Natural Medicine

Natural medicine propaganda is based on the assumption, that if it's natural it must be good, while non-natural things are definitely bad. Moreover classical medicine is accused of being "chemical" and focused on money-making. I wonder how these “prosecutors” drink water. It's so chemical! It consists of oxygen and hydrogen! Both of these two elements are really flammable, so its combination is probably what hell is made of. H2O is dangerous and should be avoided at all cost, if we're serious about shunning chemistry. As for the money-making issue you should see the prices of all that so-called "natural" meds. It's definitely not free, and the hidden cost is what you really should consider.

The "nature is oh-so-great" argument is seriously wrong. After all these years of living in civilization, most people don't realize what nature really is. Do you know how nature solves problems like sick/lame/challenged baby? It kills the baby. So you have a broken leg? Sorry, die. What do you prefer? Living in the building or in the forest? Do you like spaghetti or perhaps you prefer raw meat instead? Would you like to hunt in the woods, dismember and flay the carcass with your bare hands or just buy the fillet in the shop? And if you fail to hunt anything, would you accept the natural starvation?

So why the hell would you even consider using some suspicious herb from some Granny the Healer instead of legit drug from a pharmacy?

If your body needs some substance, you can get it from eating something that has it or just take a pill. If you'll choose the pill, you'll have some sort of guarantee, that you've really taken the right substance, proper amount of, and nothing else that you don't need.

The "natural" approach means that you don't control anything, specifically:

1. You don't know, if you have taken any substance. If the meal has been incorrectly prepared or stored, substance could be deprived of its healing properties. Granny the Healer doesn't have any medical or pharmaceutical education. In Poland you can't even sell a condom in the pharmacy unless you're at least a pharmaceutical technician, which requires 2 years of studying and passing an exam.

2. How much did you take? Precision is a vice of chemical, money-making drug industry, while overdose or underdose is so very natural.

3. What else did you take? Real drugs are cleaned from anything unnecessary to avoid conflicts and possible allergic reaction. But aren't allergic reactions natural? So is a death from anaphylactic shock.

4. All real drugs are carefully tested for side effects, but aren't that uncertainty natural and precious? Granny the Healer probably didn't care much for blinded placebo-controlled studies.

Ignorance is anything but bliss in this case. The most natural effect of using natural medicine is a natural death.

Poland's Most Hated Acronyms

1. ZUS, responsible for all kind of pensions. Irresponsible in the way it handles money, and totally crazy in the way it purchases IT systems. ZUS subsidy is the biggest budget cost in the country. 

2. GDDKiA, responsible for national roads, including expressways and highways. They are constantly ridiculed for not anticipating the snow every year [1]. Complaining about Polish roads is a significant part of our culture; it's performed regularly country-wide. People are so used to complaining about it, that many of them seem to be blind to all the actual improvements in this field. 

3. PKP, responsible for nearly all the tracks, most trains, most train stations. It’s a state-controlled monopolist, extremely ineffective. It owns enormous amounts of land in Poland, that thing alone with proper management should make PKP very rich. Obviously, it’s not. 

4. PZPN, responsible for Polish Football. Poles love football and hate PZPN, so politicians officially hate it too, but as soon as Polish National Team is playing in any kind of championships, every last one of them is wearing a red-white scarf posing for the camera along with all the critics, journalists and fans. 

5. TPSA. Long-time monopolist in the telecommunication market, responsible for impeding the development of Internet in Poland, ridiculed for poor customer service. TPSA is not a monopolist anymore, so the hatred towards it seems to be fading lately.

[1] Obviously it's not the case. The case is that snowplows don't grow on trees, and people who demand that every road in the country should be black 5 minutes after the fall of snow are being deliberately stupid.

Zeno's Paradoxes In Poland: Shortest Path Between Wroclaw And Warsaw

According to PKP Intercity [1] it goes either via Poznan or Katowice. Look at the map and weep.

Layman would think that it's shorter via Lodz, but when Intercity CEO heard about it, he ordered to fire Mr. Layman immediately. Lodz shouldn’t be connected to the network as it’s only second biggest city in Poland [2], and who would want to go there anyway. Since Lodz means “boat” in Polish, PKP Intercity obviously concluded, that people just swim there, so the train connection would be redundant.

Poles love PKP Intercity for many things; its magnificent logic is just one of them.

[1]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKP_Intercity
[2] Or third. Lodz and Krakow are constantly fighting over that.

9 Things Poland Don't Suck At

As we had determined earlier, Polish national sport is complaining. Not doing it for a whole day is against the Polish Nature, and is known to cause hemorrhage, cardiac arrest, spontaneous combustion and hair loss. Nevertheless I decided to take the risk and write a piece that actually praises Poland. So here we go.

1. Surgery. There's a small local hospital at Trzebnica, near Wroclaw. They have a world class surgical team, specialized in hand transplantations. Their recent success is transplantation of two hands at once. Only five hospitals in the world did that. Operation lasted for 17 hours, the hand donor was a women. The receiver was male special ops soldier, who lost his hands in Iraq.

2. Heroes. We've got plenty of them. Some of them are bogus, and are scheduled to be ridiculed in this blog. But we have a lot of real deals, some of them really incredible, like Irena Sendler [1, 2].

3. IT skills in general public. Polish edition of Wikipedia is 4th biggest in the number of articles after English, German and French. That's fantastic considering that Polish language has only about 40 million native speakers [3] and Polish as the second language isn't very popular [4].

4. Programmers. Look at TopCoder [5] statistics [6]. Poland is 3rd after Russia and China, which have much more participants (China over five times more).

