Roger Hyam

This page on the NHS England website claims that eating fish oils (long chain Omega-3 I assume rather than any Omega-3) help prevent depression. It says:

Omega-3 fatty acid

Research has shown a link between the amount of a fish people in different countries eat and the level of depression. In Japan, where people eat on average 70kg (150lbs) of fish a year, the rate of depression is 0.12%. Whereas in New Zealand, where people eat only 18kg (40lbs) of fish a year, the rate of depression is almost 50 times higher.

It is though that a chemical found in fish – omega-3 fatty acid – may help your brain work more efficiently, so serotonin (which can boost your mood) has more of an effect on you.

Fish that contains a lot of omega-3 fatty acid includes salmon, sardines and mackerel. Vegetarian alternatives include walnuts and tofu, and omega-3 food supplements are also available over the counter (OTC) from health shops.

I don’t think this would get through on Wikipedia. “Research has shown” are weasel words if you don’t say who’s research and where. This is a shame because on the same site is a well balanced report on a reasonable study of whether a mediterranean diet prevents depression. The contradiction between these articles is interesting.

To show how ridiculous the fish oil claim – that people in Japan are less depressed because they eat more fish –  real is consider the graph below (taken from the EqualityTrust.org.uk site – a great site go and donate now).

Income Inequality vs Mental Health from Equality Trust

It shows that there is a correlation between mental health and inequality and that New Zealand is a ‘worse’ place than Japan for mental health ‘because’ NZ is a more unequal society. Is there are causal link between fish consumption and income inequality I wonder?

Given the choice between depression being caused by a chemical imbalance and  depression being caused by a more complex set of social (even ethical or religious) conditions it is easy to see which the market would prefer to respond to. Eat more fish! Take these supplements!

I have a load of material on the fish oil ‘conspiracy’ that I’ll have to find time to post. In the mean time if anyone has actual scientific research showing that eating fish makes people happy (other than just because they like the taste) I’d love to see it.

It is customary for scientists to cite the author of a scientific name whenever that name is used. Indeed it is considered grossly amateurish in some circles to omit such details. This causes problems because, although there are standards for abbreviation of author names (notably Brummitt in botany), these are not always followed and often embellished. This means that the entire string of name characters is never guaranteed to be unique. To a machine every variation of authority string would results in a new combination of characters and implies the existence of a new taxon

What if we just stopped using author strings (other than in monographs) and ignore them when other people use them? Read more…

Almost Free Scanner

In the last weekend of the Christmas break I was sat in Starbucks in Waterstones in Edinburgh considering which of a stack of potential books I was going to spend my Christmas book tokens on. I had just been playing with a Sony eBook reader and so was thinking maybe I should take the plunge and go digital with books as well as the rest of my life.

I wondered what I would do with my existing books. It would be nice to be able search through these and have them all with me when I travel. There would be issues with copyright if I were to copy them but there would also be technical problems. How would I get them in EPUB or PDF format? I did some Googling and came across a great site diybookscanner.org. There are some really innovative designs on this site and it got my obsessive thoughts going. There were two problems.

• I only had 48 hours to play before going back to work and my wife and kids wanted some of that time.
• I didn’t have a workshop. Just a desk and some simple tools.

Could I produce a scanner in that time? Would it work? Read more…

Just doing some SQL against the Catalogue of Life ‘09 database and came up with some figures unrelated to what I set out to do. I can’t decide if they are useful or not so they are going here.

I wondered what the mean/median genus size is but got distracted into wondering “Given any one species what does knowing the genus tell me about that species?”. I figured that we (being human) have rough classes of sizes of groups of thing. Firstly there are the unique things – monotypic genera. Then there are the small groups of things that fit in our working memory (7+/- 2). Then there are groups of things that are large but memorable like the size of a class of school children (in the UK) up to about 30. A typical teacher can probably list them and a taxonomist who was monographing such a group could probably list the species. Over 30 I figure we have the kind-of-things category where we just give up and may know set individuals but are more likely to think of set characteristics. This size includes anything over 30 right up to the super genera with thousands of species.

What does this mean in practice? I don’t know. Maybe something will come to you.

Amazon are selling an ebook of Siddhartha by Herman Hess for the Kindle for $3.51 and it appears in different versions for even more. Siddhartha is out of copyright so it costs them nothing for the rights on this book. The $3.51 is all for them.

Does this mean that $3.51 is the cost of distributing an eBook through the Amazon system? That would imply that the publisher (nee the author) would get the value of any ebook that retailed for over this sum. With Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (which retails for $9.58 on Kindle) for example the authors would get $6.07? Somehow I doubt it!

That price tag of $9.58 doesn’t compare very well with $10.19 for the paperback version of Pirsig’s book.  The Kindle version can be yours in 60 seconds or less but it is controlled by Digital Rights Management (DRM) so really all you are buying is the right to have a permanent relationship with Amazon who will supply you with a copy to read on an authorised device. For 61c more you could have one made out of real paper that you could hand on to a friend or loved one, sell, donate to charity or even burn to keep warm. Sure it won’t last forever but it still has a residual value. My paper copy is yellowing but perfectly readable. It was printed in 1978 (that is 32 years ago!). It has a price tag of £1 and I bought it from a second hand shop for £1.50 ($2 ish) about 10 years ago. Read more…