In double-blind medical tests on legal thuggery …

Via Paul Crowley: The UK Society of Homeopaths has a code of practice and rules of professional conduct, including such cautions as “Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority. No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.” When Andy Lewis of the Quackometer found a SOH-registered homeopath blatantly flouting the code and wrote about it, the SOH promptly dealt with the offender …

Well, no — they forced his ISP to take it down under the Laurence Godfrey precedent (the mere threat can scare a UK ISP). This has led to the original article being mirrored across the net. And has made the news. I expect the SOH’s press officer will have a really great Monday morning.

Any SOH members in the house?

Volunteer spyware.

  • God inducers will be included in mobile phones by 2009 as seduction devices. “Body of Christ.” *zip* *thunk*

InGimp is a version of Gimp 2.2 with instrumentation, being run by HCI at the University of Waterloo to gather data for how to improve open source user interfaces in general. Available for Windows, Linux and Intel Mac. The Windows version picked up my Gimp preferences properly. The first startup was really slow, but normal thereafter. If you use Gimp but would like it to suck less in future, you may wish to contribute your way of working.

Gimp 2.4 is nearly out — 2.4.0rc3 is in Ubuntu Gutsy, and it’s already much nicer than 2.2. So I hope they’ll instrument that as soon as there’s a release.