oracknows | October 28, 2006With the Tigers losing the World Series last night, I think I need something light and funny to pick me up. Here's just the thing:
Believe it or not, you don't have to be Jewish to learn Yiddish with George and Laura.
(The part mentioning evolution at the end is particularly timely, given a couple of my posts this week.)
oracknows | October 27, 2006This is getting depressing.
Last night, the Tigers lost a particularly heartbreaking game 5-4. It's heartbreaking because it's a game that they really should have won. Unfortunately errors and the two unearned runs that they allowed killed them.
Now the 2006 World Series is at the same point that the 1968 World Series was, with the Cardinals leading three games to one. In 1968, the Tigers came back and won three games in a row. I'm not so sanguine that they can do it again, particularly given how their inexperience has led the pitching staff to make so many costly errors. (And, besides, the…
oracknows | October 27, 2006It's Friday, and I haven't done this for a long time; so here we go. I fired up iTunes, set it to Shuffle Play, and awaited with baited breath for what came out. See how this stuff compares to Mark's list today:
1. My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade (from The Black Parade). OK, I admit it. I engineered this list so that MCR would be first on the list before the randomness follows. This album deserves it. I just got this CD a few days ago, and it hasn't left my car or the top of my playlist. MCR takes punk, glam, Goth, and sprinkles in a touch of Queen here and there like…
oracknows | October 27, 2006Tired of doing Google searches for evidence-based discussions of dubious-sounding medical treatments and finding that the first 100 sites (or, if you're unlucky, the first 1,000 sites) that pop up are nothing more than altie woo, shills selling alternative medicine and supplements, and CureZone or Whale.to wannabes? Here's a useful tool. Le Canard Noir has put together a QuackSafe⢠Search Engine:
The Search Engine will only return matches from sites and blogs that are known to supply reliable information about quackery, quacks, medical fraud and pseudoscience. It is based on the newly…
oracknows | October 27, 2006No, I'm not talking about "Iron Justice," a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the future. This time, it's something different. This week, as every week since inaugurating Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was sitting back, contemplating what flavor of woo I should have a little fun with. As is often the case, it was hard. No, it wasn't hard because of lack…
oracknows | October 26, 2006The Skeptics' Circle has been hosted in many places and in many forms, but leave it to Kev at Left Brain/Right Brain to bring it to the one place that it's been hosted before.
We're talking Heaven, people.
Naturally, the assembled skeptics were a bit disconcerted by this particular venue, as amusingly recounted by Kev:
It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Persuading a bunch of Skeptics' to affirm their belief in the blood of Jesus in order to attend a conference in Heaven. Admittedly, they didn't look very happy about it, but it worked. Skeptics' in Heaven. Marvellous.
Once the…
oracknows | October 26, 2006You didn't think this one would go by without my commenting on it, did you? Even though Abel and Tara have already ably commented on it, I can't help but jump in because the article echoes one of the common threads of this blog since the very beginning. Besides, as I've said before, just because everyone else has already commented on an article or issue never stopped me from jumping in before (well, almost never, anyway).
The article in question, Ignoring the failures of alternative medicine, is remarkable (to me, at least) because I can't recall any major media outlet like MSNBC daring to…
oracknows | October 25, 2006This one's for you, Afarensis (all in good fun, of course--well, for the most part, anyway):
Here's Jeff Suppan, pitcher for the Cardinals (who, it just so happens, will be starting game four of the World Series tonight) appearing prominently along with Patricia Heaton, Jim Caviezel, and other celebrities in a predictably lame "response" ad to the ad that Michael J. Fox made supporting the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Claire McCaskill. Fox made the original ad because McCaskill supports removing the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that destroys embryos to…
oracknows | October 25, 2006One problem with getting old is that you start to see bands that you admired in your youth start to betray what you perceived as their ideals. The Baby Boomers were the first to start experiencing the disillusionment that comes with that, and songs from the rock gods of the 1960's have become ubiquitous in ads for everything from clothes to Cadillacs. Of course, bands that I idolized when I was in high school and college are no different. Sometimes, however, something happens to members of such a band that is just plain bizarre.
For example, could you believe that a member of The Clash is now…
oracknows | October 24, 2006Yesterday, I wrote about a rather disgusting and ignorant tirade by Rush Limbaugh about Michael J. Fox, in which Limbaugh accused Fox of either faking Parkinsons's symptoms or purposely not taking his medications before taping an ad in which he supported a Democratic candidate because she supports stem cell research.
