It was while watching the third loop of a video of Jack Callaghan, a 28-year-old man from Newcastle, running a steamer back and forth over his bedsheets that I realised I agreed with one of the commenters: yes, this also brought me “peace and joy”.

So begins a (paywalled, sorry) FT article on people earning a good bit of money from posting housekeeping tips to social media: #cleantok, #cleanfluencers, apparently. It reminded me of Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts, my favorite book to pick up and read at random, and for the same reason all these people are watching a guy clean out a microwave with half a lemon and some water: peace and joy.

The article goes on to describe some spring clean routines for homes of various sizes, including — it is the Financial Times, after all — some they euphemistically call big and stately. This spring we will be moving house, not cleaning it, but I’ll keep browsing through Home Comforts for peace, joy, and some semblance of a plan for spring cleanings to come.

Finished reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚

A well-made case for why capital-s-Science is not the answer to all of the world’s many ills, and why it should be separated more from politics and policy, and less so from church. Pair it with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Currently reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚, and I will post about it soon as it is at least a thought-provoking if not a great book, but I came across this biography of Imre Lakatos who was Feyerabends frenemy and to whom he dedicated the very book I’m reading, and I have to say it is one of the most entertaining encyclopedia entries ⊕ Being a nerd kid in the 1990s without broadband internet, that is a lot of encyclopedia entries! I have laid my eyes on.

About their collaboration in particular:

It is quite clear that Lakatos and Feyerabend were engaged in a self-conscious campaign of mutual boosterism, leading up to a planned epic encounter between a fallibilistic rationalism, as represented by Lakatos, and epistemological anarchism, as represented by Feyerabend. As Feyerabend put it “I was to attack the rationalist position, Imre was to restate and defend it, making mincemeat of me in the process”

Fun!

From the essay Zombies in Western Culture, which a friend recommended I read:

Clearly, the zombie has transcended the constraints of its own genre. Whereas early zombie films closely adhered to horror tropes, more recent renditions have wed themselves to comedy and romance (Zack Snyder released the comedic Shaun of the Dead in 2004 to critical and popular acclaim), and broken away from melodrama.

Emphasis is mine, and I still can’t get over this mistake. Clearly the comedic masterpiece Shaun of the Dead is Part 1 of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto triology ⊕ Part 2, Hot Fuzz is even better! and has nothing to do with Zack Snyder.

Is this an intentional troll? Zack Snyder does attract a lot of 4Chan attention. But how am I supposed to take the any of the essay’s many meandering philosophical references ⊕ And I thought medical jargon was bad… seriously if they can’t get this one basic thing right? Submit myself to voluntary Gell-Man amnesia?

Finished reading: The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset 📚

A series of essays published in 1929 that shows just how much we have been spinning in circles since the spasm of WW2. A reactionary right that wants all of the privileges of a liberal democracy without any of its obligations. A revolutionary left which uses its disgust for the current state of things as an excuse not to get involved in the messy business of fixing them. A middle free for ideals, morals, or goals.

It makes for fine reading, if you ignore the European imperialism and unabashed racism of the author who would, I am sure, be horrified to learn that his worst fears about the faith of Europe have been realized.

Finished reading: Fundamentals of Clinical Trials by Lawrence M. Friedman 📚

It is assigned reading for a course I’m helping prepare, so I thought I’d better read the book we’ll ask our students to use. Like many textbooks, it suffers from MANE — many authors no editors — and like many academic texts, it can get way too pedantic. Still, it is hard to argue with its overarching themes: that randomized controlled trials are the pinnacle of medical evidence generation, and that much of the trial paperwork done in the name of quality is unnecessary. I have more comments on that last point, but that is for another time.

At the very start of the textbook Fundamentals of Clinical Trials the authors make a distinction between clinical trials — comparing two or more different interventions — and clinical studies, which merely describe an intervention without comparing it to anything. So, there can be no such thing as a “Phase 1 trial”, since they typically involve a single drug at different doses and schedules. The only true trials, according to the authors, would fall under Phase 3, or Phase 2b at the earliest.

This is stupid, misleading, and not at all how the words “trial” and “study” are used by anyone else, including the biggest and most important drug regulatory agency in the world. There are many such pointless exercises of professorial power in medicine, including my favorite: whether the correct pronunciation of “+” in “7+3” is “plus” or “and”. They amount to nothing more than purity tests that award the wielders of the right language a false sense of precision. As Nassim Taleb wrote, nitpicking is the enemy of thought.

The rest of the book is good enough, but more on that later.

Finished reading: 1177 B.C. by Eric H. Cline 📚

Come for the meticulously documented story of the Bronze Age collapse, stay for what preceded it: alliances, feuds and intrigue to rival anything you’d find in the Game of Thrones.

📚 An unpopular opinion: nonfiction audiobooks are an oxymoron. Those which are better heard than read (see: Gladwell) are entertainment disguised as education, giving only an illusion of understanding.

The very best works of fiction, however, work equally well as either.

Finished reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚

“Finished” as in read every word on the page, yes. But to actually finish this one will take a few years’ worth of listening, as you can imagine. At least I won’t be listening blindly.