I feel the Earth move

England was hit by an earthquake this week... England was mildly shaken by an earthquake this week... Small Earthquake in England, not many tea cups rattled. I asked four of my relatives, who all live about 100km from the epicentre (or Ground Zero, Lincolnshire, as I call it), whether the earth moved for them, and two said they slept through it. The others were shaken, but not stirred.

Having used up all the standard earthquake jokes and cliches in the first paragraph, let me tell you that Lincolnshire has a history of earthquakes. In 1185, the cathedral suffered structural damage, and had to be rebuilt. The rebuilt Cathedral was the tallest building in the world for over 200 years, until the central tower was destroyed in a storm.

Further earthquake news: the Saarland (memories of learning the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles for GCSE history come flooding back) was also hit by an earthquake a few days ago. This earthquake was due to mining subsidence. I think the human race should be given more credit for this kind of thing. Bacteria and plants got there first in changing the composition of the atmosphere, Dinosaurs lived ages, got fossilized and stomped around a lot, but we can cause significant earthquakes by digging out the earth from beneath our feet and waiting for the ground to fall, with only the loss of the odd chimney. I visited a mining museum near Essen last year, and the guide said that the Ruhr area had sunk by 30 metres over the last couple of centuries due to mining subsidence. I think this is a much greater achievement than a high building, and as a monument to human endeavour it is less prone to fires, storms and earthquakes.

Using the rather tenuous connection of Chile to earthquakes, here is the legendary Battle of Santiago from the 1962 world cup.

The game you are about to see is the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football possibly in the history of the game.

Blue Star Oblomow 5 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

The new season has started in Bochum's spare time league. I was going to write some excuses for the scoreline, but in truth the opposition were better. We kept trying, though, despite going 2-0 down early on. I hope that next week will see an improvement, and if not that the opposition aren't very good. On a personal note I beat the full back and skipped down the wing a couple of times, which gave me a good feeling.

Antidepression

I just looked at the guardian online, and saw the headline "Prozac does not work, say scientists". The article had a link to the original paper, which was very helpful, as this says something completely different.

First rule of reading scientific papers: just look at the plots, the rest is usually irrelevant. This plot from the paper shows how much patients improved when they were given either an antidepressive drug or a placebo.



Maybe there are too many dots and curvy lines to see what is happening. After squinting my eyes a bit, I have, using the power of MS Paint, reproduced the main features of this plot.



Note the baseline, which the authors felt was unnecessary. Mistake. First rule of drawing plots: add a baseline. Looking at the plot, and looking at the baseline, I drew the following conclusions:

1/ Taking antidepressive drugs improves, on average, the mood of people with all degrees of depression. Woohoo.

2/ For people with mild depression, the same improvement can be made with a placebo. For these people, it is not the active chemical of the antidepressive that is helping them, but the circumstances of being given and taking a "cure". This could lead to a long debate about the ethics and effectiveness of giving patients a placebo cure.

3/ For people with severe depression, the chemicals of the antidepressive work and improve their mood. Woohoo.

So antidepressive drugs have been shown to improve the mood of people with severe depression above the level achieved by a Placebo. Or, as summarised in the Guardian:

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

This is obviously bullshit, as a second look at those graphs will tell you. More subtle is the mistake made by the authors, who conclude:

The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.

This is confused thinking. Taking any drug gives potentially a medication effect and a placebo effect. If the total improvement caused by taking the drug stays the same, but the placebo effect diminishes, then the response to medication effect must have increased: the drug works.

Maybe there are other, better, options for some people, but antidepressive drugs do on average have a positive effect for people with severe depression.

Links:

This blog discusses the difference between statistical and clinical significance (the funny green area in the plot), so that I don't have to.

Don Jewett is an emeritus Prof. at the University of California and knows how to use his CAPSLOCK. He takes issue with the conclusions of the paper (link added 28. Feb)

The language log get into the graph-drawing spirit. I like their old-skool noughts and crosses marker styles. They also summarise the press coverage.(link added 1. Mar)

Stream of Consciousness

I am unemployed, unattached, living in a bedsit and will turn 30 this year. These are facts, and I'm not particularly unhappy about them. I am trying to decide where to live. I have four choices: Bochum, Erlangen, Leeds or somewhere completely different.

Bochum

Plus: I live here, and have done for one year. I am good friends with some Bochum jugglers. I am the left winger of Torpedo Entenhausen and have developed a good understanding with the left back and the strikers. I know enough budding footballers to get a kick-about twice a week. I live close to a good ice-cream parlour. It only costs 11 Euros to watch a football game.

