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They make an expensive and ineffective alternative to brake cabling.

Washing line?

Try to work out mine and I buy you a pint

Skryczak?

Oops. Joke fail. :(

Seaman Mould.

.... wait, wait:

Sam Danom?

I've worked out one person's surname so far. :)

Agreed. It's the word "slurry".

On the other hand, Axel Rose changed his name to be an anagram of "oral sex", and mine has all his words and two more.

repost?

YouTube- A good solid safety rope is essential

Ha!

But pretty sure I saw that on You've Been Framed circa 1995.

"an oral sex bitch"

I'm not lying.

I win.

That looks fucking terrifying.

did he actually write anything else?

Yep, mainly short stories though. Apparently he wrote quite a bit in his self-imposed exile but didn't publish any of it.

For Esme - with Love and Squalor is a great collection of stories.

With a chain tensioner...hmmm.

I can only see it in the last (folded up) photo in the series. Could you have a tensioner that only stuck out to take up the slack when the bike was folded?

But yeah. Hmm.

If you read the comments on one of the other photos, the builder mentions that the frame is an alu copy. So it might be possible to convert that frame, but not a genuine Brompton (not familiar with them myself, so can't say for sure...)

Do you think that a simple bike can altough handle with track drop outs ?

Either I'm more hungover than I thought or colourless green ideas sleep furiously?

According to 21 Grams, you want to avoid tattoos on your neck.

Cheers, but I don't live in London (or the UK). At the moment it's on the roof with the cork in it again, soaking in ammonia. I just like to come on here and vent...

Got a stuck seatpost to look forward to when I get back to Blighty.

Banging the half undone bolt with the mallet worked for me.

This only works if it's the expander wedge/bolt that's stuck, not the whole stem. With an alu stem in steel forks, it's the same deal as alu seatpost in a steel frame.

Admitting defeat had started to bug me. So I've been trying get the stem out - without destroying it - for the last couple of days.

No joy as yet. :(

Where is the next Guy Fawkes when he's needed?

He's a fat, self-important, homophobic Tory wanker with an interesting past.

Does that answer your question?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r5d2Ccpo3I

The thing thast gets lost in the debate is that the purpose of medicine is to 'make people well' and it should always be 'treatment x makes people more well than treatment y'. Whether the cure fits in with our understanding of science is irrelevant.

No, your understanding of science is irrelevant.

Seeds this thread gave me a chuckle, but you know it has indirectly outed you as a bit of a geek.

Lycans indeed.

Shit...

Can I get a d20 saving throw to protect my credibility?

Not necessarily fundamental dishonesty.

It would depend on what sort of conditions you are treating and how you present things to a patient. For instance, anything routinely degenerative, critical or life threatening then placebo treatment probably isn't the way to go. On the other hand other illnesses or conditions may be suitable for initial treatment through placebos.

Bear in mind a doctor will almost never tell a patient "I am going to give you this medication and you are going to get better". If a doctor says something typical like "We'll try you on this medication and see how that goes" then there isn't a lie. They haven't made any claims about the constitution of the medication or how it is expected to work. Like any medication, if it doen't have the desired effect, alternatives will be sought.

Naturally problems might arise if the patient demonstrated an interest in the science of the medication and as said, you couldn't treat every condition with it.

You would have to consider the illness, it's pathology, responsiveness to placebo treatment, etc but the potential exists.

I'm completely sympathetic to your position on this, but I think the problem is informed consent. If you don't tell the patient relevant information about what you're giving them and why (for instance... "this medicine has no active ingredient, I'm giving it to trick you, but in a nice way") then you're not putting them in a position to make an informed decision about their treatment. I think a lot of people would be angry if they discovered that they had been taking sugar pills, outside of a clinical trial. And I think it would undermine people's trust in doctors if they were believed to be regularly handing out placebos.

Also, it's worth noticing that many CAM practitioners do tell their patients "I am going to give you this medication and you are going to get better", or similar. It's a highly paternalistic culture of "I am the healer, I'm an expert in these complicated mystical matters but unfortunately I can't satisfactorily explain it to you because it would be too difficult with our current state of understanding. However I can confidently tell you that it probably has something to do with Quantum Physics or Eastern religion and incidentally I can sell you a book that explains that in fact they are both the same and Taoism understood it all 1000 years before Einstein did, so long as you are prepared to willfully misread both Taoism and Quantum Physics."

This is probably the least appropriate forum to ask this, but there is enough people here for someone to know something...

I was wondering if anybody here knows much about lycanthropy?

Have you been treated sucessfully for it or do you have some relevant hunting expertise?

I am rather intrigued by how it works. I know very little about it, except that involves changing into a ravenous monster on the night of the full moon, and that it cannot be cured by conventional bullets, even to the heart.

But I know that it was the basis of legal trials in 16th century France. And it DOES happen in real life. Beyond being a laughable piece of folklore. There are lots of good stories about vampires, zombies and Egyptian mummies throughout the world, but werewolves are fucking hard and could hand out a beating to pretty much any other monster, except perhaps a dragon.

So does anyone have an idea of how it works? Is there some secret magic going on in the bite, or do you have to wear a magical wolf pelt?

Ok, here is some real scientific research, on animals no less.

But I am certainly not going to be able to read and digest it fully tonight!

http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/3/2/171

But it seems to hint at some scientific basis for homeopathy.

I don't know what doctors think about* Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine*, but engineers tell me good things about its sister publication, Strawberry Jam-based Building Materials.

This in itself raises an interesting question. If positive treatment can be acheived through placebo treatment, is there a case for future propogation within certain areas of the medical community. It could certainly reduce the cost of medical care and subsequent treatment of side effects of conventional medicine. It also drives a big hole through the western tendancy towards overmedication.

The problem with the placebo effect in a medical setting is that it relies on paternalism (it works better if you tell people "it works" rather than "it has an 80% chance of working"), drama (placebo surgery > placebo injection > placebo pill) and, um... fundamental dishonesty? :( After all, you're lying to your patients.

Overmedication is a separate issue. Total agree that something should be done about it, but it's not a dichotomy between the bastards of Big Pharma and the fuckwits of alternative medicine.

Well, that last one is definitely wrong. And I have my doubts about the second, though I've never seen a tiger in real life.