oracknows | April 4, 2007Well, well, well, well.
I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…
oracknows | April 3, 2007Dr Melody Clark of the British Antarctic Survey recently presented two bizarre adaptations that arthropods use to stave off cold temperatures. At the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting in Glasgow last week, Clark showed how the Onychiurus arcticus, an Artic arthropod, copes with the freezing winters. As the surrounding temperatures fall, the Onychiurus arcitus literally dries up, leaving what Clark describes as "a normal looking head, and a body which looks like a crumpled up crisp packet when it is fully dehydrated. But add a drop of water and it all goes back to normal!"…
oracknows | April 3, 2007Given my post yesterday about how increased scanning finds more disease that may or may not ever cause problems (and, don't worry, the promised followup post is coming, either tomorrow or Thursday), I thought it was an opportune time to post this little gem that's been floating around medicine for a long time. I first got it back in the late 1990's, and there are several permutations of it around, all with the same basic message:
EVERYBODY MUST GET SCANNED
(Sung to the tune of Bob Dylan's "Everybody Must Get Stoned")
They scan you when you fall and bump your head
They scan you when they think…
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…
oracknows | April 2, 2007...of this:
Horror film fans dressed up to look like an army of the undead have been stomping the streets of Brisbane, Australia, in an annual Zombie Walk.
Spattered with fake blood and their faces painted a deathly white, the "Zombies" staggered across the city to the botanical gardens.
The event originated in North America and is in its second year in Brisbane.
Its website explains that it is not an April Fool's joke "but serious, in a flippant sort of manner".
The Hitler Zombie is, however, disappointed that there was no brain-eating and no ridiculously overblown Holocaust analogies.
oracknows | April 2, 2007Now that it's been admitted that the apparent Discovery Institute prank, in which Dr. Michael Egnor posed as a parody of the most ignorant creationists there are, spouting truly inane and long-debunked canards about evolution for a month and a half, all in an effort to snooker us evil Darwinists into attacking him and then gloat as he revealed to the world that it was all just a joke, has been revealed to be in reality a Panda's Thumb April Fool's Day prank, I have to admit that it's depressing to have to contemplate again the fact that Dr. Egnor actually believes all the pseudoscientific and…
oracknows | April 2, 2007In the course of a few days last week, two prominent political personalities from different parties, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, announced that their cancers (breast cancer in the case of Edwards and colon cancer in the case of Snow), after having apparently been successfully treated two years ago had recurred and were now metastatic. One of the issues that comes up whenever famous people announce that they have cancer is the question of early detection and why we don't detect tumors earlier. Indeed, Amy…
oracknows | April 1, 2007Most jellyfish drift freely in the ocean current but the dangerous box jellyfish is an active swimmer. To help it navigate, the box jellyfish has 24 eyes that dangle from their cube-shaped bodies. One set of eyes is remarkably well developed and can detect color, size and shape, similar to our own eyes. At Lund University in Sweden, researchers recently set up a jellyfish obstacle course to test their vision and were surprised by how deftly the box jellyfish were able to avoid objects in the tank. However, their ability to jump through flaming hoops left much to be desire
Clearly there will…
oracknows | April 1, 2007Given that my attempt last year to pull an April Fool's Day gag fooled no one and in essence went over like the proverbial lead balloon, I'm chastened enough not to try it again this year. Maybe by next year, I'll get up the nerve again.
In the meantime, this little gem came through a mailing list that I'm on, and I wanted to see what my readers thought of it:
Redondo Beach Surfer News. Where the sun shines most the time, and the feelin' is laid back.
Sunday Apr 1, 2007. 5:40am
Chiropractic treatment fights global warming
by Olga Re
With the specter of global warming on the horizon, many…
oracknows | April 1, 2007This Panda's Thumb entry makes me wonder if I was wasting my time with all those rebuttals of Dr. Michael Egnor's astoundingly ignorant attacks on "Darwinism." Could it be that Dr. Egnor really was just pulling our legs all along?
