Wednesday, July 31, 2002

"The One Thing" revisited. In herbal remedies, many of the manufacturers have switched from whole herb remedies to standardized. I find this very troubling. Whole herb remedies include extracts from all the parts of the plant. The standardized trend is in response to consumers' concerns that they are getting low-grade herbs which do not have enough of certain "active ingredients" which are the proven causes of better health (through double-blind placebo studies). Now this seems absolutely crazy to me, but it seems like I'm the only one. Isn't it obvious that the way plants heal us is through a complex interaction of many of the plants' qualities, not through some special active ingredient?  Again, we are looking for the "one thing" that is responsible. It's like our relationships with presidents. Democrats are saying that while Clinton was in office, we had a good economy and now we have a bad economy, so obviously Bush is a bad president and Clinton was great. Although I have great respect for Clinton and little respect for Bush (either one) this theory smells suspiciously like the "one thing." I do not believe that a change in presidents could affect the economy by itself. It is a complex set of interactions between factors and nothing else. Maybe going from a competent to incompetent president was one factor, but only one. Or am I just crazy?   10:18:19 PM    comment [] About blogging... The New Alternative Press The Economist "Blogging, the publication of running commentary on personal online weblogs, has in the past couple of years exploded from a cultish techie activity into a cottage industry churning out increasingly compelling content. In 1998, there were about 30,000 weblogs; today, there are some 500,000, according to Cameron Marlow, who runs blogdex, which tracks them. Blogging has taken off thanks to the development of online tools, such as Blogger and UserLand, which make it simple and cheap to update personal web content instantly. Weblogs range from the political (InstaPundit, Kausfiles, AndrewSullivan) to the high-tech (Dan Gillmor's eJournal, Scripting News, 802.11b, Boing Boing), and from the personal rant to the thoughtful critique. One recurring theme is their quirky, counter-cultural nature. As a recent article in the Online Journalism Review put it: 'Weblogs are the anti-newspaper.'" From: Blogging: The Trees Fight Back The Economist, July 4, 2002 I disagree. I think blogs are the anti-advertisement. Ads are always trying to portray the good things about something (except political attack ads) but with blogs we can show the underbelly of things too. I think that is why there are so many blogs with a strongly negative tone, the I-hate-everything-and-everyone type of blog. I'm guessing the reason people write them (and read them) are because we're tired of the sickly sweet advertising of everything-is-wonderful-just-please-don't-look-behind-the-curtain. (Shit. I thought I would get through at least a month without a Wizard of Oz reference.)   8:55:16 AM    comment []

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