oracknows | July 10, 2010My wife and I had a pleasant evening with a handful of our readers last night, but I'm aware that there are more of you here who might not have run into us at the hotel bar. What I proposed doing yesterday still stands. The panel discussion on alternative medicine "professions" in which I'm participating happens to be right before lunch. After it's over I'll try to hang out and make myself visible and, depending on how many show up, we can try to get a table together for lunch.
oracknows | July 9, 2010My wife and I are here at TAM8, and so far things have been a blast. The Science-Based Medicine Workshops yesterday went quite well, and I'm told that my talk actually wasn't half-bad. In the meantime, after the serious misstep of Pepsigeddon, which has claimed some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, ScienceBlogs finally did the right thing and got rid of the PepsiCo blog. All is well. Well, not quite, but at least all doesn't suck the way it did for a couple of days.
In the meantime, there is the Amazing Meeting. I've been informed that I actually have fans. I know, I know, it's really hard to…
oracknows | July 8, 2010I've been a critic of Arianna Huffington's massive group blog, The Huffington Post, since three weeks after it first blighted the blogosphere. That's when I first noticed that the "health" section (such as it is) of HuffPo had already become a wretched hive of scum and anti-vaccine quackery, something I began documenting again and again and again and again and again over five years ago, before Salon.com and Rolling Stone flushed their credibility right down the crapper with Robert F. Kennedy's infamous conspiracy mongering about thimerosal in vaccines. Indeed, I continue to document the…
oracknows | July 8, 2010I learned with dismay this morning that blogchild Mark Chu-Carroll has decided to leave ScienceBlogs over our management's incredibly bone-headed decision to host a blog written by PepsiCo. Given that Mark's blog was the first (and, as far as I know, only) blog directly inspired by my efforts over the last few years, I find Mark's departure especially saddening. Even worse, Mark's joining a growing exodus that has led to some serious and not-so-serious speculation over who's going to be left here when the dust settles.
I can honestly say that, as I write this in my hotel room in Las Vegas,…
oracknows | July 7, 2010After the annoying kerfuffle that erupted last night over our Seed Overlords' most unfortunate decision to let a corporate blog breach the firewall between content and advertising, it's a good thing that I can go and hang out with fellow skeptics, chill, and think about things a few days. Yes, I'm going to TAM8. By the time this posts, hopefully I'll be in the air on my way to Vegas to hang with around 1,000 skeptical rogues, give a talk at the Science-Based Medicine workshop, and participate in a panel discussion.
A perfect antidote for what's going on at Sb. Who else is going? Don't forget…
oracknows | July 6, 2010There's a problem brewing and ScienceBlogs, a disturbance in the Force, if you will, and it's a doozy. It's a darkness that's distubed several of my fellow ScienceBloggers to the point where I fear that some of them may leave. Indeed, it's a spectacularly tin-eared and idiotic decision on the part of management that is leading me to start to wonder about my continued relationship with ScienceBlogs.
All in all, this is most definitely not good.
It all started when PalMD and I noticed something popping up on the ScienceBlogs newsfeed. It was a new blog in the collective announcing itself thusly…
oracknows | July 6, 2010Oh, goody.
It looks as though the fall is going to be a repeat of the spring as far as anti-vaccine lunacy goes. This spring, we had the release of a book by the now disgraced granddaddy of the most recent incarnation of the anti-vaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield. The book, entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines--The Truth Behind a Tragedy, was released to great fanfare by the antivaccine movement and then promptly tanked. This is not surprising, given how bad it apparently was. Only the die hards would want a copy, and it's currently languishing around number 23,576 on the Amazon…
oracknows | July 6, 2010Remember Dr. David Katz? Fellow skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine Dr. Steve Novella is unfortunate to be saddle with Dr. Katz on the same faculty as him at Yale. He achieved some notoriety a couple of years ago when at a Yale conference on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), he laid down this gem:
I think we have to look beyond the results of RCTs in order to address patient needs today, and to do that I've arrived at the concept of a more fluid form of evidence than many of us have imbibed from our medical educations.
In one fell swoop, Dr. Katz rallied supporters of…
oracknows | July 5, 2010Today is the third day of the three day weekend cobbled together from happenstance that the Fourth of July fell on the weekend this year. In any case, I'm still in a bit of vacation mode; so this post won't be as voluminous as you are used to. (Some of you are probably rejoicing at the lack of logorrhea.) I'm also working on my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshops at TAM8. In fact, while working on my talk, I came across a little tidbit that forms the basis of this post.