5. Rescue teams from KGHM Polska Miedz have achieved good results in the International Mine Rescue Competition. They won the first place in the years 2000 and 2004 and third place in 2008. This kind of rescue operations is extremely specialized; it demands very unique skills and equipment. That team is helping with natural disaster all over the world.

6. Elite soldiers. Polish special ops soldiers from the GROM unit [7] have been deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Kosovo, Macedonia, East Croatia and probably more. They worked with their counterparts from other NATO countries.

7. Girls. There are countries where you can become gay by accident, since both sexes look alike. I won't tell you which country I have in mind particularly, but I'm starting to understand, why they have started so many wars. Girls rules in this country. Pretty like a flower, smart like a google, angel-shaped little marvels, all of them, perhaps only excluding those with an engineering degree.

8. Bread. Polish bread is the best. I've read that Polish Shops in London were originally created to serve Poles in voluntary economically-based exile, but expanded their target group to anyone, who has any taste left after years of eating McShite, Tesco muffins and other junk food.

9. Natural resources. Prior to joining UE, Poland has been severely underdeveloped (when compared with UE average). Preserving most of the natural resources is one of the few advantages of that. After joining UE Poland is forced to develop sustainably.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR0WE3hASC4&feature=related

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

[4] http://faculty.ignatius.edu/turner/languages.htm

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopCoder

[6] http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=country_avg_rating

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GROM

Misnomer Of The Week: Deadline

With the amount of deadlines I've missed, I should be in hell, and Osama should be fetching me beer.

This word should be restricted to be used only by surgeons, safety engineers, pilots, soldiers and so on. In these fields missing a deadline means that someone could or will actually die. In my field there are no real deadlines, but I created a list of all things similar, in the chronological order (more less):

1. Wishfuline. Impossible to meet, set only to win a tender, and to be renegotiated later.

2. Funline. Still impossible, but we can't just say we were joking about the wishfuline, so we're working on setting a realistic deadline in baby steps. That's a first. The number of funlines can be really impressive.

3. Realine. Could be met if we were real flawless professionals, who never slack, and the client really knew what he wanted. Will that ever happen? Not likely, unless one client would want exactly what we just sold to another. Then we could fix that solution for him and call it new.

4. Shameline. The product is handed over to the customer, it's lame, has many defects, but we have to pretend it works because we can't postpone anymore.

5. Happyline. There's some kind of support agreement, which allows us to actually fix the product, so it would have at least 10% of the quality our sales team promised.

6. Terrorline. The product is a piece of shit and the client is threating to sue us unless we fix it by yesterday. The client has a deal with our competition and just need some formal court-friendly excuse to cut us off. Even in these circumstances it's still not a deadline, not even close.

Polish Sexual Techniques: The Lefty Linda

Origin: "Psy", the movie.

A dude is being tortured by the mobster. Eventually his right hand is cut off. After being saved by Linda [1], he asks dramatically:

- What will I do without my right hand?

- You're gonna jerk off with the left one.

More about the movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105185/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus%C5%82aw_Linda

Anal Fun At The Wroclaw University

Today's subject is anal fun at the Wroclaw University. We'll continue after a short commercial break. Stay with us.

And we're back. It seems that this commercial should be translated for some administrative workers of the Wroclaw University.

There's a seminar on functional analysis [1] (it's "analiza funkcjonalna" in Polish) at the University. Administration decided that "analiza funkcjonalna" is too long, so they shortened it. So one day the students faced the note, that there's an "anal. fun." lecture by professor X, followed by a practice led by doctor Y.

We asked a famous actor to comment on that, and that's what he said:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_analysis

The King Stay The King On The Wire

Have you seen The Wire? There's a reason why critics said it's the greatest television series ever made, and that it's a "realistic portrayal of urban life" recognized for its "literary ambitions, and uncommonly deep exploration of sociopolitical themes." [1] It's a fantastic lesson of English as well.

I picked three funniest scenes. That was a hard choice for many reasons. And I realize that it may be difficult to understand what I find so funny about it, without watching at least a few episodes.

1. A scene, in which D'Angelo Barksdale is explaining the rules of chess to his fellow drug dealers, is simply beautiful.

2. Felicia "Snoop" Pearson shopping:

3. And a similar scene, when Bodie is shopping:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire

Media vs. Reality

There's a large set of statements that are obviously false, but nevertheless very popular in the media, and recited stone-faced by mindless presenters when the opportunity arise. Now it's "Polish Pope is sacred to all Poles".

Yeah, right.

We have just witnessed the beatification of John Paul II, which started another series of idiotic quotations. If now, in the XXI century, so many people believe that the guy has defeated communism [1], cured some nun [2], or is sacred to all Poles, then it cast some serious shadow over that all walking on the water and bread & fish magic two thousand years ago [3].

The fact is that anyone could come to Wroclaw town square to see beatification on the big screen. There was like 20-30 people. Wow. A day before in the same place anyone could come to see as 5601 guitarists are beating the Guinness World Record in the number of people playing "Hey Joe" at the same time. The town square was full.

Some journalists were trying to ask people about the things they were taught by The Pope. About the books he wrote, the poems, letters, and other writings. Obviously it turned out that he's "beloved" and "sacred" so much, that reading his things would be a sacrilege, and talking about it would be a blasphemy, so no-one dared to do that.

Yet everybody knows he liked cream puffs. And that he's sacred to all Poles.

[1] Single-handedly, according to some. Lech Walesa is also believed to single-handedly defeat communism (mostly by himself).

[2] Curing by the placebo effect will be ridiculed later in this blog.

[3] Yeah, like you could cast any shadow in complete darkness.