Category: Life

I don’t quite remember how the conversation started, but I was talking to a coworker about the changes we had made in our lives to make it better. I told him about how I got rid of my dependence on a watch and how I hadn’t ever regretted the decision.

“Try waking up without an alarm,” he said. “You’ll feel so much more refreshed.”

So I did. I’ve been going to bed at a reasonable hour, and waking up every morning at around six or so to get ready for work. All without the annoying buzz of the alarm to jolt me up from the sleep.

My coworker was absolutely right. I don’t wake up feeling groggy and tired like I used to. I suspect the key in all of this is that I go to bed earlier, which means I sleep more overall. With an alarm, you can stay up later knowing that you’ll wake up on time regardless. When that option goes away, earlier bed times become essential.

I’ve also been going to work earlier, catching the 6:40am bus. This means that should I wake up “late”, I’ll still show up on time. There’s no stress; I get there when I get there.

I’ve been doing this for a few months now and I don’t regret it one bit. If I have a late night, then of course I’ll set the alarm, but I try to avoid it as much as possible.

You might be wondering why I’m churning out book reviews with such great frequency. It’s because I’m fully aware that my return to school will kill my love of reading, so I’m trying to get as much of it done now.

Trick or Treatment is a book by renowned science journalist Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter. The pair joined forces to release a book that evaluates popular alternative medicine approaches on the basis of whether they work.

Under the microscope are acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, and herbal medicine. The authors also look into, but devote fewer pages to, such treatments as osteopathy and crystal healing.

The book sparked a lawsuit against Singh by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), which was widely perceived as an attempt to silence criticisms of their work. Singh had taken issue with the fact that the Association “claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence.” The BCA withdrew their action after Singh won an appeal, but not before costing the author thousands in legal fees.

The book itself is a mixed bag. I feel like a third of its 300+ pages could have been tossed without losing content. The history, studies, and criticisms of the treatments are good. I found it informative, for instance, to learn that homeopathic remedies dilute the ingredients claimed responsible for the healing to the point where the most potent cures have a 1 in a billion billion chances of even having a single molecule of it. I also enjoyed finding out about how the placebo effect was discovered and how it is accounted for in medical trials.

The authors show that not all alternative medicines are bogus. Some herbal medicines do have legitimate uses, and it is from such medicines that Aspirin and modern anti-malarial treatments were initially derived. St John’s wort does have demonstrable impact in treating depression. However, the authors note it’s really about cost-benefit. Modern drugs will condense the active ingredients while reducing the side-effects that may accompany these herbal treatments.

Furthermore, the authors also state that if evidence is found in support of such treatments, then it is no longer considered “alternative.” The term is relegated to unfounded claims rejected by evidence.

The book is worth a read. It won’t change the minds of those who view anecdotal evidence of one as superior to anecdotal evidence of hundreds in a controlled environment, despite the best efforts of the authors. But for those of us who adhere to a willingness to test claims in the most objective manner possible to see if they hold water, it’s an informative text.

It’s interesting to note that my latest project, the book Diets Suck, was completed without spending a single cent. I accomplished this by using open-source software, liberally licensed fonts, and royalty-free imagery. To contribute back into this commons, I am releasing my own work under an open copyright license which allows people to do what they wish as long as they don’t sell it.

The book itself was written using LibreOffice, the open-source equivalent to Microsoft Office. Setting up the book’s formatting with it was a breeze, including making sure that the margins were different depending whether it was a left or right page (you want the content to be further away from the spine) and automatically updating the page references found throughout the text.

For the text inside the book, I used the Liberation Fonts released by Red Hat, the company best known for its enterprise Linux distribution. Contrary to mainstream thought, having a font installed on your computer does not give you carte blanche on its use. That Times New Roman font that comes with Windows isn’t free – Microsoft obtained proper licensing for it from Monotype Imaging Holdings. As for the book’s cover, I made use of two additional fonts: Bebas Neue and Vegur.

Keeping with the theme of the cover, it was made using the open-source GIMP. It’s closest analogue familiar to most readers would be Adobe’s Photoshop.

