Anthony Campbell's blog

To be rational in anything is great praise. [Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister Cassandra]

All my books are available as ebooks on Apple ibooks, Sony, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. For links, please see my home page at www.acampbell.org.uk or go to my iTunes page.

John Yudkin, who died in 1995, was a physiologist who specialised in nutrition and is best known for his views on the dangers of sugar. His book on this subject was first published in 1972; a revised and expanded edition appeared in 1986 and is reproduced here, together with an introduction but Robert H. Lustig. [More]

I spent most of last week trying out FreeBSD. The official FreeBSD site was a bit noncommittal for someone in my position. It says, If it ain't broke, don't fix it: If you already use an open source operating system, and you are happy with it, there is probably no good reason to change. I am happy with Debian, but still I thought it would be interesting to see what life in the FreeBSD world was like. I'm glad I did but I think the above advice is right,.

Here, in outline, are my main impressions of FreeBSD, admittedly based on only a brief acquaintance.

Good Things

1. The installation was quite straightforward and I had the system up and running in quite a short time. The X Window system was also easy to install.

2 When booting, there is a nice menu that allows you to boot in single user mode (e.g. to fsck the file system if necessary).

3. As others have remarked, the distinction between the unified base system and the third-pary software is a good feature (though in practice it doesn't make a vast amount of difference). The base system feels very solid and well organised.

4. The Handbook (to which you are constantly referred when you ask questions on the mailing list) is really good and very comprehensive, answering nearly all the questions you are likely to come up with and many more besides.

5. In at least some cases, ports of upgraded programs appear very rapidly. Thus the latest version of my window manager, spectrwm, was available almost at once. This version is 2.3.0; Debian still offers only 1.0.0.

Less-Good Things

1. Still thinking in a Debian way, I wanted to install the new version of spectrwm but couldn't find any way to do this. I asked on the mailing list and was given answers which were mainly RTFM. I'm not complaining - the information is there - but it's pretty counter-intuitive to someone coming from a Linux background.

In fact, you can't just install a new version of a program. You have to replace the WHOLE of your ports tree (thousands of items) and then compile any new program versions you want. Easy (if time-consuing) when you know how but it took me some time to figure it out. I'd say the Debian mailing lists are more friendly to newbies than are the FreeBSD ones.

3. FreeBSD is supposed to run most Linux programs, but I didn't find it as easy to do this as I expected, mainly because of the need to install Linux libraries. I got wcd to run but it brought up an annoying error message each time owing to a missing library. I never did work out how to fix this.

Anyway, if you are going to run lots of linux binaries, why bother with FreeBSD in the first place?

4. The clincher: battery management on Thinkpads
This was what really put me off the idea of using FreeBSD permanently. I have two Thinkpads. Thinkpads allow you to use the tp_smapi kernel module (available in Debian) to extend the life of your battery. With this loaded you can set minimum and maximum charge levels (say, 30% and 80%) which is supposed to be much better than keeping the battery fully charged all the time you are running on mains (or alternatively taking the battery out).

This module is not available for the FreeBSD kernel. I googled for an alternative way of managing the battery in FreeBSD and found quite a lengthy discussion about it, but the upshot was that it couldn't be done.

Conclusion
None of this is meant in any way to put FreeBSD down or to say that I think it's worse than Debian. If I'd started out on FreeBSD I expect I'd have continued with it. But, as things stand, I respect FreeBSD and admire what they are doing, but I'm continuing with Debian.

Certainly the battery question is a major factor here, but leaving that aside, I'm not prepared to live permanently in a world dominated by ports as opposed to binary packages. (Yes, FreeBSD does offer binary packages as well as ports, but the main emphasis is on ports.) I found a number of people on FreeBSD mailing lists and forums who have reached a similar conclusion.

In today'sThought for the Day Bishop Tom Butler referred to the soul as temporarily inhabiting the body. I've posted about this idea before. Although many people think it is orthodox Christianity, it isn't really. Christianity has traditionally taught the resurrection of the body but the question of what, if anything happens to us between death and resurrection at the Second Coming is left uclear. It was Plato who taught the notion of the soul as eternal and separable from the body, but Christian philosophy has been based on Aristotle, not Plato, and Aristotle had a different view ot the matter - one hat is actually not entirely capable of being reconciled with Christianity. Quite a muddle, in fact.

