I was going through some of the comments posted by people on BBC News' thread on non-proven drugs (popularly known as alternative medicine) being available on the NHS.

Obviously they shouldn't be, NHS funds should only be spent on things that actually work. However certain aspects of society, like the Royal Family insist on promoting un-proven drugs. Un-proven drugs unlike clinically tested drugs have no evidence to show any effect, have not been tested for safety, for effects with other drugs, for the proper doses etc. They're just put on shelves untested and sold.

Anyway one comment stood out.

Dont forget that all chemical produced medicines have side effects and are addictive natural medicines have no side effects and are not addictive and work in a slow gentle way.

What a load of nonsense! All drugs are chemicals, everything is chemicals, "natural medicines" are drugs, they're chemicals too and they of course have side effects. Just off the top of my head:

Cyanide (produced by plants, bacteria etc). Side effects include death.
Digitalis (produced in plants like foxgloves). Side effects include heart failure.
Heroin (produced by opium poppies). Side effects include addition.
Uranium (produced by supernova). Side effects include death.
Arsenic (produced by supernova). Side effects include death.

I demand freedom of choice from the national health service that is my basic human right as per the charter to deny me that is a form od dictatorship

The NHS, being publically funded must make best use of the money the public give to it. Wasting it on unproven, and by unproven I don't mean studies haven't been done, they have been done and there is no effect, is a waste of the tax payers money, and indeed it would be responsible for the loss of life of a great many people, when that money could be spent on drugs and treatments that do actually work and save people's lives.

and dont forget the chinese have been using alternative medicines for thousands of years and they are doing ok thankyou

That's nice but they often used the drugs being sold today for different purposes than what they're currently sold for. So that's irrelevant.

Until the introduction of scientific medicine life expectancy worldwide was about 40-45 at the most. So for all those thousands of years those un-proven drugs had no effect on average life span. With the introduction of scientific medicines and treatments life expectancy is now around 75.

We are so lucky to have scientific medicine, most people throughout history have not been so fortunate. Don't throw it away and squander it with such utter nonsense I'd rather not have to break out the leeches again.

Science is a method of understanding, with science we can discover what actually works and what doesn't. Science should be applied to everything so we can stop wasting our time, and money with things that don't work. When drugs are found to have no effect they should no longer be sold, they shouldn't hide under the "natural" umbrella and fool people into thinking they're actually getting treatment when they're not.

Here's the followup picture from my previous post.

We can use the Sun to help highlight the geography of the Moon, as the Sun slowly rises other the lunar surface light flood into vallerys and crators, or vast shadows are cast by mountain ranges. You can see this on the closeup below, the terminator isn't smooth, its all bumpy, even over the space of a few hours you can often see quite dramatic changes along the terminator as the Sun floods into areas of shadow.

Below you can see quite a prominant feature on the western rim of Mare Crisium, just as the Sun begins to rise over the highground around the sea.

According to Symantec it is. In their 11th internet security report, part of which tracked vulnerabilities and fix times for operating systems in the last half of 2006 they found the following:

Microsoft's Windows came in first place with 39 vulnerabilities discovered and Microsoft took on average 22 days to fix them.

Red Hat Linux came in second place with 208 vulnerabilities and an average fix time of 58 days.

Apple's Mac OS X ranked 3rd place with 43 vulnerabilities and an average fix time of 66 days.

Hewlett Packard's HP-UX had 98 vulnerabilities and took them 101 days to release a fix.

Sun's Solaris came in last place with 63 vulnerabilities with a fix time of 122 days.

Looks pretty much the same as the first half of the year. Microsoft's security investment is paying off. 2006 was a solid year for Microsoft on the security front. With how 2007 has started its going to get even better.

If you go outside right now (even if its daylight), Venus is a few degrees south of the Moon. That makes Venus possible to spot in daylight assuming you've got really transparent skies. You'll probably need binoculars but its possible.

It also means the Moon is hanging around near Venus in the evening sky, here's a photo I took yesterday.

I've got high-resolution versions and close ups of the Moon on my gallery.

Weather permitting, I'll be taking one again this evening, the Moon would of moved up above Venus. This is because the Moon takes only a month or so to orbit the Earth, so every day it moves about 13° across the sky, the Moon is about half a degree in width which means it moves its own width about every hour compared to background objects. It orbits anti-clockwise when viewed from the north pole and so, compared to everything else in the sky it moves slowly leftward. Keep in mind the Earth's rotation is about 28 times faster, so we only see this movement relative to things behind it, the Moon still rises in the east and sets in the west.

I managed to take a few images of the lunar eclipse last week, I only used my camera with the standard 55mm lens. I was feeling too weak to drag the telescope outside and set it up. :)

There's two more photos and the rest of my astrophotographs on my gallery.

Hamad Darwish has released the remaining images from his Windows Vista set. For those that don't know this is the guy who took the photos that made up two of the best wallpapers in Windows Vista.

You can download the full size images (1900x1200) from his website. They compliment the existing wallpapers very nicely and I hope to see more of his photos in future versions of Windows.

Landscapes > gradients.