oracknows | July 22, 2006I tell you, I take a night off from blogging, not even glancing at the blog or my e-mail, instead falling into a deep slumber at 10 PM after The Dog Whisperer on TV, thanks to a somewhat stressful week and a large meal plus a beer, and what happens?
Abraham' Cherrix's uncle comments on the old blog and the legal decision regarding whether Abraham has to undergo chemotherapy is issued, three days later than originally anticipated, that's what! In this case, the judge decided that Abraham must report on Tuesday to undergo conventional therapy. Fortunately, I realize (most of the time, anyway)…
oracknows | July 22, 2006The latest Carnival of Bad History has been posted over at Hiram Hover's. If you think the Bush Administration can abuse science, you ain't seen nothin' yet when it comes to how history is abused by various people and groups for ideological purposes!
oracknows | July 21, 2006A little blog housekeeping is in order here.
Several days ago, the overlords at SEED Magazine installed a new spam filter, which, despite some fine-tuning over the last several days, unfortunately still seems a bit more indiscriminate than we'd like, sometimes gobbling up legitimate comments without our being able to figure out what words are triggering the filter. On the internal discussion forums, some of us, such as Ed Brayton, have been scratching our heads over what triggered the spam filter on some comments. Worse, because this filter works before Moveable Type ever sees the comment,…
oracknows | July 21, 2006Alright, I admit it.
I went a little overboard with last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. This feature was intended to be a light-hearted look at whatever particular woo target that catches my fancy on a given week, as opposed to the more serious discussions of alternative medicine I like to do at other times. However, it's a fine line between believing in a bit of strange altie woo and possibly being a disturbed individual, and I fear that last week's targets (the guy who wanted to sell the secrets of Jesus on Ebay and Alex Chiu, who claims to have figured out how humans can be…
oracknows | July 20, 2006You may have noticed that I opted out of the last two or three weeks worth of Ask a ScienceBlogger questions. The last couple of weeks it was because the questions simply didn't interest me, and the week before that it was because i just plain forgot.
This week, however, our overlords at SEED Magazine demand:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?
That's a pretty easy one. I'm with Stein in that I answer: Now.
Think about it. I'm a physician, and my interest is in studying cancer. I started graduate school in 1990. Since…
oracknows | July 20, 2006
Thirty seven years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man ever to walk on the Moon. (You can quibble and say it was July 21 by Universal Time (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time), but I'm an American, and to me as a child it happened on July 20.
In any case, I have two things to post that are of interest on this anniversary of the first Moon landing. First, here's an über-cool website that allows you to view a panoramas of the Moon made up of high resolution photos from the original missions digitally stitched together from photos taken during original lunar…
oracknows | July 19, 2006Zoinks! Why didn't anyone think of this before?
This week's Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle starts out in the Mystery Machine, courtesy of Big Heathen Mike at Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant:
We join the gang as everyone got ready for a weekend adventure...
Everyone piled into the stretch Mystery Machine and headed off on our road trip to Franken Castle. It looked to be a great meeting this week and the change of location from "the 'net", most agreed, was a good idea.
And it was.
Next up to host is Daylight Atheism. Start getting your best skeptical material ready to submit to the Circle, and…
oracknows | July 19, 2006The latest Tangled Bank has been posted at a fellow skeptic's blog, Salto Sobrius, who, it just so happens, is also scheduled to host the Skeptics' Circle in September. Go catch up on the best science blogging of the last two weeks.
Speaking of the Skeptics' Circle, you still have a few hours left to get your entries to Mike. Then join him tomorrow. Nothing like a little extra dose of critical thinking and science for your week.
oracknows | July 19, 2006I thought this was a joke when a reader e-mailed me about it. I mean, it's just so over-the-top that I had a hard time believing that it was real.
It was (found via MacDailyNews):
The huge rise of autism in Britain is linked to old iPod batteries, mobile phones and other products of the electronic age, a leading scientist claimed this weekend.
Autistic children have been shown to have problems getting rid of toxic metals - and those metals are increasingly polluting the environment, says Dr Richard Lathe.
