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This week I did a video about the Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. I love the book, I’ve read it twice: one in text and once with my wife as an audiobook. Both are great. The comic doesn’t have much to do with that, I hope, but it is based on a true story. Although… stabby robots do figure in Use of Weapons and in the comic…

Use of Weapons is a space opera, and if you like that kind of thing, you might like it. It has deeper meaning, too, which I think is rare among space opera books. Even very good and influential books in the genre, like Ringworld, often focus more on Big Ideas instead of human themes. Use of Weapons does both. But it’s not an easy book. It can be hard to follow at times. I go into that more in the video.

Last week, I put up a video about essential oils. There were a few things I forgot to mention. I talked about how there are biological effects of some plant oils, despite the fact that they are not approved as medicine. Like spearmint oil spells like spearmint, but may also have effects on human memory, maybe? I briefly reviewed a study of clinical experiments with spearmint oil (Kennedy et al.). It’s a peer-reviewed, double blind, placebo controlled clinical trial on a bunch of cognitive and memory tests with peppermint oil. It’s a good example of a trial with careful controls. And it did have one result with very high statistical significance. I forgot to mention what the result actually was (whoops!). The oil improved word recall error rate.

I’m a little sad that I didn’t conclude the video more forcefully. My point in the video was just that this was the right kind of trial, and sometimes, there are some effects from these chemicals. They tend to be subtle, though. In general, eating essential oils is not safe and they are no substitute for medicine.

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