You might have heard of this new, alternative take on medicine called Homeopathy. If you haven't, the basic idea is that you take a (possibly active) substance, dilute it with alcohol or distilled water, and repeat the process until only the "vital energy" of the original substance remains. According to Hahnemann, the creator of Homeopathy (or, to be precise, according to the Wikipedia article), each dilution increases the potency of the preparation while ensuring that all traces of the original substance are effectively gone.

The efficacy of this practice has been called into question several times, which to me sounds less like a problem and more like an opportunity: how do we bring Homeopathy into the 21st century?

Enter the Nocebo effect. Unlike it's big brother the Placebo effect, the nocebo effect is at play when a treatment has a negative effect simply because the patient believes it to be so - the common example being patients that suffer from "side effects" when receiving an inert substance. While precise numbers are impossible to obtain, around 5% of all patients are considered susceptible to this nocebo effect.

If a nocebo "weakens" a patient's positive response to a medication, and Homeopathy is based on diluting substances, we can combine them both! In what I have decided to call "Martinopathy" in honor of its creator (me), I suggest the following clinical procedure: when a patient is prescribed a Martinopathic treatment for (say) common cold, they are first directed to a standard pharmacy, where they buy a common, over the counter, non-homeopathic common cold drug. They are then sent to their physician. The Doctor will take a look at the medicine, repeat to the patient "this medicine will not work" around 20 times, after which the patient is free to continue their treatment with their now-martinopathic medication. In this way the effect of the regular medicine has been "diluted" down to homeopathic standards, but this time in a scientifically sound way.

There is still some room for improvements. If costs are an issue, they could be kept low by martinopathing the medicine at the source - instead of yelling at a patient, a medical professional could yell at the boxes directly in the factory floor. It is not entirely clear whether the medical professional would have to be certified in this new treatment or not. But those are small details that we can sort after I get my Nobel prize.

It is tradition to start every new year with a blog post lamenting why I haven't posted more. Instead, I have decided to kickstart 2020 with a list of the changes I've made to the blog to ensure I write more, why I've made them, and what interesting tools I've found along the way.

A big problem in my blog has always been how difficult it is to actually get something published. As I've mentioned in the past, my blog is powered by a bunch of command-line tools and Bash. This works fine when I want to work from home, but makes it very difficult when I want to blog something spontaneously: writing a post involves SSHing into my server, and there's exactly one computer from which I can do that. Converting an entry to the final HTML is not hard, either, but is friction enough that I need to be really motivated to get into it.

Enter 2020. I am more and more concerned about the state of the modern web, where "the internet" has become a synonym for Facebook, Google, and not much more. At the same time, I realize that I'm part of the problem: I may not be putting content in Facebook, but I'm not really putting content anywhere. The little content I'm putting out is not particularly useful, either. Clearly, something had to change.

And thus, a plan for 2020 was born. In order to simplify blogging, I have now thrown away my custom blog engine and moved to Pelican. I've also embraced Markdown as document format, meaning I no longer have to worry about things looking ugly after I've written them down. All my previous content has been migrated from .html to .md using Pandoc.

On the content generation side, I've also decided to try something new. Rather than wait until inspiration strikes, I'll try to blog weekly about small problems and how I solved them. This will often involve talking about Bash and Python, so I'll have to pay special attention to other topics that could be interesting.

In the meantime, here are some changes you'll notice from the migration:

• Some entries will look a bit different. My custom footnote CSS no longer works with Markdown, so I'll probably substitute them with regular, boring footnotes.
• A couple entries with custom html will look weird for a while. It will take a bit to get them looking like before, and I'd rather avoid delaying the update until then.
• The RSS feed will probably break a little bit. Seeing as the RSS will now be generated by Pelican, I imagine your RSS reader will panic a little bit.

Next in the pipeline: a showcase of my now-almost-defunct blog engine.

Tell me if the following sounds familiar:

Oh, hi! It's been such a long time! They told me that you are a researcher now, right? What are you working on?
Me? Oh, well, ...

• ... I am developing a new carbulator theory that can hiperstat a maximum-entrophy logarithmic equation.
• ... it's something complicated. Have you ever heard of carbulators? No? Don't worry, no one ever does.
• ... you don't really want to hear that. It's super boring.

