Pray now to get better yesterday
QUITE why David Kemmish was looking for studies on the medical effects of prayer we do not know, but we are as delighted as he was to be reminded of the nine-year-old paper 鈥淓ffects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial鈥� by Leonard Leibovici, then at the Rabin Medical Center at Petah-Tiqva, Israel.
It seems surprising that this paper, published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in December 2001 (), didn鈥檛 create more of a stir at the time. It appears to show that prayer is associated with shorter stays in hospital and quicker recoveries from fever. However, as David points out, 鈥渢he keyword is 鈥榬etroactive鈥� 鈥� the patients were treated between 1990 and 1996 but the prayers were said in July 2000. Apparently this works because God is 鈥榥ot limited by linear time鈥�.鈥�
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We are bound to point out here that any result reported with, say, a 95 per cent confidence level (the standard for social science studies) has, by definition, a 1 in 20 chance of being utter nonsense. On the other hand, what if the effect were real? Do we have to convert before we pray for, say, Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley鈥檚 mother) to have recovered from her septicaemia in 1797? If we succeeded, would we risk un-writing Frankenstein?
Might prayer work for outcomes other than length of stay in hospital? What if we pray, most faithfully, for Abraham to have said 鈥渘o way, Yahweh鈥� and we thereby manage to un-found an entire family of religions?
鈥淩od Heard read in the magazine of the Queensland Writers Centre, Australia, that entries for the Place and Experience Poetry Prize 2010 鈥渕ust be typed on single-sided A4 paper鈥�
READERS continue to assist with retro-proofreading our quote from an article in the UK consumer-issues magazine Which?. We reproduced, accurately, their assertion that 鈥淭he average bacon packet was nearly 15 grams and we [in the UK] eat about 50 million packets of bacon a year. That鈥檚 7500 tonnes of packets, the equivalent of 50 blue whales鈥� (15 May). Readers quickly pointed out that we had failed to spot that 50 million times 15 grams is only 750 tonnes, the equivalent of a mere five blue whales (19 June).
Since then, several readers and colleagues have commented that 15 grams is a miserly serving of bacon, even by the fabled standards of British seaside guesthouses. True enough, but we鈥檙e obliged to point out that the weight in question is that of the packaging, not the rashers of pork product therein. We accept it is possible to wrap a decent breakfast in 15 grams of packet 鈥� though we have to admit that, as we share accommodation with a vegetarian, we don鈥檛 actually bring home the bacon ourselves, but meet it only in its natural caf茅 habitat, where it is packetless.
Jim Grozier, meanwhile, took the trouble to check our suggestion that perhaps Which?鈥榮 numbers work in whale arithmetic, as opposed to the human kind. He has come up with an equation showing not only that the sums are wrong in base 10 arithmetic but also that they cannot be correct for any base.
Then, however, he undercuts his argument by asking whether whales, having zero fingers, count in base zero, in which all equations are true. Perhaps that settles it 鈥� unless any whales reading this disagree.
WONDERING what a friend meant when she said on Facebook that she had been for a 4D scan of her baby, Luke Gibbons tracked down an explanation on : 鈥�3D scans are still pictures of the baby, whereas 4D scans are moving 3D images. These videos show the outside of your unborn baby in amazing detail and are a world apart from the traditional black & white 2D ultrasound images most people are familiar with.鈥�
That鈥檚 the great thing about promotional writing. If copywriters don鈥檛 like or don鈥檛 understand what a technical term means, they can simply make up a new meaning for it.
THE pair of socks Karen Hamshow-Hart bought for her baby daughter came with the instruction to 鈥淲ash and dry separately鈥�. This led to a domestic disagreement, with Karen arguing that it meant the socks should not be washed and dried at the same time, as if such a thing were possible, and with her husband believing it meant each sock should be individually laundered. Or did it mean, as Feedback guesses, that the socks should be washed and dried separately from other garments? Karen does not tell us if any of these views prevailed, or if she simply decided to ignore the instruction.
FINALLY, continuing the theme of strange notices (12 June), Malcolm Moore reports one in a men鈥檚 restroom near Lake Rotorua, New Zealand. It says: 鈥淟AKE FLIES DO NOT OPEN WINDOWS鈥�.
鈥淭hat,鈥� says Malcolm, 鈥渋s good news.鈥