In an article published 25 years and 2 days ago, Clifford Stoll told us why the Internet had no future.

Stoll:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

2010: Newspapers are dying, Rosetta Stone is the prefered way of learning a language short of being there, and Twitter drove the Iranian government nuts during the protests.  Voters are now demanding legislation be posted online ahead of votes.

Stoll:

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

2010: consider Kindle, Nook, i-Pad, and all the other readers in the pipeline.

Stoll:

the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness…a wasteland of unfiltered data. ..Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”

2010: Search engines are much more sophisticated and deliver links in a much more coherent fashion.

Stoll:

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? …when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

2010: a politician without a web presence is dead.  Look at Obama’s astounding fund-raising results through his website.

Stoll:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. ..These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.

2010: the kids are teaching the teachers.

Stoll:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

2010: Somehow, without salespeople, Amazon’s revenue for Q4 2009 was $9.52 billion.  Hardly anybody uses a travel agent anymore, and there’s Paypal.

These are just highlights.  Some prognosticators are just plain wrong, and some are astoundingly wrong.  Read the entire article here:

Image via Wikipedia

Back in January I posted a piece, Homeopathy = quackery.  Less than a month later, the British House of Commons comes out with a report condemning Homepathy as a fraud.

If it is thought that a placebo is something worth having available (a highly contentious idea) then it should be done honestly. The present practice combines the worst of both worlds. Doctors are not allowed to prescribe an honest placebo, even if they think that is the best they can do for the patient. But they are allowed to prescribe a dishonest placebo by referring the patient to a homeopath.

Those Brits don’t mince words.  The report also recommends that NHS no longer pay for Homeopathic concoctions.

To allow sugar pills to be paid for by the NHS is an absurdity.

I don’t know about you, but I have no doubt that my True/Slant piece spurred  the House of Commons to action.

Okay, maybe not.  But it’s so refreshing to see a government body acting on sound science instead of  fudged results and outright lies.  We need more of that.  Much more.

Okay, not officially.  But I think secretly they’d love to hand him the title.  Does he deserve it?

Well, consider this: During the first year of his tenure as president Americans bought a record 14 million+ guns.

That’s more than 21 of the world’s standing armies – combined.

Shocked?  So was I when one of the members of my Repairman Jack website’s forum started a thread that broke the news.  The site is frequented by liberals, conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, and a mixed group lovingly known as “the gunnies.”

So I wasn’t surprised by the thread itself, but the data it contained was an eye-opener: 14 million guns.  The article compared that to the numbers of the world’s standing armies:

Countries By Number Of Troops: Source Wikipedia

People’s Republic of China	2,255,000
United States	1,473,900
India	1,414,000
North Korea	1,106,000
Russia	1,037,000
Pakistan	619,000
South Korea	687,000
Iran	545,000
Turkey	514,850
Vietnam	484,000
Egypt	450,000
Myanmar	428,250
Indonesia	400,000
Brazil	369,000
Thailand	306,600
Syria	296,000
Republic of China	290,000
Colombia	285,554
Germany	284,500
Iraq	273,618
Sri Lanka	266,700
	13,785,972

The post-election surge in gun sales was big news back in late ‘08 and early ‘09, but I had no idea it had continued through the entire year.  The initial surge was understandable: Democrats have a supermajority, many Democrats hate the 2nd Amendment, so you’d better buy a gun now or you may never have the chance.  Rumors of a $3 tax per round of ammo were in the air.  (Perhaps that explains the reported ammo shortage.)

The number is based on NCIS background checks (check the multi-year chart here), so the number of weapons purchased may be higher due to multiple purchases per check.

And let’s not forget, NCIS logs only legal gun sales.

Does any of this really mean anything?  The chart shows that the number of background checks holds in a steady range of 8.5 to 9 million per year from 1998 through 2005.   Then an 11% jump in ‘06, a 12% jump in 2007, followed by a 13% jump in 2008.  So the 10% increase in ‘09 sales is not terribly dramatic, until you realize that it represents a 56% increase over the number of guns sold in 2005.