"Think of iPod batteries, computers, television sets and mobile phones - thousands of…
oracknows | July 19, 2006Here we are, five and a half years into George W. Bush's Presidency, and he's not yet vetoed a bill. Not even a single bill. All sorts of bad legislation have been passed, from the bankruptcy reform legislation that makes it harder for people to start again after declaring bankruptcy, to budgets containing huge increases in spending, to a really offensive campaign finance reform package that restricts political speech.
All passed with nary a peep from the President.
So what gets Bush's dander up enough to finally pull out his veto pen and use his power to veto a bill he doesn't like?…
oracknows | July 18, 2006If Your Friday Dose of Woo from me isn't enough woo for you, now Medgadget has inaugurated a new feature it calls Pseudoscience Friday (its first target: bioresonance testing). Between the two blogs, plus the Amazing Randi, that ought to be all the woo any skeptic could want to see debunked every Friday!
In the meantime, since I mentioned it so late, it can serve as a little appetizer before the skeptical feast that Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant is poised to deliver on Thursday when he hosts the Skeptics' Circle.
The guys at Medgaget did have a good idea. They're taking requests, and, now,…
oracknows | July 18, 2006Egads, I almost forgot to mention it, but the latest RINO Sightings was posted. Oh, well, better late than never.
oracknows | July 18, 2006Fellow traveler in the fight against Holocaust denial Andrew Mathis asks whether Israel has adequate justification for its recent attacks in Lebanon and Gaza based on "just war theory." Basically, he finds that Israel meets many of the criteria, but fails in proportionality of response and using force as a last resort. However, he finds that Hezbollah and Hamas fail to meet these criteria by an even greater degree. I'm not sure I agree with all of it (for instance, I wouldn't be nearly so hard on the Lebanese government, given that it really doesn't have the power to rein in Hezbollah or…
oracknows | July 18, 2006Over the weekend, between bouts of rounding on patients and seeing consults (I was on call), I perused the Last 24 Hours channel on the ScienceBlogs homepage, when I came across a fellow SB'er discussing a recent paper in Science about evolution. It was a study of the finches of the Galapagos Islands by Princeton evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant. Being a physician and not a hardcore evolutionary biologist, I must confess that I don't always get into the nitty-gritty of how biologists study evolution, but this was a compelling story that was fairly easy for me to understand. I…
oracknows | July 17, 2006The time is rapidly approaching again. This Thursday, the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle, the only blog carnival that I'm aware of that is dedicated to skepticism and critical thinking, is scheduled to appear at Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant, which means you have only two days to get your best skeptical blogging to Mike, per his instructions here. Guidelines for what sorts of blogging the Skeptics' Circle is looking for can be found here.
oracknows | July 17, 2006Via Kevin, MD, here's a Washington Post article describing how the religious beliefs of health care practitioners result in the denial of care. Here are some examples:
Cynthia Copeland also had a run-in with a pharmacist in 2004. He wrongly assumed she was planning an abortion because she had a prescription for a drug that can be used for that purpose. In fact, Copeland had already had undergone a procedure to remove a fetus that had no pulse, and she needed the drug to complete the process.
"I was sitting there in the drugstore waiting and heard the pharmacist say really loudly, 'I refuse to…
oracknows | July 17, 2006Many of the bloggers here at ScienceBlogs lament about the woeful state of science knowledge among the U.S. public. This ignorance about the basics of science and the scientific method has been blamed on many things, whether it be the poor quality of science education in the public schools, an all-too-prevalent view of science as not being "sexy" or "interesting," and the rise of a distinct antiscience bias, particularly in the present administration. Many of us have also lamented at one time or another about how this ignorance allows pseudoscientific belief systems like "intelligent design"…
oracknows | July 16, 2006It was a sad day when of the earliest and most prolific medbloggers, Medpundit retired from blogging a couple of months ago. However, like many of us, she's found that she just can't keep out of the blogospher, and, via Kevin, M.D. and GruntDoc, I've learned that she's back:
Well, it's official. I'm a blogging addict. I can't give this up. Not quite two months away from it, and I'm forsaking my family to rejoin the blogging life.
I'm not really forsaking them. They urged me to return. Smothering mothering is not working out well for us. Not only that, without blogging, my rants against the…