Blog bud PalMD once coined a truly apt term to describe a certain form of disclaimer that's found on quack…
oracknows | July 4, 2010It's nearly sundown here in the eastern time zone of the United States. That means that soon all sorts of amateur fireworks aficionados will be making a whole lot of noise and, the part that I hate, scaring the crap out of my poor dog. So, for those of you who are soon going to be reducing my poor dog to a quivering mass of fur, not to mention annoying me to no end, in the spirit of the holiday season, I have some firework safety tips for you:
oracknows | July 4, 2010Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Since it is a holiday here in the States, I'm chilling out and recovering. I'll try to be back tomorrow, but, worst case scenario, I'll be back for sure on Tuesday. (Monday just so happens to be a holiday, too, this year. Gotta have those three day weekends.) In the meantime, here's a little something you might want to know about, particularly if you live in New York City..
The skeptics in Chicago did a truly excellent job countering what fortunately turned out to be not much of an anti-vaccine "protest." Now here's a chance for NYC skeptics (both belonging to…
oracknows | July 2, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from almost exactly four years ago, in July 2006. Also remember that, if you've been reading less than four years, it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than four years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged. (Sometimes I shudder when I go back to read stuff that I wrote four or five years ago.)
Come to think of it, if you have been reading…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Status report: I'm in the home stretch of writing my grant. It will be finished by 8 AM, when I have to be at work again, in tip top mental condition for the meetings I'll have to endure all morning. (What the heck happened to not doing anything substantive the day before a holiday weekend? At least I don't have to operate or see patients.) Whether it will take an all nighter to do it I am not yet sure. Whatever the case, here is the perfect mood music for late night science and grant writing.
"We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death."
Yeah,…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
oracknows | June 30, 2010First, there was the history of Andrew Wakefield and the MMR vaccine in cartoon form. Now there's the history of homeopathy (click on the image):
The cartoonist, Darryl Cunningham, says this is a first try at such a history, a beta version, if you will. It's definitely a good start, particularly the part about how homeopaths in Africa have advocated using homeopathic nostrums to prevent and treat malaria. Particularly true is the conclusion that homeopathy is not science. It is faith. I'd also add that, as I've mentioned before, it's also basically sympathetic magic.
oracknows | June 30, 2010ORAC SAYS: Please note my disclaimer.
After the events of last week, I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to matters like the one I'm about to discuss. Having the anti-vaccine cranks over at the Age of Autism weblog trying to get me fired over my blogging has a tendency to do that to me. (The details are out there if you haven't heard of it; I will say nothing more of it here.) In any case, if there's anything the events of last week drove home to me, it's that a sina qua non of anti-science cranks like the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement is that, when faced with serious scientific…
oracknows | June 29, 2010I wish it were otherwise, but not all that many reporters "get it" when it comes to science and quackery. Fortunately, Chicago Tribune reporter Trine Tsouderos does. She's shown it multiple times over the last year with stories about the autism "biomed" movement and Boyd Haley's trying to pass off an industrial chelator as a dietary supplement.
It just so happens that she's going to be taking part in a live web chat Thursday, July 1, at noon CDT (that's Chicago time). The topic is going to be alternative treatments for autism, pegged to her story last week about OSR#1 and Haley. The chat will…
oracknows | June 29, 2010With the aging of the population, one of the most feared potential manners by which more and more of us will leave this earth is through Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. And it is a scary thing, too. Having valued my intelligence all my life and in particular enjoying the intellectual stimulation that I derive from my job, not to mention from blogging and contemplating science outside my realm of expertise, like many people I fear Alzheimer's disease at least as much as cancer or heart disease, possibly more. Imagining the slow decline in my faculties to the point where I can…
oracknows | June 28, 2010I really hate this.
I really hate having to take a friend to task, but he leaves me little choice. You see, I actually like Chris Mooney. Back in the day, I even even hoisted a pint with him at the Toledo Lounge in D.C., round about the time of the commencement of the whole "framing" kerfuffle that has periodically flared up to engulf ScienceBlogs and the rest of the science blogosphere. We had great fun making fun of everyone's favorite creationist neurosurgeon, particularly his claim that the "design inference" has been "of great value" to medicine and has been a great boon to medical…