We’ve been called a gun-crazy society.  If that’s so, with all these extra guns we must be killing each other off at an alarming rate.  I mean, it’s the logical assumption.  But the facts don’t bear that out.  According to the FBI’s statistics, crime is down across the board.  Again.

They say an armed society is a polite society, but it’s specious logic to attribute the fall in crime to the increase in weapon ownership.  There’s certainly no way, however, that you can say more guns equals more crime.

So why the steady upsurge in gun sales the last 4 years?  Can’t be Obama.  Yes, a case can be made that his election was responsible for the all-time record sales in November and December of ‘08, but  he wasn’t on the radar in 2006 when the uptrend began.

Something else is going on.  I don’t pretend to know what.  Maybe someone can clue me in. For now, consider this a heads up.

The American Psychiatric Association, dat who.  That’s the organization that puts together the Diagnostic and Statistical  Manual of Mental Disorders (known as the DSM). Benedict Carey offers an elegant summary of the DSM’s importance in a piece in today’s Times.

…the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be treated.

The APA is revising the DSM for a new (fifth) edition in 2013, but yesterday they let us have a peek at some of the proposed changes.

The DSM-v will will have new diagnoses and will lump formerly separate diagnoses together.  This is serious business, especially with a new diagnosis.  Because a diagnosis is a label, one that can be used for good or ill.  It can make you eligible for treatment or disability, or it can be a stigma you’ll carry the rest of your life.

On the lighter side, it can be a source of PC speech – we can point out to Rahm Emanuel that it’s not “retarded” but “intellectually disabled” – and it can resonate with the tabloids – diagnostic criteria for the Tiger Woods syndrome:  Satyriasis and nymphomania weren’t listed in the  DSM-iv but the new edition will include “hypersexual disorder” for men and women with “recurrent ‘out of control’ sexual behaviors that are not inherently socially deviant.”  These folks were formerly lumped under Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

But it’s serious business where the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children is concerned.  In discussions with other primary care physicians over the past few years, I’ve realized I’m not alone in my concern that it has become a sort of diagnosis du jour for difficult children.  And if you think, “What’s in a name?” think again.

Bipolar disorder is widely recognized as having a genetic basis that causes derangements in neurotransmitters – whether serotonin, norepinephrine, GABA, a combination, no one is sure – but that is what the treatment targets: the neurotransmitters.  Children with bipolar disorder are treated with anti-psychotics which, to be frank, I, as a primary care doc with just enough knowledge in this field to be dangerous, find scary as hell.

Even scarier is what they might do to a child who fits the diagnostic criteria of bipolar but has something else – a behavioral disorder rather than a neurochemical disorder.

That’s why I’m glad to see a new diagnosis proposed: Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria.

A new DSM is always controversial, as it should be.  In essence it defines who’s normal and who’s not.  Take this one, for example:

DSM-5 Proposed Diagnostic Criteria for Binge Eating Disorder

A. Recurrent episodes of binge eating. An episode of binge eating is characterized by both of the following:

• 1. eating, in a discrete period of time (e.g., within any 2-hour period), an amount of food that is definitely larger than most people would eat in a similar period of time under similar circumstances
• 2. a sense of lack of control over eating during the episode (e.g., a feeling that one cannot stop eating or control what or how much one is eating)

B. The binge-eating episodes are associated with three (or more) of the following:

• 1. eating much more rapidly than normal
• 2. eating until feeling uncomfortably full
• 3. eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry
• 4. eating alone because of being embarrassed by how much one is eating
• 5. feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty after overeating

C. Marked distress regarding binge eating is present.

D. The binge eating occurs, on average, at least once a week for three months.

E. The binge eating is not associated with the recurrent use of inappropriate compensatory behavior (i.e., purging) and does not occur exclusively during the course of bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa.

I’m sure many of us met some of those criteria on Superbowl Sunday.  The interesting thing here is part C – the distress.  You can have A-1 and A-2, B-1, B-2, B-3, D, and E, but without guilt or distress over this sort of behavior, you’re normal!!!

Really?

Apparently this is real, not a product of Photoshop.  Details here.

My answer: No, sir.  I do not.

But 8 years of you and 1 year of your successor have put me in a place I thought I’d never be: missing Bill Clinton.