June 30, 2007
Ever wonder what you could do with the hole in CDs?
Category: Humor
Well, now you know....
Posted by Orac at 3:30 PM • 0 Comments
Respectful Insolence
"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine,
quackery, science, pseudoscience, history, and pseudohistory (and anything else that interests him)
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Who (or what) is Orac?
Orac is the nom de blog of a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued here, along with a DISCLAIMER that you should read before reading any medical discussions here.)
Orac's old Blog is archived at Archived Insolence.
Recent Posts
- Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- The 86th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: A bitch of a meeting. Really.
- A (kind of) new cancer research blog
- When popularity outpaces science in surgery
- Geez, give a guy tenure...
- Be afraid, be very, very afraid, people of Butler County, PA...
- No justice for Abubakar Tariq Nadama after all?
- Spell-checking is a good thing
- The "mind-body" connection series on NBC News
- "Why aren't there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?" cries the CAM advocate
Recent Comments
- Kate on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- Pineyman on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- Will TS on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- charles on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- anon on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- Sastra on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- viggen on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- Ktesibios on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- Glenn on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
- Jim on Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants
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Bad covers
Category: Entertainment/culture • Music • Popular culture
In keeping my (temporary), retreat from medical blogging for the weekend, I thought you might enjoy as much as I did this list of the 100 Worst Cover Songs. I do have a few objections, though. For one thing, I...
Posted by Orac at 9:31 AM • 8 Comments
June 29, 2007
I poured a death potion for my sick baby!
Category: Entertainment/culture • History • Humor • Medicine
I love these old ads. Remember, keep fresh batteries in your house or you might poison your baby! The tag line sounds almost like the reaction of an antivaccination loon to the polio vaccine....
Posted by Orac at 3:08 PM • 11 Comments
The "just another study" gambit
Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
I wrote about this classic crank gambit a bit about a week and a half ago, emphasizing that no amount of studies will convince a crank. Now, MarkH at denialism.com takes on the same issue in more detail so that...
Posted by Orac at 12:31 PM • 1 Comments
Your Friday Dose of Woo: Your interactive quantum gyroscopic homeopathic DNA activating....
Category: Alternative medicine • Friday Woo • Humor • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
Here's something I've wanted to try for a while now. It'll either be wildly successful and popular, along the lines of You Might Be an Altie If..., or it'll be an utter failure, sinking into oblivion. Which one it ends...
Posted by Orac at 9:01 AM • 27 Comments
June 28, 2007
More on the Generation Rescue poll
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Yesterday, I did a deconstruction of Generation Rescue's dubious "study" (in reality an automated telephone poll) that claims to show that vaccines increase the rate of autism and other "neurologic diseases." Now skeptical blogger extraordinaire Prometheus has posted his own...
Posted by Orac at 6:01 PM • 6 Comments
Deepak Chopra's woo-ful whine
Category: Alternative medicine • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
Pity poor Deepak Chopra. I've abused him on this blog many times, even coining a word ("Choprawoo") for the silliness that emanates from his keyboard every time he posts his inanity to the Huffington Post or his own IntentBlog. I...
Posted by Orac at 3:02 PM • 19 Comments
David Kirby's Osama bin Laden vaccine gambit, revisited
Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Bioethics • Medicine • Quackery
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I wrote about how mercury militia buddy David Kirby invoked the Osama bin Laden gambit in discussing the Autism Omnibus trial? I wondered where Kirby's claim came from and what vaccine components were "derived from pigs," as did a number of you. Now I know, thanks to a reader.
Posted by Orac at 9:01 AM • 11 Comments
Poor Behe, now he's in for it
Category: Evolution • Intelligent design/creationism • Pseudoscience • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking
You may have noticed that I haven't commented much on Michael Behe's recent book, The Edge of Evolution, other than to bemoan its presence in the Evolution section of the University of Chicago Barnes & Noble. I have, however, read...
Posted by Orac at 4:30 AM • 6 Comments
June 27, 2007
Am I an old blogger?
It was with sadness that I saw fellow medical blogger Dr. Charles' announcement that he is taking a break ("perhaps a long break," as he puts it) from blogging. He points out that he's been at it for almost three...
Posted by Orac at 11:01 PM • 0 Comments
Condolences to Lindsay Beyerstein
Please take a moment to head over to Majikthise and pay your respects to Lindsay, whose father, Barry L. Beyerstein, died yesterday. Dr. Beyerstein was a prominent skeptic and very active in the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He also served...
Posted by Orac at 2:01 PM • 4 Comments
Fun with phone surveys and vaccines
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Pseudoscience • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
J. B. Handley never ceases to amaze me how much he is willing to torture me with his abuses of science, never mind his childish attempts to annoy me by cybersquatting domain names that he thinks I want. So there...
Posted by Orac at 9:01 AM • 6 Comments
June 26, 2007
And now for some NIH science wonkiness
If you're not into the ins and outs of applying for NIH funding, this one may be a bit too wonky for you. I'm linking, however, to a rather interesting discussion of how to go about getting funding from the...
Posted by Orac at 2:01 PM • 9 Comments
The Autism Omnibus: The difference between real scientists and crank scientists
Category: Alternative medicine • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
The Autism Omnibus trial continued last week, which was devoted primarily to the government's case. Consequently, there were a variety of real experts, as opposed to the pseudoexperts called by the prosecution last week. With only the occasional hiccup, they...
Posted by Orac at 9:06 AM • 17 Comments
June 25, 2007
I have this syndrome!
Category: Medicine • News of the Weird
Finally, there's a word for a feeling that many people have no doubt experienced many times: Some call it "phantom vibration syndrome." Others prefer "vibranxiety" -- the feeling when you answer your vibrating cellphone, only to find it never vibrated...
Posted by Orac at 2:01 PM • 20 Comments
"Darwinism": A "marketing problem"?
Category: Evolution • Intelligent design/creationism • Pseudoscience • Religion • Science • Skepticism/critical thinking
Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or...
Posted by Orac at 9:01 AM • 53 Comments
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