Popular Culture
oracknows | February 16, 2010I realize that Chris Mooney is a polarizing figure here on the ol' ScienceBlogs, but I have to give him props for doing a damned fine job handling questions about vaccines, autism, and Andrew Wakefield's utterly discredited 1998 Lancet study, which was retracted by the Lancet's editors last week:
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I wish I could say the same thing for Nancy Snyderman. Although she was mostly right, I cringed--big time--when she insisted that there are no studies that show a link between vaccines and autism. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!…
oracknows | February 15, 2010I feel really, really good today.
The reason? Simple Orac has annoyed Jim Carrey enough to ban him on Twitter. The exchange went something like this. For the first time in a while, I was perusing Twitter (I have a really hard time keeping my Insolence to 140 characters; so I only check my Twitter account maybe once or twice a week) when I saw someone mention a couple of Tweets by Jim Carrey that went like this:
Dr. Andrew Wakefield's studies r being unfairly supressed. His newest vacs vs unvacs study MUST BE PUBLISHED. RT "Show Me The Monkeys!" ;^)
Folks, it's a REAL STUDY of chimps subjected…
oracknows | January 30, 2010Thanks to having been up all night Thursday night and most of the night a couple of days before that working on a grant, I know I haven't had a chance to write about the GMC's ruling on Andrew Wakefield's unethical conduct in conducting his "clinical research" that according to him linked the MMR vaccine to autism. That dubious and possibly even fraudulent research ultimately fueled the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. and, aided and abetted by the sensationalistic and credulous U.K. media, Wakefield started an MMR scare that persists to this day, having led to vaccination uptake rates…
oracknows | January 28, 2010You knew it was coming. You knew from many previous incidents that it was inevitable:
Who knew Hitler was such a Mac geek?
Personally, although I think the iPad looks like a really cool device, I'm really not sure where it would fit into my life. I already have an iPhone, which I love, and I already have a MacBook Pro, which I also love. Given that, I just don't see the need for the iPad, at least not for me. However, I also know that I'm not the sort of person for whom the iPad was designed.
oracknows | January 17, 2010While I'm working today, enjoy some bizarre cartoon awesomeness from Max Fleischer, courtesy of Boing-Boing:
Truly amazing. And 80 years old, too, with a wicked jazz soundtrack. The Fleischer brothers rule.
oracknows | January 12, 2010For some reason, I've tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I just haven't paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it's because, even when he was on Oprah's show, he didn't delve as deeply into the woo as her other frequent guests, such as Christiane Northrup, Suzanne Sommers, or Jenny McCarthy. The one or two times I saw him with Oprah, usually online because I'm never home to watch Oprah during the day and on those rare days when I am home on a weekeday, trust me, I don't watch Oprah. Then Dr. Oz got his own…
oracknows | December 24, 2009If there's one thing that's irritated the crap out of me ever since I entered the medical field, it's celebrities with more fame than brains or sense touting various health remedies. Of late, three such celebrities have spread more misinformation and quackery than the rest of the second tier combined. Truly, together, they are the Unholy Trinity of Celebrity Quackery.
The first two of them, of course, are that not-so-dynamic duo of anti-vaccine morons, Jenny McCarthy and her much more famous and successful boyfriend Jim Carrey. Having apparently decided that selling "Indigo Child" woo was not…
oracknows | November 9, 2009
This project is behind schedule. The reasons, I hope, are forgivable. First off, there was just too much other stuff going on last week, to the point where, even though I've read several chapters of Suzanne Somers' new book (if you can call it that) Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place (Random House website), I couldn't force myself to sit down in front of the computer, copy of Knockout in front of me in order to pick choice brain-necrosing quotes from. Besides, the whole issue of Desiree Jennings came up, as well as a…
oracknows | November 3, 2009Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. After a prolonged wait, it's finally here:
Yes, my promotional copy of Suzanne Somers new book Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place. (The Dalek was included because, well, I was just feeling perverse when I took this picture.)
I can only say that, after having perused the next couple of chapters after Chapter 1, I can already feel my brain melting and oozing out through my ears, screaming as the neuron-necrosing stupidity liquifies it. I've also noticed that, by and large, this book is…
oracknows | October 22, 2009Before I move on for a while from the topic of that faded 1970s comic actress, Suzanne Somers, whose latest book is a paean to cancer quackery and who has been carpetbombing the airwaves with burning napalm stupid, I think one revelation is worth a brief mention. Specifically, after my post about how I find Somers' story about being misdiagnosed with cancer, a fan wrote:
Orac,
Sarcoidosis? Nope. Wrong again. Suzanne admitted on TV she had an acute pulmonary fungal infection, valley fever. Try going back to medical school, you mental midget.
