Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Publishing success
I own two modern medical books. First one is a first edition, a miscellaneous collection of papers about pain. Apart from being the only vaguely accessible book on the subject I could find, it also serves to prop up the research scores of the various authors. I was once told that having a paper in a collection was one of the lowest forms of research, but nevertheless does attract a positive score from the central research police. The second one is a sixth English edition of an excellent picture book about our nervous system. Again the only vaguely suitable book on the subject I could find - in Foyles, of course. But this book was originally German and runs to 10 editions in German. One each in Bulgarian, Turkish, Hungarian, Polish, Greek and Chinese. Two each in Croatian, Indonesian and Portuguese. Four each in French, Italian and Spanish. Five each in Dutch and Japanese. It really is the number one international best seller as they say on fat books in airport lounges. Herren Kahle and Frotscher must have done rather well out of it. Does it make them more than their day job salaries in universities?
Moving on from pain, I read a piece by someone who clearly has a lot of time on his hands, the Mayor of London, about torture. His very firm line being that torture is abhorrent and should not be done in any circumstances. Noting in passing that maybe Bush the younger would get arrested in some European countries for his robust defence of his use of torture. I can more or less go along with the mayoral line, although not to the limit. But I thought his argument was marred by an assertion that torture does not work and is therefore pointless. This I do not believe. I believe that a professional torturer who has somehow managed not to become a sadist can extract useful information in this way. I don't know if there are chemical routes to the same end, but on the assumption that there are not, the Mayor failed to deal with the point that there might be circumstances when torture was useful if unpleasant.
And moving onto chemicals, I read recently that Freud has been knocked on his perch by the arrival of chemical treatments for psychiatric problems. That medical doctors no longer bother with talking cures now that they have the much more convenient chemical cures. Psychoanalytic Institutes are reduced to taking on doctors of anthropology and classicists as trainees rather than proper doctors. But I think Freud will have his day again. The brain people will find that the brain is a sufficiently plastic place for a talking cure to effect real change. Change in the form of changed wiring. Chemicals might be a cheap way to do things but they are not the only way.
Closer to home, have now discovered the first really useful new feature in MS Office 2010. The new sections feature in large Powerpoint presentations makes them much more manageable in write mode and provides a useful 'goto section' feature in right click in read mode. The left hand summary part of the display in write mode is a touch wobbly, although, so far, it has come right in the end. No doubt something they will get completely right in the next edition. In the meantime, I am comforted by the knowledge that large Powerpoints are OK. I had been wondering with one of mine running to near 500 slides and 2Mb. Not too many pictures so bytes not as bad as they would have been otherwise.
The discovery made quite by chance. I was trying to find out, using the not too clever offline help, what a new print feature called OneNote 2010 was all about. Failed on that front, but happened to notice along the way something about this new feature called sections. And as luck would have it I stopped to investigate.
# posted by Jim @ 12:37 AM 