The image of the doughnut used on the cover came from a royalty-free stock photography website, stock.xchng.

GIMP wasn’t the only tool I used to create imagery. I also used the excellent Inkscape. Whereas GIMP specializes in raster graphics, Inkscape does vector graphics – it’s brother in the proprietary world would be Adobe’s Illustrator. Vector graphic formats are more appropriate when creating images involving simple shapes.

Finally, the book’s electronic edition was completed using a combination of Sigil and Calibre. Sigil to format the text in the ePUB format of electronic books, and Calibre to put the finishing touches such as embedding the cover.

The advent of print-on-demand services such as Lulu meant that publishing paperback copies didn’t cost me either. Even a few years ago, publishing meant a significant investiture, with the printers requiring that I order batches of hundreds of books at a time.

These days I just upload PDFs of the book interior and cover to my account with Lulu, and they do the rest. People can just go to the Diets Suck website, click on a link, and end up on a page hat lets them purchase a single copy. Within days, Lulu will manufacture that book and ship it off to the customer. Best of all, the price for these one-offs is comparable to that of other titles found in bookstores.

This brings me to the last piece in the development of this book, its website. I used Geany as the code editor, and the aforementioned GIMP and Inkscape to create the graphics. I used the W3C Markup Validation Service to make sure the code checked out.

I’m very grateful to the culture of sharing that flourishes online. It is thanks to people who devote their time to making open-source software, who create fonts for others to use, who take pictures and share them, that I was able to create this work.

I just finished reading Paul Fussell’s The Boy’s Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945. Paul Fussell was an American who served in WW2 before coming back and becoming an author and university professor. He passed away last month. I was first exposed to his writings through the article The Real War that appeared in The Atlantic.

Crusades breaks from the convention set by other history books, whereby events are explained on a macroscopic level and the participants reduced to movements and statistics. This title instead looks at specific chapters of the Second World War from the perspective the infantrymen who experienced its consequences first hand. As Fussell notes, romanticism and such notions as that of a “good war” quickly break down when it is seen for oneself.

Fussell’s work brings balance to the clean black-and-white characterizations of WW2 demonstrated in Hollywood films. He talks of the Allied bombing of villages as a diversion, bombers knocking out entire divisions of their own ground forces, platoon leaders who sent the newest replacements ahead so they could die instead of their longer-serving comrades, intestines littering trees like Christmas decorations, etc. It would be a disservice to characterize the knowledge of these darker chapters as being anti-American or whatnot. These aren’t fictitious happenings, they are a real component of war. Bias does not emanate from learning more, but of ignoring that knowledge when it presents itself.

We filter, to this day, reports from war zones. So complete is our censorship that it distorts our perceptions of war itself, a fact not lost on John Steinbeck when he wrote of his reporting days “I don’t mean that the correspondents were liars. . . . It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.” When the negative aspects do filter through, they are mistaken for an aberration. It is this kind of one-sidedness that allows for the young to seek out war to prove themselves, and the old to be so willing to grant them that wish.

This is a short book, and it made me want to read another of Fussell’s work, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War.

I’ve just finished making the digital edition of Diets Suck.

It’s released in the ePUB format, which is an open standard that works on virtually every eBook reader out there, with the notable exception of Amazon’s Kindle. I can only assume that there was some strategic motivations for the omission from the popular eReader.

It took me about a week or so to put the book’s digital edition together using the excellent open-source Sigil and Calibre. The most time consuming part was redoing the formatting from scratch. While I could copy and paste text, all the special little things like how the paragraphs set on a page, how the tables look, how the images fit – all had to be defined anew. Fortunately, ePUB is essentially a zipped up website, so it wasn’t all that hard for me to get things to look the way I wanted. I’ve included some screenshots of what the editing process looked like below.

There were a few quirks I couldn’t get around. Centering tables, for instance. On some devices, the tables were centered. On others such as my last-generation Sony eReader, they were aligned to the left-hand side of the page. Searching online revealed that this was a sore point with many of these readers.

I’ve updated the website as to include links to both the paperback and digital versions. I’ve set the price point to $3.99. The paperback copy, by comparison, is sold for $9.99.