Advice Goddess gives us more perspective with an excerpt from Fox's autobiography that explains how difficult it is to balance the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease with the side effects from the medications necessary to treat it. Fox describes this as a "constant vexation for the…
oracknows | October 24, 2006...the World Series, with the Tigers versus the Cardinals.
The series is now tied at one game apiece and set to start again in St. Louis tonight at 8:05 PM. This is a real pain because it means that it'll be pretty late when the game ends, and if it goes into extra innings I'll be hurting tomorrow.
Even so, all I can say again is: GO TIGERS!
oracknows | October 24, 2006Yesterday afternoon, while working on grants, I was flipping through radio channels, and I came across something that stopped my dial twiddling in its tracks. It was Rush Limbaugh, and he was trashing Michael J. Fox for making a commercial in support of stem cell research.
As you may recall, Michael J. Fox is the unfortunate sufferer of a virulent form of Parkinson's Disease, which he contracted at the very young age of around 30. He's now had it for 15 years, and, as Parkinson's is wont to do, it's slowly gotten worse. Indeed, Fox has more or less given up acting since 2000 because of the…
oracknows | October 24, 2006I'm with Kevin, M.D. on this one. Not giving required vaccinations is akin to child neglect:
CHICAGO - State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests.
All states allow children to be exempted from school immunization requirements for medical reasons -- because they might have a bad reaction, for example, or have weak immune systems -- and 48 states allow exemptions for personal or religious beliefs.
To get non-medical exemptions, some states require documentation, notarized…
oracknows | October 23, 2006The Carnival of Bad History has been posted at Archy. Go there and learn how history can be distorted and abused for ideological purposes or just plain ignorance. Oddly enough, though, there doesn't appear to be an article on that ultimate form of bad history, Holocaust denial. There is, however, a rather odd article on the Nazi-Yeti alliance.
oracknows | October 23, 2006...not according to this article:
If 40 percent of Americans refuse to believe that humans evolved from earlier hominids, how many will accept that the book we know as the Bible evolved from earlier texts and was not handed down, in toto, by God in its present form?
The fossil evidence for human evolution is permanently on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Hard evidence that the Bible took its present shape over centuries will be on display for the next 11 weeks, from today through Jan. 7, across the Mall at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
They are rarer than…
oracknows | October 23, 2006Having been out of town a lot the last couple of weeks, I haven't read the New York Times Magazine the last couple of Sundays. It's a magazine that I either read cover to cover or toss aside having read only The Ethicist, something that usually happens when it delves into some annoying hipster topic or lets the fashion and food stuff expand to fill too much of the magazine. This week, I came across an article that made me think: What should be the penalty for academic misconduct in science? Consider the case of Dr. Eric Poehlman:
On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood before a…
oracknows | October 22, 2006Yesterday I was in a strange mood; so I posted a couple of David Hasselhoff videos, asking the question: Why is this guy such a big pop star in Germany? Fellow ScienceBlogger Mike the Mad Biologist then informed me that the videos that I posted (the Hoff doing Rhinestone Cowboy and Secret Agent Man) aren't necessarily the "best" the Hoff has to offer. And I have to admit that he's right. See if you agree:
What's with the Hoff and flying in videos? He was flying in the Secret Agent Man video, and he's flying here.
But, with all due respect to Mike, I'm not sure if even the above video is…
oracknows | October 22, 2006A "reality" television show is being developed in Israel that has to be about the biggest misnomer I've ever heard. You see, infamous fake "spoon bender" Uri Geller is doing a televisions show in which he seeks an "heir" to his psychic/telekinetic throne:
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - After four decades of bending spoons, halting clocks, reading minds, and penning metaphysical thrillers, Uri Geller is seeking a paranormal protege.
A reality television show being produced in Israel, where Geller grew up, will feature 10 contestants vying for the title of "heir" to the world-famous celebrity psychic.
"…
oracknows | October 21, 2006...the 2006 World Series.
The Tigers are rested and ready; the Cardinals just finished taking out the Mets in a prolonged series. Will the Tigers be rusty in Game One? Or will they pick up right where they left off?
My prediction? The Tigers in six.
GO TIGERS!
oracknows | October 21, 2006...OK, no you didn't. But I found it amusing, anyway.
Can anyone explain to me why David Hasselhoff is such a phenomenon in Germany and other parts of Europe? Or why the video below ever got made:
It's a question I've asked before.