oracknows | December 8, 2006Via The Second Sight, I find an example of a tool that, I suspect, many alties will find highly useful: The Woo World Self Treater. It'll allow you to diagnose yourself free from the boot of big pharma and the oppressive evidence-based medicine that close-minded "conventional" doctors like me advocate.
My results are below the fold:
Quantum-consciousness analysis of your auric field shows you are suffering the symptoms of Temporomandibular Joint Disorder, which is commonly seen among males born under the sign of Leo. This may also be due to alien implants. Magnet therapy has been shown to be…
oracknows | December 8, 2006Ever since I started Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) back in June, I had always intended that someday I wanted to expand this loving deconstruction of various forms of woo beyond just medical woo and quackery. True, having a little fun with woo that claims to treat disease or restore health is something that I've gotten pretty good at. You may wonder why I would want to move beyond medicine occasionally. After all, there's no shortage of medical woo to deal with every Friday, and I'll almost certainly return to it next week.
Sometimes a skeptic needs a change of pace, and this is one of…
oracknows | December 7, 2006
Matt over at Pooflingers Anonymous informs me that Respectful Insolence⢠been nominated as a finalist in the Best Medical/Health Issues Blog category of the Weblog Awards. I have no idea who nominated me (I certainly didn't and was unaware until the other night that I was even a finalist), but my thanks go out to you, whoever you are. As you can see from my little logo, on the sidebar, I was a finalist last year as well but didn't win. Last year, I was in the Best New Blog Category, though, and lost big time to the political blogs. (Note how the nominees for Best Blog are, with the…
oracknows | December 7, 2006As much as I detest Holocaust denial, neo-Nazis, and all they stand for, I can still understand why there is a certain sensitivity to emblems of Nazi-ism in Germany and Austria, although I have pointed out that sometimes Germans and Austrians go a bit too far, all too often stomping on free speech in the process, in their efforts to prevent the resurgence of Nazi-ism.
However, even 61 years later, there may be a reason these governments act the way they do. There is still a large contingent of people in Germany who see Nazi symbolism where none is there or intended:
BERLIN (Reuters) - A…
oracknows | December 7, 2006Those of you who have been kind enough to submit your skeptical blogging to this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle may have been puzzled by the replies you received. It appears that DoC relied upon a certain medium to transmit the entries telepathically or by distant reading to DoC.
Well, now that the Circle is here, it would appear that DoC is AWOL. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), the Medium has taken a hand and channeled the entries to a certain very famous deceased skeptic named Harry, who is as we speak transmitting them from the other side to…
oracknows | December 7, 2006
Sixty-five years ago today, the 1st Air Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, plunging the United States into World War II. Four days later, hoping that the Japanese would attack the Soviet Union (a hope that the Japanese did not fulfill, having previously signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin), Hitler declared war on the United States.
Every year, more and more of the generation that fought and lived through World War II is dying off. A sailor who was 18 years old in 1941 would be 83 years old now, and the youngest…
oracknows | December 6, 2006A few months ago, I wrote about a horrific miscarriage of justice in Libya that could result in the deaths of innocent health care workers whose only crime was to have the wherewithal to want to work in Libya to help the people there, but who have been falsely accused of intentionally infecting children with HIV. My original post was prompted by Declan Butler and an article in Nature.. The six health care workers (known as the Tripoli Six or the Benghazi Six) were convicted in a sham trial that was rigged and far from impartial. Apparently Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi found them a…
oracknows | December 6, 2006The Cheerful Oncologist posts a nice piece about When Is No Treatment the Right Treatment? It's a difficult question that surgical oncologists have to face as well. His example is a man with lung cancer who has recently rapidly deteriorated with little hope for long-term survival. Should he get chemotherapy? Are the risks (immunosuppression, etc.) worth the rather meager benefit?
It's a really, really tough question.
We surgeons face this question as well, although probably much less frequently than medical oncologists do (another reason I don't think I could do medical oncology). One of the…
oracknows | December 6, 2006Although I've mentioned before that I am a surgical oncologist, but I recently noticed that, in nearly five months of blogging, I've yet to explain exactly what that is or what it means. I've written about all sorts of things, ranging from alternative medicine, to the evolution-creationism conflict, to the Holocaust, to even trying my hand at reviewing music.
True, I've discussed a fair number of anecdotes based on patient stories. Certainly those stories can give a feel for what I do in the clinical part of my duties, but they don't really explain what my specialty is. I've also spoken about…
oracknows | December 5, 2006Apparently my handy-dandy Only Response You'll Ever Need To Choprawoo, written in response to the last volley of Choprawoo to hit the blogosphere, hit a nerve. Chopra sycophant and blog comment spammer extraordinaire "ChopraFan" was none too pleased with it.
