2530: Clinical Trials

2021-10-19T16:54:20Z

162.158.159.25: /* Explanation */ There's much that can be said here. But the comparison between viagra and willow bark (etc) could extend this into a whole essay...

{{comic
| number = 2530
| date = October 18, 2021
| title = Clinical Trials
| image = clinical_trials.png
| titletext = We don't need to do a clinical trial of this change because the standard of care is to adopt new ideas without doing clinical trials.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by MEDICAL PROCEDURE STEP DERF - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The purpose of clinical trials in medicine is to make sure that a new medicine works and doesn't have serious side-effects. One example of the dangers of failing to make sure that it doesn't have serious side effects is {{w|thalidomide}}, which caused a lot of birth defects. In a clinical trial, the effect of a treatment is compared to the effect of a placebo, or an existing treatment, to make sure it has actually has a beneficial effect. (Earlier trials establish that it is even a viable candidate for testing and establishing possible dosages/regimens that can then be carried forward to a treatment (Phase III) trial.)

Before the invention of clinical trials, people generally didn't know, or at least had no way of confirming, whether medicines actually worked. Although some herbs and medicines were stumbled upon, most medicine was no better than a placebo. A lot of medical treatments such as {{w|trepanation}} and {{w|bloodletting}} not only had no benefit, but were very likely to be harmful. Those that did work at all were mostly just those few possible treatments that had been tried (for {{w|doctrine of names|whatever reason}}) and had just happened to be useful, but many others will have had neutral or even adverse effects, but had still managed to not be so entirely deadly such that recoveries regardless of (or despite!) such treatments were taken as common-knowledge 'proof' of their efficacy.

Some may, like some of today's treatments, have been gradually discovered to help a particular condition only by noticing beneficial side-effects when imbibed for sustenance or for unrelated medical 'guesses'. However, they also remained without the full scientific vigour so long as it remained a 'traditional remedy' with at best an oral tradition across many disparate practitioners, and no consistent effort to formalise or test the falsifiability of any findings.

At the time that this comic was published, the world was in the middle of the {{w|COVID-19 pandemic}}, which made the existence of clinical trials more relevant to the public, who waited eagerly for what sounded like good ideas to get through clinical trials and available to the general public…or fail clinical trials and not do that.

The title text is a nice bit of Monroean humor — because we didn't have clinical trials as part of the "standard of care" before their adoption, we didn't need to do testing before we started using them. If we had had them as the standard of care, then we would have had to perform tests before we switched over (in concept; in practice of course that kind of political change is still not tested) and it would have taken longer.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:1. Come up with new idea
:2. Convince people it's good

:[Scrawled in red handwriting, as an afterthought, an arrow indicating it is between item 2 and the original item 3]
:3. Check whether it works

:3. [Now scribbled over and amended to "4."]
:New idea is adopted

:[Caption below the panel]
:The invention of clinical trials.
{{comic discussion}}
[[Category: Science]]
[[Category: Comics with color]]

Talk:2529: Unsolved Math Problems

2021-10-16T21:59:41Z

162.158.159.25:

Center panel possibly related to "The drunkards walk" and theories on randomised motion.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/random-walk-puzzle-solution-20160907/
More references https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RandomWalk.html

Someone's gotta point out that "walking randomly on a grid, never visiting the same square twice" would rapidly trap you in a corner (even the example has a 50/50 chance of that happening on the next move) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.125|172.70.130.125]] 04:29, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Not if it's an infinite grid.

I think there's two different ways to interpret the question - as a uniform random element of the set of all non-self-intersection NxK length paths, in which case it's fine, or as a path defined by a random walk in which moves onto your own path are not allowed, which doesn't seem well defined, since you might end up in a situation where you are surrounded by your own path and cannot continue for all NxK steps.

An early example of a cursed problem is the Cantor Function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_function

I admire whoever wrote the description of the curve in the "cursed" panel. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 05:36, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

"Algebreic" is a misspelling of "algebraic". Could Randall really have made this mistake, or is it another malamanteu? What does "breic" come from? [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 06:10, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if Randall was actually referring to that quote about "Into the Woods", or he just thought "Sondheim calculus" sounded cool and it was a total coincidence. I found it when I googled "sondheim calculus" to make sure it wasn't a real thing. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 06:29, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

In panel 2, what would 'k' be? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.35.108|172.69.35.108]] 08:00, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

'k' would represent the number of marbles placed on the ground. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.88.127|162.158.88.127]] 08:09, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
:Though probably correct, I think the implied state is that an integer multiple (k) of N steps is made (s=N*k), with that number of marbles dropped, not s=(N*k)+c steps (for N>c) which would have the same result (uselessly) for all values of s where c ranges 0..N-1. It just introduces inflections into the graph (with s as an axis) that needn't be there (with just a k-based one). Or, in other words, selectively poll all s-values that are exactly divisible by N, and forget all the rest. (That divisor is k, and hence k is the number of marbles. Or perhaps k+1 if you leave one on the starting spot too.) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.25|162.158.159.25]] 21:59, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

To me, the cursed curve looks a bit like a crosier https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crosiere_of_arcbishop_Heinrich_of_Finstingen.jpg

--> I had the same impression and added it. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.94.219|162.158.94.219]] 11:40, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

No explanation of the "Euler Field Manifold Hypergroup (Isomorphic to a)..." part?

The cursed curve looks almost like someone took a graph of the Binet formula in the complex plane, stretched it out a bit, and rotated it onto the i axis.
: This was my first thought too when I saw it. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.34.87|172.69.34.87]] 17:16, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
: It looks like Vulcan script to me. [[User:LtPowers|LtPowers]] ([[User talk:LtPowers|talk]]) 13:51, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Could the cursed curve be a reference to the logistic map?

Can someone produce a high resolution image of the Cursed Curve? It needs to be on a T-shirt [[User:Avimimus|Avimimus]] ([[User talk:Avimimus|talk]]) 21:39, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Is someone going to mention the title text?

I swear I've seen that third plot, I thought it was in XKCD, but a quick run through tagged entries didn't find anything... unfortunately I consume a lot of math media so I can't place it. It's bugging me so I hope this note will serve as encourgement to someone that DOES remember [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.221|162.158.106.221]] 21:29, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2530: Clinical Trials

Talk:2529: Unsolved Math Problems