This morning I rang my bank to find out how my mortgage will change once the fixed-rate term expires. Turns out there’s an 80% increase. Holy crap. So, today rapidly became about finding a better deal.

moneysavingexpert.com is my first destination for anything financial, and turned out to have a downloadable remortgaging guide. It recommends that everybody but the most financially savvy use a broker, so I gave London & Country a call. They apparently make their money in referral fees from the banks/building societies involved, so it seems less risky than phoning a random person from the phone book. They’re also able to link into my current bank’s systems to view offers only available to existing customers etc.. Hopefully they’re ok. They’re currently off deal-hunting and have promised to get back to me today/tomorrow.

Obviously fees are going to go up - my fixed rate was 4.3% and the current BoE rate is 5.75% - but hopefully it won’t be too insane. Might have to try and speed up the job applications process, though…

Spotted in a local hotel car park:

Skuds thinks Christopher Brookmyre’s ‘The Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks’ might have been written especially for me. In the last few days I’ve had it personally recommended from a variety of sources, and it does sounds like good times:

Integral to the story are discussions on the relationship between science, religion and the paranormal. Many of the arguments for and against religion/spirituality are included but in a more amusing and concise way than normal, making it an ideal book for anyone interested in the debate but lacking the patience to read The God Delusion.

What unsettled me was how persuasive some of the arguments in favour of pseudoscience and Inteligent Design were - but then that’s what makes them so dangerous. Brookmyre is firmly on the side of science, but he manages to write characters who make a good case against.

‘Unsinkable rubber duckies’ is a catchphrase of the great (not to say, Amazing) US skeptic James Randi, in reference to attempts to battle purveyors of pseudoscience, and indeed the book is apparently dedicated to him and Richard Dawkins. I didn’t need any more convincing, but that’ll do it. Definitely a necessary read; I’ll have to pick it up.

Or, at least, I found out about it this weekend.
Whenever we sell a book on Amazon I receive a ’sold, dispatch now’ email, or if there’s any problem with payment I get a ’sale pending’ email telling me to reserve the book until payment goes through / three days pass. Three weeks ago I received a dispatch¹ email, quickly followed by a sale pending message. So I reserved the book, but didn’t hear anything so forgot about it. I hadn’t realised quite how it works: ’sold’ emails are definitive, and only arrive once payment has actually gone through. I’d probably have figured it out if the Amazon emails hadn’t arrived in the wrong order - for whatever reason there was a delay on the initial ‘pending’ email. Not their fault, just unfortunate timing.

So on Saturday I had an email asking why the book hadn’t arrived, which confused me for a couple of minutes. Once I realised what had happened I quickly posted the book and, after double-checking with Abi, completely refunded the guy. I’m nervous every time I check our feedback, now. Obviously it’d be reasonable to leave negative feedback, but we’re currently at 100% positive and one problem would drop us to ~97%, or over 1 in every 50 orders. Not good, when you’re selling online.

I knew the spreadsheet was out by a few pounds, so would probably have picked it up once I properly balanced the tables. Shame I didn’t spot it sooner, but at least I won’t make that mistake again.

1. despatch? [↩]

A recent eSkeptic reviewed ‘How Doctors Think’ and, amongst some fairly strong criticisms of the book, mentions ‘decision aids’ - algorithm-based methods of diagnosis:

Most doctors do not like decision aids. They rob them of much of their power and prestige. Why go through medical school and accrue a six-figure debt if you’re simply going to use a computer to make diagnoses? One study famously showed that a successful predictive instrument for acute ischemic heart disease (which reduced the false positive rate from 71% to 0) was, after its use in randomized trials, all but discarded by doctors (only 2.8% of the sample continued to use it).⁵ It is no secret many doctors despise evidence-based medicine. It is impersonal “cookbook medicine.” It is “dehumanizing,” treating people like statistics. Patients do not like it either. They think less of doctors’ abilities who rely on such aids.⁶

The problem is that it is usually in patients’ best interest to be treated like a “statistic.” Doctors cannot outperform mechanical diagnoses because their own diagnoses are inconsistent. An algorithm guarantees the same input results in the same output, and whether one likes this or not, this maximizes accuracy. If the exact same information results in variable and individual output, error will increase. However, the psychological baggage associated with the use of statistics in medicine (doctors’ pride and patients’ insistence on “certainty”) makes this a difficult issue to overcome.

I can see how that would suck, from a doctor’s perspective. But that’s quite the statistic on the heart disease prediction. Maybe this is the way of the future: statistical techniques that apply to the majority, with human oversight to spot the minority cases.

Having said that, I was hearing this evening how current advances in the understanding of disease at the genetic level are going to lead to much more personalised medicine in the next 10-20 years. Which is cool. It was Francis Collins who said it, mind, and his reasoning skills elsewhere in the interview were somewhat suspect, but he nevertheless knows more about it than me