I Am Calling You From Windows

I've been sort of waiting for a call like I received yesterday. I've heard about them, and even know a few people who've been taken in by them, but until now I've never experienced them myself. And whilst I would have loved the opportunity to bait the caller a little, I was supposed to be working from home and couldn't give them as much time as I would've liked.

The call was from a woman with an Indian (Asian?) accent telling me that she was calling from Windows about a lot of 'Critical Errors' they were seeing on their server from my computer. Right away it's clearly a scam - an unknown company is seeing errors on my computer how? And which computer? On my network there could be up to 20 devices connected at any time, about 6 of these are what would be commonly referred to as 'computers'. So despite the huge temptation, I only asked them which windows they were talking about, double- or single- glazed and then proceeded to inform them that they couldn't be seeing any windows errors as my computer didn't use Windows.

The modus operandi of these scammers, is to get you to fire up the Windows Event Log viewer (where there will be a number of errors, but mostly normal under every day running of a Windows PC), prove to you that you can't delete this error (hmm, it's a log file) and then inform you that they are caused by un-deletable viruses which only they can remove. They'll use a remote-control service such as TeamViewer and get you to give them control of your PC. And, of course, they're not doing this for free.

Will We Ever Learn?

This kind of sums it up for me.  It's both beautiful and horrific at the same time, but most definitely worth a read. Here is just a taster...

I know what it is like to lose someone you love, and it's a pain so great that I can't imagine reaching out to cause that pain in anyone else; what killers must do is blind themselves to the enormity of their act and wall themselves off from the empathy that all human beings should have. They also must bury that portion of their mind that can sympathize with their victims in an avalanche of pretexts, these excuses that later apologists will call "nuance", or "shades of gray", or "complications". And they will dredge up the familiar roll call of empty ghosts to water down the evil of what is done. They will call it God. Country. Honor. Justice. Revenge. The priests and the mullahs and the politicians and the generals are experts at softening the contrast and blurring the edges and persuading one person that that other person over there, so much like you in every way that matters, deserves to have everything important extinguished and brutalized and disregarded.

Embarrassed to be British.

Right, first up, I think that any burning of books is wrong, regardless of what the book is (books are a carbon sink and should be buried, not burned :) ). It's also not a crime in the UK to burn books, so I don't really understand why these guys have been arrested. It's especially confusing as "They were arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred and released on bail pending further inquiries." Islam is not a race, it's a religion and this is an important distinction - with one you have a choice, the other you don't. They burnt a book. Their own book, on their own property. They did nothing wrong.

Quack Medicine

On my cycle journey into work I pass a business offering complimentary therapies. Yesterday morning they had some new posters in their windows offering courses in 'Beginning Homeopathy'. Now, whilst I accept that some of these 'therapies' may compliment traditional medicine and I can't help but remain sceptical. Especially about therapies which market themselves as alternatives to traditional medicine. A homeopathic 'remedy' is a perfect example of a placebo – a perfectly harmless, ineffective, neutral substance (water) being marketed as a medicine and charged for accordingly. If you take such a 'medicine,' you can do so with virtual certainty that the substance is safe. You can do so because it is nothing but plain water or maybe water with a little alcohol or food colouring. Such remedies are so diluted that there is no chance of there being a single molecule of the active ingredient whatsoever (whatever it’s supposed to be) being present. I did a little research into how these so-called 'remedies' are prepared. Read what I found here.

If the original substance is soluble, one part is diluted with either nine or 99 parts of distilled water and/or alcohol and shaken vigorously (succussed); if insoluble, it is finely ground and pulverized in similar proportions with powdered lactose (milk sugar). One part of the diluted medicine is them further diluted, and the process is repeated until the desired concentration is reached. Dilutions of 1 to 10 are designated by the Roman numeral X (X = 1/10, 3X = 1/1000, 6X = 1/1,000,000). Similarly, dilutions of 1 to 100 are designated by the Roman numeral C (1C - 1/100, 3C = 1/1,000,000, and so on.) Most remedies today range from 6X to 30X, but products of 30C or more are marketed.

He goes on to say...

A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. Assuming that a cubic centimeter of water contains 15 drops, this number is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the Earth.

Got that? A 30X dilution requires a sphere of water 50 times the size of the earth to contain a single molecule of the active ingredient. So, when you buy your 10-20ml vial of homeopathic 'remedy', it has to be pure water (plus whatever colouring and flavouring they've added). Higher dilutions are even more ridiculous. But according to homeopathy’s founder Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), the more diluted a solution is, the more powerful and therefore more effective it is. This is homeopathy’s 'law of infinitesimals.' It’s an idea that goes against everything we know about chemistry and physics. To believe it is to believe in alchemy and magic.

Robert L. Park, PhD, a prominent physicist who is executive director of The American Physical Society, has noted that since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth. In fact, such a container would be 30,000 times larger than the Sun–which is already a million times larger than the Earth.

Money for old rope?