There is a widespread belief that many of our modern ills, physical and mental, result from a mismatch between our genes and the artificial environment that we have created for ourselves. Books, magazine articles, TV programmes, and numerous websites popularise the view that we were shaped over many thousands or millions of years to live a hunter-gatherer existence in small groups, yet now we live in huge cities with millions of inhabitants. In this 'unnatural' environment we encounter an abundant supply of food and drink of kinds that we are not evolutionarily adapted for. A critical point in our path to all this was the adoption of agriculture a 'mere' ten thousand years or so ago. The path to salvation lies in returning to the habits and diets of our palaeolithic ancestors.

This is an intuitively appealing story, but is it true? According to Marlene Zuk many of the assumptions on which it is based are questionable. While not rejecting the importance of evolution in shaping us - quite the opposite - Zuk picks the presuppositions of the 'paleofantasists' to pieces and shows how ill-founded many of their ideas are. In me, this prompted the thought that the current enthusiasm for life in the palaeolithic really a modern version of the myth of the Noble Savage or a secular version of the legend of the Garden of Eden. [More]

I've more than once mentioned here that Mona Siddiqui is one of the (few) contributors to Thought for the Day who can be trusted to come up with something worth listening to. Today she was talking about medically assisted suicide, and - I think - saying very subtly that this was something that a merciful society ought to take seriously as a possibility. As usual, I was glad I'd heard her.

In ITV-1's 'Endeavour', the youthful Morse, still a detective constable at this early stage of his career, found a girl who had died with digoxin in her stomach. "Is that dangerous?" he asked a GP who was involved in the case peripherally (the partner of another doctor who was murdered).

"It certainly is. The clue is in the name of the plant it comes from, deadly nightshade,"
the GP replied.

But deadly nightshade doesn't give us digitalis or digoxin, it gives us belladonna. Digitalis, from which digoxin is derived, comes from the leaf of the foxglove. I thought that perhaps this wasn't really a medical howler and we were being given an artfully planted clue; the GP was going to turn out to be an imposter. But no, it wasn't the doctor who was ignorant, it was his creator.

John Hawks has announced a new course in human evolution, starting in January 2014, which you can sign up for.

The materials are designed to guide students on their own distinctive paths of discovery. Short documentary videos highlight the most up-to-date science and bring students virtually into some of the most famous archaeological sites. With a series of interviews, students will hear about new ideas from many of the world's leading experts. Students who are experimenting with the world of personal genomics can see how their own genetic results fit into global and historical patterns. And together students will build and test scenarios of how human evolution may continue in the future.

I've no idea how this will work out, but it sounds exciting so I've signed up. The link is here for anyone interested.

Joan Bakewell#s interview with Oliver Sacks on |BBC Radio 3 is well worth listening to.

Quite a number of small children are concerned with the question that forms the title of this book. Jim Holt was one of them, and so was I; I can still remember the vertiginous terror I felt at the age of six as I contemplated the thought that there might have been nothing at all. Not everyone, it has to be said, agrees that there really is any mystery here, and even those who do don't always think that the question is answerable. In fact, it isn't very clear exactly what we mean by nothingness - it can't be imagined. This was realised right at the dawn of philosophy by Parmenides, one of the pre-Socratics. Later generations of philosophers have sought to clarify the issue, notably the Existentialists, but it remains contentious. [More]

I recently bought a Logicam webcam (EasyCam) for my Linux Debian (Sid) desktop computer. It was advertised as not needing any drivers and working on Linux, but I still was worried. But I needn't have been; I simply plugged it in and it worked at once on Skype with no need for any configuration. So I'd definitely recommend it to any Linux users looking for a reliable webcam.

In today's Thought for the Day the Rev..Michael Banner quoted the mediaeval Latin tag mors improvisa, which he translated as "a sudden and improvised death". This doesn't make sense (I suppose it would be "improvised" in contrast to a carefully thought-out suicide), but "improvisa" doesn't mean "improvised", it means "unforeseen". Coming from the Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, this seems a real schoolboy howler.

When launching various browsers (iceape, iceweasel, firefox) I kept getting an error message:

GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information.

The browser seemed to run normally but the error message was annoying. This was on Debian stable.

I found various suggestions on the net but none of them worked. In the end I purged gconf2 and reinstalled it, after which the error message went away.

This morning, James Naughtie was commenting on the Chief Medical Officer's warning about increasing antibiotic resistance. He said "our bodies are becoming resistant ." It's not our bodies, of course, it's the bacteria, providing a classic example of Darwinian natural selection in action.