local attention

In attempts to censor profanity on the Internet, the first try is almost always with search and replace, or as smart people call it “regular expressions.”

The Daily WTF today reminded us all of the result.

This clbuttic howler is easy to find now with Google. There’s a world full of blue-glbutt banjo, paranoid theories about buttbuttination from the grbutty knoll and systematic chemical mbuttacre, and Big Mouth Billy Bbutt.

It reminds me of the possibly apocryphal news story in which the suspect fled in a late model African-American Dodge sedan.

The antidepressant-debunking study

There was a news release today about a study that appears to show the uselessness of popular antidepressants.

This was reported in the Guardian, among other places. The publication can be read here.

There are problems, as summarized:

~~PlOS is not an academic peer-reviewed journal.~~ edit: They are in fact peer-reviewed, based on better information I have received by comments. Read the threads. They say they are peer-reviewed, but when you read their FAQ, you’ll see this: “We involve the academic community in our peer review process as much as possible. After professional staff have determined that the paper falls within the scope of the journal, and is of a minimum acceptable quality, decisions on whether to send a paper out for in-depth review are made via a collaboration between experienced, professional editors who work full time at PLoS, and academic editors who are experts in their field.”
I’m not saying this is Wikipedia, but it’s not the same thing as a traditional journal, either.
It’s one study. Beware of an equivalency between “one metastudy showed that these three or four drugs didn’t show a good outcome under these conditions” and “antidepressants don’t work.”
The study measured outcomes at six weeks. That isn’t very long in a depression treatment, whether you’re using Prozac or a trampoline.

That having been said, anything that keeps family doctors from throwing the best-advertised drug at every problem is going to be helpful at this juncture. And using any kind of medication (except possibly the trampoline) without counseling is, well, crazy.

Against wiki

I dislike wikis.

It wasn’t a bad idea for storing object oriented software info (thanks, Ward!) and I didn’t mind maintaining one for a bunch of other nerds ten years ago.

But now they’re everywhere, and it’s annoying. Reasons I dislike the wiki phenomenon are:

Every nerd who saw the idea reimplemented it, so there are 20 different wiki software packages, all different from each other.
It”s yet another example of the user interface that nerds thing is intuitive. It’s so easy, and fun, and transparent! If you like learning another markup language, that is.
Wikis are used for everything. As a shared resource for software development it makes a lot of sense. As the knowledge base for a tech support site, or an archive of scripts, or damn near anything else, it’s worse than useless. How many times have we seen “Our useful resource thingy is now a wiki! Enjoy, everyone!” and then been asked to create our own answers to a problem?
Wikipedia.
Administering one of these things is a huge pain in the ass. I never know whether I’m changing my own user settings, the entire site, or someone else’s user settings. No one using the site has any clue how wiki code works or any desire to learn, and I don’t blame them, so I end up doing all the stuff that’s supposedly intuitive and simple and beautiful.

ACCENTUATIVE THE POSITIVE I have to say that I love HTML and its successors, hyperlinking, the WWW, and the Internet. I just don’t want to play Choose Your Own 404 Adventure or User-Generated Reality all the time!