oracknows | September 2, 2009As the person entrusted with the skeptical bloggy goodness that arrives every other week in the form of the Skeptics' Circle, how could I refuse to hawk something like this e-mail:
Inspired by the annual The Open Laboratory, the Skeptical Blog Anthology is a printed anthology of blog posts voted the very best of 2009, managed by the Young Australian Skeptics in conjunction with the Critical Teaching Education Group (CTEG).
Entries for the Skeptical Blog Anthology can be submitted to the Young Australian Skeptics Website at http://www.youngausskeptics.com/anthology.
The anthology is an attempt…
oracknows | September 2, 2009I've been a bad, bad boy. In particular, I've been a bad, bad host in that I totally forgot to hawk the last Skeptics' Circle back on August 27, nearly a week ago.
So, please, go make up for my horrific error and visit The 118 Skeptics' Circle: Looking Closely Edition (if that link doesn't work, try http://evolvingmind.info/blog/2009/08/the-118-skeptics%E2%80%99-circle-looking-closely-edition). Now. Peruse the skeptical bloggy goodness that is there.
Hmmm. I wonder if too many toxins have built up in my bloodstream and are causing incipient Alzheimer's disease. Maybe I need some chelation and…
oracknows | September 1, 2009For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I'm going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing critical thinking, science, and science-based medicine is just how unyielding belief in pseudscience is. Whatever realm of science in which there is pseudoscience Orac happens to wander into, he find beliefs that simply will not yield to science or reason. Whether it be creationism, quackery such as homeopathy,…
oracknows | September 1, 2009Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an end, with Hitler utterly defeated. I mark this occasion because of my interest in World War II history, the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and because my heritage is Polish through my father's side. Another thing that needs to be understood about September 1, 1939 is that it marked…
oracknows | August 31, 2009Last Thursday, I expressed dismay about an upcoming NBC news special, A Dose of Controversy, which is about a man who arguably caused more damage to public health than just about anyone in the last decade, namely Andrew Wakefield. Anyone who's a regular reader of this blog knows just what I think of Andrew Wakefield. I've made no secret of it; I have little but contempt for the man, whom I view as incompetent, dishonest, and a quack. Andrew Wakefield, as you may recall, is the British gastroenterologist who in 1998 published a study in The Lancet that claimed to find a link between the MMR…
oracknows | August 30, 2009It was just a high school marching band, like so many other high school bands in this country, a band that no one outside of the area of Sedalia, Missouri would be likely to have heard of, were it not for a breathtakingly stupid action by its school superintendent. You see, the band had an idea for a clever and amusing way to illustrate their theme for the year of the "Brass Evolutions." It was this T-shirt, to be worn by band members and reported by the Sedalia Democrat:
When I saw it by way of ERV, I thought it was kind of cute and a rather clever way of illustrating the theme. As the…
oracknows | August 29, 2009I don't know why, but I'm tired, lazy, and in a bit of nostalgic frame of mind this morning, which makes coming across this ad dangerous:
Not only that, but Faygo is a Detroit company. At least it was when I was a kid. At least it's still bottled in Detroit. Ah, yes, Faygo red pop. Pure chemically goodness that no child under around 10 can resist--particularly because it would produce that lovely red pop mustache after drinking.
You may now thank me for having injected that unbelievably infectious (and annoying) jingle into the deepest recesses of your mind, where it will dwell for at least…
oracknows | August 28, 2009It really and truly saddens me to have to do this.
The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is one of the finest children's hospitals there is. Unfortunately, as I documented yesterday, the hospital has, either knowingly or unknowingly, lent its good name to the metastasis of the quackfest known as Autism One from its primary site in Chicago to a metastatic deposit sullying one of the finest cities in our fair neighbor to the north, Toronto. The metastasis is a secondary quackfest known as Autism One Canada, and, unfortunately, the SickKids Foundation and the Dalla Lana School of Public…
oracknows | August 27, 2009Want to know what will start my teeth grinding when I read it in a newspaper? That's easy. It's headlines like this one, which appeared two days ago in The Telegraph:
Scientists two years from developing 'potential cure' for breast cancer
The subtitle was even worse:
British scientists could be just two years away from developing a drug that may be a "potential cure" for breast cancer, it has been claimed.