I am guilty of giving all of those answers at some point in my life. And while I am used to people not caring about my work, I'm not happy about it. Of course, I'm a nerd, so "doing boring things that no one cares about" is what I do. And I'm not saying everyone should be pasionate about Dungeons and Dragons^1. But I do think that, when I give a completely useless answer like the ones above, I'm contributing more to the problem than to the solution.

It is a fact that a lot of what we programmers and researchers do is considered boring by lots of people. But think about it, do you think it's boring? If the answer is "no", then I bet you could explain to me what's exciting about your job, why does it matter and/or what are you expecting to achieve. So all we need to do now is to better transmit this excitement to those around us. And yes, by "around us" I mean people who doesn't know what a carbulator is, have never heard the term in their life, and are probably none the worse for it.

I think a good start is my research section, in which I've listed some articles where I give a simple explanation of what I do. Not because I'm expecting my relatives to check my personal homepage, but because writing the articles has made me think really hard about what might be hard to grasp to non-technical readers, and next time I'll have a good script to begin with.

I can't tell you why I feel so strongly about this. Perhaps it's because the last time I was asked this question all I had were links to published papers, and that's unacceptable. Or because the time before that I straight up lied about it. Or maybe because I'm thousands of kilometers away from my family, and yet they don't have a clue about why I think it's worth it. And I have yet to find any downside to making knowledge more accessible.

So, what did you say that you do?

Footnotes

^1 I still can't find a Dungeon Master near me, though. And if you don't know what that is, no, it's not a sex thing. It's an old game...

One of the most enjoyable aspects of gaming for me is to try and pretend I'm the protagonist. That includes making choices the way I'd do them in real life. Of course, I understand that games are escapism, and I'm not blaming those that use games as an opportunity to murder pretty much anything that can be murdered. It's just not my style. I'm more the kind of gamer that's constantly being chased around by the guards I didn't kill because they didn't do anything.

Having said that, I'm having trouble with Angry Birds. I know, I shouldn't expect moral lessons from what is essentially a group of suicide birds bombing an enemy. But am I the only one who has trouble with a game that asks you to bomb a playground, including the kids playing there?

Did you enjoy committing a crime against humanity? Do you need more genocide? Then good news! You can bomb the skate park, somebody's house, and even a cemetery. Not only you get to kill your enemies again, but this time you can get their friends and family too!

Maybe it's because I'm having a bad day. Maybe it's because I'm putting too much thought into it. Maybe it's because I'm sick and tired of the phrase "collateral damage", or maybe I'm just missing some black humor. But in any case, I found out I can't bring myself to finish the game.

I hope that says something nice about me.

Dear Spotify,

I think it's time to realize that you are not the service you once where. At first it was subtle, like that time when you changed the shade of green of your logo to the ugly one you are using now. Then there was that issue with offline mode, in which I lost a whole playlist because your synchronization with Windows Phone doesn't work. I guess I should have seen the signals back then.

But now... now you changed. More specifically, you change your Terms of Use, and I can only use you if I agree for you to collect my pictures and track my location, among others. And that's where I have to draw the line. Spotify, I'm breaking up with you.

Wait, let me rephrase that: I already broke up with you 10 minutes ago, when I canceled my paid subscription. This is just me being polite.

Let's be honest here: I was not paying for music. I can get free music pretty much everywhere - call it Youtube, Vimeo, MP3 forums or torrents, finding free music is not particularly difficult. I was paying those € 10 because I preferred that to paying with my data, like so many other services. But if you are going to build a profile of me anyway that is related not to what I like to listen (which is what you are supposed to care about) but about what I do in my daily life (which is none of your business), then what's the point? I was paying to get away of the claws of marketing, and that is now gone. And so am I.

I guess I'll just go back to the old way, building my own music collection and listening to it wherever and however I want. I may even get back to my old idea of a streaming server. I know we had our issues before, like when I kept looking for videogame music and you kept showing me crappy piano versions of them. Or when you wouldn't change the title of Fabiana Cantilo's misspelled album even after I pointed it out repeatedly. But this time it's different. This time I'm gone for good.

Bye, Spotify. I'll show up later on to collect the titles on my playlist, so I can download them later. You can keep my e-mail address. It was a throwaway anyway.