Minus: Bochum is "no beauty, and grey from work".

Distance to Leeds: I can be in Leeds within about 3 hours and the flights are cheap.

Erlangen

Plus: I used to live in Erlangen, and am friends with the local jugglers, some of whom even read this blog. Erlangen is a rich town with relatively good job chances. I am good friends with my ex-colleagues, who form the majority of people reading this blog. I grounded an Erlangen cricket club, and could try to reform it. There are lots of beer gardens within cycling distance of the town.

Minus: Erlangen is a small town which I might get bored with after a while.

Distance to Leeds: The flight to England takes a couple of hours and there is no direct flight from Nuremberg to Leeds. Awkward.

Leeds

Plus: Leeds is in England. My parents and sister live not far away. I would be able to write, speak and read the language perfectly, and never have to see another kezboard. I could race my dad up hills and find a cricket club. I could make my mum cook Sunday lunch, or even lend a hand. If I ever get bored I can call myself Klaus-Peter and pretend to be a German exchange student.

Minus: I know only four people there. The football club is owned by Ken Bates.

Distance to Leeds: N/A.

Somewhere Completely Different

Plus: Maybe I'll find something I never new I was missing.

Minus: I know nobody and would find it hard to get going, like I did in Bochum. I think I can rule this out.

Distance to Leeds: Upper limit - Leeds is to be found at -1.5 deg longitude, +53.8 latitude. The other side of the world is somewhere below New Zealand. The nearest landfall would be the bottom of New Zealand, and nearly 100,000 Furlongs away. Lower limit - Negligable compared to upper limit.

New Mission Statement

I am no longer an electrical engineer, and must therefore give up my search. Being an electrical engineer didn't do much for me in any regard. For the record, during the past year the following stood at the top of my blog.

The diary of a soul searching for the answer to the question: do electrical engineers have better sex lives than physicists?

The Perfect Crime

Bochum is just on the edge of the german Carnival scene, which is centred around the Rhine cities of Cologne, Dusseldorf and Mainz, where thousands don their fancy dress and get very drunk. I stayed away from the main events, but juggled at a small Carnival party in Bochum on Saturday; a video may appear soon. The payment was free beer and food, which was quite a good deal.

In Duisburg the perfect crime may have been committed, as reported in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

A 25-year-old was robbed at gunpoint by two men at the Central Station on Sunday at around 17:30. One robber was dressed as a clown, the other as the Pink Panther. According to the police, they relieved the man of his money. The robbers fled in the direction of Friedrich-Wilhelm Street.

The first robber was described as being 1.85m tall, 25-years-old, with a black goatee beard, a dark complexion, a red clown's wig, a red clown's nose and a white costume with blue and red polka dots. The second robber was described as being 1.80m tall, 25 years old, with short blond hair, square black-framed glasses and dressed in a Pink Panther costume. Any information should be given to the local police.

Reports that the culprits were last seen being pursued through the streets of Duisburg by Batman and Robin remain unconfirmed.

20 Million Cubic Litres

I just sat in a cafe and read the European edition of the guardian, which sadly doesn't have Ben Goldacre's column in it. This week he makes fun of bad usage of numbers and statistics in newspapers. The European edition does, however, have a report on sending music to the stars, with the following excerpt:

Nasa will encrypt the song and beam it into space from its Madrid transmitter on Monday at the start of a 2.5 quadrillion-mile trip (that's 23 zeros for anyone without a large capacity calculator) to Polaris, where it will finally arrive in the year 2439.

The single most useful thing I learned studying physics is that there are almost exactly pi*10^7 seconds in a year. I also learned that the speed of light is almost exactly 3*10^8 m/s. So if you multiply the speed of light with the time of 400 years, there is no way that you're going to get a power of 10 to the 23.

I never learnt what a quadrillion is, as any attemped use usually ends in confusion between the British and American systems, but all these things that end in 'illion' are powers of three. 23 is a prime number, and obviously not a multiple of 3. I worked all of this out in the cafe, but things are a lot easier with a google calculator, which kicks ass, and has room for lots more zeros than needed astronomically.

((2 439 years) - (2 008 years)) * c = 2.53363342 × 10^15 miles

(Rounding to an appropriate level of significance is left as an exercise for the reader)

If all this sounds too mathematical, you can just look up Polaris in Wikipedia, and find out that it is 431 light years from the earth. This means that light will take 431 years to get there, and will arrive in 2439. No miles, no powers of tens to the fifteen, not so much fun.