Good.
I have to wonder if "ChopraFan" is either Chopra himself or whether he or she just works for Chopra, scanning the blogosphere for negative reactions to Chopra's woo that can be spammed with plugs for the latest installment of still more Choprawoo. Whatever the case, he/she/it led me to The God Delusion? Part 7 (also found here).…
oracknows | December 5, 2006As much as I hate to admit it, I'm not perfect.
I know, I know, given the (usually) tasty (usually) Respectful Insolence⢠dished out nearly every day here, that's a hard thing to believe, but it's true. In fact, occasionally I even do something that is so unbelievably, incredibly, outrageously boneheaded that there's only one thing to do: Blog about it.
About four months ago, I decided I needed (in actuality wanted) a new cell phone. So I perused the offerings of Sprint, the company I happen to be with right now, mainly because of an insanely cheap plan that we managed to get a few years ago…
oracknows | December 4, 2006Everyone seems to be taking this quiz, so I thought, what the heck:
Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 81%
You are a terrorist-loving scoundrel who hates our dear leader and the values he defends. There are few redeeming qualities about you. You most likely celebrated when the evil-doers hit us on 9/11, then opposed the Iraq war when we tried to pay them back. You hurt us at every step and cause troops to die in the field by questioning Bush's decisions. You are most likely a lost cause, doomed to be a brainwashed victim of free thought and liberalism forever. No dose of…
oracknows | December 4, 2006Note: If you're not familiar with the Hitler Zombie, here are two posts to introduce you to the creature, with the most recent installment of his terror here, in which Orac narrowly escaped the creature.
And, now, the adventures (if you can call them that) continue....
PRELUDE: SEVERAL MONTHS AGO
It was a dreary, overcast day, as so many days were there, with the clouds seeming to reach down to engulf everything with a wet chill that went straight to the bone.
An eminent professor sat in his study typing. Gray-haired, bright-eyed, and very professorial in appearance and bearing right down…
oracknows | December 3, 2006There's no justice in the world, as the blog Hot Chicks with Douchebags shows.
I know, Kevin Beck mentioned this blog a while back, but I came across it again and it made me laugh yet again. I just couldn't help but link to it.
oracknows | December 3, 2006I'm getting really tired of "ChopraFan" spamming the comments of unrelated posts with his serious kissing of Chopra's posterior over Chopra's risibly idiotic multipart response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. In fact, given the number of times that I've fisked Chopra's profound ignorance of and obtuseness over science and what the theory of evolution actually says, I feel like I'm playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with him, with no end in sight.
Consequently, as promised over at PZ's demolition of this woo, my response will be brief. In fact, I daresay it may be the only response ever…
oracknows | December 2, 2006I think I may have found the guy to help me take care of something I've been meaning to do for a long time, produce a dedicated picture of a certain recurring character. Do you think this guy could help me out? Would it be worth $80? Should I e-mail the guy? I like the old Photoshopped logo that Skeptic Rant helpfully provided me months ago, but I'd like an illustration, too. Heck, I'd use both of them.
(Link via Boing Boing.)
oracknows | December 2, 2006Courtesy of Maxim, here's a list of The Worst Band Names Ever. (Found via Stereogum.)
I'll certainly go along with them in naming Limp Bizkit and Toad the Wet Sprocket as truly horrible band names. But, hey, what's wrong with Men Without Hats (besides the music)?
A few suggestions I'd add to the list:
Better Than Ezra
Dogs Die in Hot Cars
Cherry Poppin' Daddies
Panic! At The Disco (I particularly detest wandering exclamation points.)
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead (Love the band, hate the name.)
Godspeed You Black Emperor! (As much as I love this band, it was a toss-up between…
oracknows | December 1, 2006The next Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching, and, if you haven't already done so, if you're a blogger you should be thinking about which one of your pièce de résistances of skepticism you want to submit. Guidelines are here. Next week's host, Dad of Cameron at Autism Street has decided to employ a most unusual means of soliciting entries:
I know the holiday season is upon us, and for many us, including myself (aka Do'C), that can mean scarce free time. In an effort to avoid delays or mixups, I have arranged for the services of a psychic medium over the next week or so.…
oracknows | December 1, 2006Yesterday, I explained why a study that purports to show that psychotic patients tended to vote for President Bush in the 2004 election and is presently making the rounds to snarky gloating through the left-wing blogosphere is so utterly flawed that almost certainly does not mean what the author claims it does, given the data dredging, small sample size, and the failure even to consider alternative hypotheses to explain the observations. In my discussion, I complained that I had only found one skeptical take on the study among the credulous acceptance and use of the study to imply (or…