Hear that grating? It's the sound of my teeth grinding together. The reason is simple. It's just plain silly to make claims like this about a basic science paper given that, as I have…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I've gotten into one of those runs where it seems that all I blog about is anti-vaccinationist loons, but, before trying once again to take a break from the madness, I had to go to the well one more time because this looks a bit frightening:
NBC News' Matt Lauer will take an unprecedented look at the emotional debate surrounding vaccines and the suggested link to autism on Sunday, August 30 at 7 p.m. ET with "Dose of Controversy." In the one-hour Dateline, Lauer speaks exclusively with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 medical study was the first in the world to suggest a…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…
oracknows | August 25, 2009Geez, I wonder if Larry Moran knows about this. If he doesn't, I'm going to make sure that he does. I'm also guessing that he won't be pleased. He doesn't like pseudoscience at all. He detests "intelligent design" creationists. Based on that, I'm guessing that he won't like it at all to learn that the Canadian version of the autism "biomedical" antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One is metastasizing from its usual location in Chicago every Memorial Day to held at the University of Toronto in October, as this advertisement shows:
If you live in Canada, the Northeastern United States, the…
oracknows | August 24, 2009The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It "evolves" very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or "autistic enterocolitis," most recently late last year, it was not a problem to the anti-vaccine movement. Neither was it a major problem to the movement when multiple studies similarly failed to find a link between mercury in the preservative thimerosal that used to be in most childhood…
oracknows | August 23, 2009I must admit that I've never heard of Margerite Kelly. Apparently she's some sort of advice columnist for the Washington Post. Apparently she's also fairly clueless, if her column from last Friday is any indication. At least, she's clueless about autism. In her column Diagnosing Autism Is Never an Easy Process, she betrays a whole lot of ignorance about autism, autism treatments, and the quackery that is being sold to parents as a "cure" for autism.
A parent writes to Ms. Kelly about her two-year-old nephew, who is throwing tantrums and showing signs that concern her that he may be autistic.…
oracknows | August 23, 2009Although I was born in Detroit itself, like so many Detroiters in the 1970s my family moved to a suburb of Detroit called Livonia when I was 10. I haven't lived in Livonia in nearly 25 years, but my parents still live there in the same house where I spent my teen years. So the politics of the town occasionally still piques my interest. Sometimes they turn really nutty, such as this year's City Council election. The city posted videos of all the candidates answering the following questions:
The following are 10 of the 11 candidates running in the Livonia City Council Primary election on…
oracknows | August 22, 2009I know this one's been floating around the blogosphere for a while, but it finally made its way to me at a time when I needed something lighthearted and amusing:
Best quotes:
"Well, science doesn't know everything." Well, science knows it doesn't know anything, otherwise it would stop ... But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you."
..."nutritionist" isn't a protected term. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. "Dietitician" is the legally protected term. "Dietician" is like dentist, and "…
oracknows | August 21, 2009I realize that this is a little late, but for those of you in southeast Michigan who might be able to make it, there's going to be an attempt at an inaugural Skeptics in the Pub. Thanks to fellow ScienceBlogger and skeptical rogue PalMD and even more so thanks a couple of his similarly skeptical (but blog-free thus far) buddies, this event will come to fruition tonight. If it works out, maybe next time we'll gussy it up a bit and perhaps even have a speaker. For now, though, it's just a chance to meet and greet in informal surroundings.
PalMD and Orac will be there. If you're in southeast…
oracknows | August 21, 2009If there's one form of pseudoscientific health care (if you can call it that) that rests on the most risibly implausible tenets, I'd have to say that it's homeopathy. Either that, or homeopathy and various "energy medicine" modalities would have to fight it out in a no woo barred cage match to the death for the title of most scientifically ridiculous medical "therapy." Unfortunately, because of its history, where in the 1800s it was often actually as good or better than the "scientific" medicine of the time (mainly because homeopathy is nothing more than water--in essence doing nothing--and…
oracknows | August 21, 2009Sorry, but I guess I was incorrect when I pointed to Barney Frank's blistering putdown of a woman with a picture of President Obama decorated with a Hitler mustache who likened health care reform to Nazi policies as being the "only? correct response to such vile and obvious guilt by association gambits. Here's another, from a Jew at a town hall meeting in Las Vegas, who, while talking about the national health care system in Israel, was subjected to "Heil Hitler" salutes from another clueless woman:
The crazy is strong in this woman. Clearly, the Hitler Zombie has feasted on the thin gruel…