I have to admit that it seems plausible. After all, how could a man like Dr. Egnor make it through an undergraduate biochemistry degree program, then medical school, then the often brutal and--dare I say it?--Darwinian culling process of a neurosurgery residency program, only to go on to become a respected Professor of Neurosurgery at SUNY Stony Brook, and, with all…
oracknows | April 1, 2007Palm Sunday seems an opportune time to mention how religious sensitivity all too often seeks to muzzle artistic expression and freedom of speech in the U.S. You may have heard of Cosimo Cavallaro's 200 lb. milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus on the cross called My Sweet Lord that was getting religious nutcase Bill Donohue so up in arms last week, leading to some threatening-sounding language while calling for a boycott of the hotel that houses the gallery where the sculpture was to be displayed during Holy Week:
As I've said many times before, Lent is the season for non-believers to sow seeds…
oracknows | March 31, 2007Why is it that the concepts of freedom of religion and freedom of speech seem so hard for some people to understand? Witness a truly idiotic attempt to prevent someone from appearing on TV simply because he is a Scientologist:
March 31, 2007 -- - A German official is demanding that John Travolta be uninvited from a guest appearance on a popular German television show tonight because he's a Scientologist, but show officials insist he will appear as scheduled.
Guenther Oettinger, the state governor of Baden-Wuerttemberg, wants Travolta off "Wanna Bet?" a popular show in Germany seen by an…
oracknows | March 31, 2007I have to wonder what we Anglophiles did before the invention of BitTorrent. I guess we probably waited months or years for the best British TV to make its way across the pond, usually to be shown on PBS, if at all. Now, I can look forward to the return of one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who, whose modern reincarnation with David Tennant is starting its third series tonight at 7 PM (London time, of course). I like the show so much that, even after BitTorrent-ing the episodes, I still ended up buying the DVDs when they made their way to the U.S., as a means of showing my support for the show…
oracknows | March 30, 2007And I bet you wonder what nudist smokers did with their smokes before this.
Who knew this would be an issue in 1938?
I guess even nudists need to keep their smokes with them. I wonder where they kept their cigs before this was invented?
oracknows | March 30, 2007While looking for a birthday card for a relative a while back, I found this card and was intrigued enough to buy it, even though it wasn't appropriate for the person for whom I was seeking a card:
So far, it's just pretty standard Bush-chimp stuff, a staple of comedy ever since W. took office. But what got me was the inside of the card:
Two points:
It's rather amazing that the whole "intelligent design" debate has become so ubiquitous that it's showing up in birthday cards, of all things.
I haven't decided if this is the best birthday card ever or the worst birthday card ever. Opinions?
oracknows | March 30, 2007It is with some trepidation that I approach the latest target of Your Friday Dose of Woo.
No, it's not because the woo is so potent that it has actually struck the fear of You-Know-Who in me (I leave it up to readers to determine whether I was referring to God or Valdemort), although it is indeed potent woo. Nor is it that the woo is boring woo (there's a reason why "power of prayer" kind of woo usually doesn't make it into YFDoW unless there's a really entertaining angle to be targeted). No, it's because this particular woo seems to combine genetics with systems biology (I kid you not),…
oracknows | March 29, 2007Although I'm rather puzzled by the reference to zebras spilling their plastinia, I can't argue that, once again, Martin has come through with another great collection of skeptical blogging as he hosts the 57th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. Your duty, should you decide to accept it, is to head on over there and check it out. You won't regret it.
Next up is Geek Counterpoint, who will be hosting on Thursday, April 12. If you're a blogger with a skeptical bent, it's time to start thinking about subjects or claims that could use a little critical thinking applied to them. Also, if you think…
oracknows | March 29, 2007Apparently the guys over at Denialism.com have irritated Bill Dembski and his band of merry sycophants over at Uncommon Descent. All I can say is: Uncommon Descent, meet the Galileo Gambit. Oh, you've already met the Galileo Gambit, I see.
That must be the explanation for why you do the Galileo Gambit whine so well...
oracknows | March 29, 2007I was going to try to be a good boy. Really, I was. I had been planning on answering a question about the early detection of tumors. It was an opportune time to do so, given the recent news of cancer recurrence in Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow, coupled with a couple of papers I saw just yesterday and the announcement of new screening guidelines for breast MRI. However, I was finding that writing the piece would be fairly complex (because it's a complex topic) and that it might even require a multi-post approach. There was no way to do it justice today; doing it over the weekend would make a…