I do so love the adoration of my fans. However, it…
oracknows | October 22, 2009Apparently, some of my readers in Canada are getting this when they look at any of my Suzanne Somers posts:
No other country seems to be affected; at least, no readers from other countries have reported the problem to me.
This will not do. The Overlords have been informed. In the meantime, if you are in Canada, I apologize. Ads for such rank quackery and misinformation have no more place on ScienceBlogs than the creationist ads that popped up a while ago. Fortunately, from my locale, I have not been able to replicate the problem. However, if you are in a country other than Canada and see…
oracknows | October 21, 2009There are two times a year that seem to be a time to beware of a serious assault of pseudoscience and quackery. The first time of year is in April, which is Autism Awareness Month. Over the last few years I can be just as sure as night following day, only to be followed by day again, that the anti-vaccine movement will use the occasion of Autism Awareness month to hit the airwaves with a blistering barrage of brain-dead buffoonery about vaccines and autism. This year, it consisted of Jenny McCarthy hitting Larry King Live with her equally brain dead boyfriend Jim Carrey, as well as Generation…
oracknows | October 17, 2009Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this: I'm incredibly grateful that this is the season finale of Maher's show. I don't think I can take much more of his moronic anti-science stances being proudly trumpeted.
It was painful to watch and showed very much that Bill Maher still doesn't get it. In fact, if anything, he escalated his quack…
omnibrain | October 5, 2009I've previously explored Superman's X-Ray vision and its scientific basis. Now it seems that someone has FINALLY come up with a reasonable explanation of his flight. I'm pretty sure I could breed some Supermen now given the right lab space. Postdoc here I come!
Anyway, here's the abstract:
Since Time immemorial, man has sought to explain the powers of Kal-El, a.k.a. Superman. Siegel et al. Supposed that His mighty strength stems from His origin on another planet whose density and as a result, gravity, was much higher than our own. Natural selection on the planet of krypton would therefore…
omnibrain | October 5, 2009
So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled "On the plausibility of superman's x-ray vision"
But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman's amazing seeing through underwear powers.
In Correcting Misconceptions…
oracknows | October 2, 2009...for Bill Maher to receive the Richard Dawkins Award. It was a huge mistake on the part of the Atheist Alliance International to award it, for the reasons I've repeated ad nauseam over the last couple of weeks; so I won't go there again.
What I really want to know is what happened. I can't be in L.A. this weekend. Actually, I'd much rather be in London for TAM London than in L.A. anyway. Unfortunately, I can't be in either place (although I will be going to Chicago next weekend for the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress; keep that in mind if any of you Chicagoans wants to try a…
oracknows | September 28, 2009I promised last week in a post in which I described Bill Maher's latest pro-quackery remarks (this time, supporting cancer quackery), today is the day that I'm going to ask you, my readers, for some help. As I complained a while back, Bill Maher, who is anything but a rationalist or a booster of science (at least when it comes to medicine) is being awarded the Richard Dawkins Award by the Atheist Alliance International at its convention this weekend in Los Angeles.
As I said before, given that (1) the award lists "advocates increased scientific knowledge" as one of its criteria; (2) that…
oracknows | September 27, 2009Khhaaaaaannnn!
I mean, Arriiiaaaaannaaa!
Ever since its very inception, I've been--shall we say?--less than enthusiastic about the Huffington Post's medical blogging. Indeed, the level of anti-vaccine rhetoric there from the very beginning, back in 2005, astounded me. If anything, HuffPo's record has gotten even worse over the last four years, be it Deepak Chopra, or, in 2009, the addition of a variety of quacks to its roster, not to mention a brain-blisteringly stupid anti-vaccine rant by Fire Marshal Bill--I mean Jim Carrey--the promotion of "functional medicine" quackery by Mark Hyman, "…
oracknows | September 25, 2009There once was a time not so long ago--oh, say, four our five years--when the anti-vaccine fringe was looked upon as what it was: a fringe group, a bunch of quacks and quack advocates, all in essence one big conspiracy theory movement, in which vaccines are the One True Cause of Autism. At the time, there were two basic flavors of this movement, the American and the British variety. The British variety began back in the 1990s, fueled by Andrew Wakefield's pseudoscience, lack of ethics, bad science, and even potentially data falsification for his original 1998 Lancet study that claimed to have…
oracknows | September 19, 2009The other day, I ripped a certain woo-meister whom regular readers all know and most, if not all, regular readers mostly despise, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com. As you may recall, a few days ago he slimed Patrick Swayze the day he died from pancreatic cancer, posting an article saying that Swayze was killed by chemotherapy and that he'd still be alive and Dirty Dancing today if he had only eschewed that horrible, evil Devil's brew of chemotherapy and gone with all "natural" cures. It was simply a followup of an article he wrote back in January saying in essence the same thing, although Adams…