when I left at 6.30 this morning. I think he likes it.



Maybe this picture will put Abbey's mind at rest on the cot/cat issue. Incidentally, I don't understand the white meat thing.

I set the rat trap but there was no rat in it this morning. There were a few slugs. Apparently slugs like peanut butter. We have squillions of slugs in our garden.

Currently the British police are operating an amnesty on knives. According to the BBC website, we can all go along to the police station and hand in our knives "without fear of penalty". Penalty for what exactly? Since when has it been illegal to own a knife? If I take my meat cleaver from the kitchen to the police station after the amnesty ends on June 30th, what penalty am I going to face exactly? The BBC goes on however to say, "police have warned that once the amnesty is over, tough action will be taken on those found armed with knives". So, from this I assume that people found armed with knives before the amnesty ends, will face no action. I think the British police only recruit people of below average intelligence.

I didn't get around to mentioning yesterday about yet another attack on homeopathy, this time from 13 top Britsh doctors led by Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College London. The attack took the form of a letter sent to hundreds of primary and acute care trusts, urging the NHS to stop funding quack practices like homeopathy. Unusually the BBC actually printed a quite balanced report with comment from both pro and anti camps. Michael Baum is quoted as saying, "We need clinical trials to demonstrate that these placebo therapies actually enhance quality of life". Seems reasonable to me. Dr Peter Fisher, Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, is quoted as saying, "I don't know the mechanism of action of homeopathy, nobody does. But there is scientific evidence to support it". So, you don't know how it works, but you're sure it does - very scientific.

I was amused by Fisher's comment that "that the eight trials [that clearly showed homeopathy doesn't work] were very carefully selected. If you had selected seven or nine, you would have got a quite different result". In other words he is saying that the statistics were skewed. He goes on to say, "There is a considerable body of positive evidence that homeopathy works. Most of the meta-analyses - the pooling of statistical results - have been positive". In other words, if you select the right trials you can show positive results. He's using the same argument for and against!

Listen people, I know that not everyone agrees with me, but this is a no brainer, if homeopathy works it should be really easy to show. There should be no argument. You set up a robust, double-blind trial, with a blind control group, and gather the data. You really only have to do it a couple of times. Every time a robust trial takes place however, it shows nothing. So why are we still investigating? This attack came just before Prince Charles was due to make a speech about the benefits of complimentary medicine and is being seen as a personal dig. The speech apparently went ahead however, with Charles simply ignoring the fact that qualified people were subtly telling him he was talking rubbish.