oracknows | March 16, 2009The antivaccine counterattack against Brian Deer continues.
As you recall, about a month ago British reporter Brian Deer published an exposé, a tour de force of investigative journalism that led him to discover that Andre Wakefield had not only had incredibly blatant undisclosed conflicts of interest (his having been in the pocket of trial lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers and his forgetting to mention the little fact that he had been developing a competing version of a measles vaccine that he had been hoping to market) when he published his infamous 1998 Lancet paper linking MMR to…
oracknows | March 15, 2009I have to admit that I've always had a soft spot for pareidolia, that phenomenon wherein people see things that aren't there because human brains are wired for pattern recognition. As a child (and even as an adult), I loved lazily looking up at the clouds and envisioning animals, objects, and people in the clouds. That's why very early on in the history of this blog I started posting about pareidolia, starting with an appearance of the Virgin Mary in Chicago under a freeway underpass for the Kennedy Expressway near where I used to live in the late 1990s, with my most recent installment having…
oracknows | March 14, 2009I love it when someone does something like this, namely pwning an antivaccine video like The Truth About Vaccines:
It's not perfect, but I love it. Now if only more people would do something similar on YouTube. I'm tired of seeing titles like VACCINES KILL INNOCENT CHILDREN! - Hundreds and More Likely Thousands of Children are Murdered Each Year by Vaccines. Vaccinations Are Part of A Hidden Crime Against Our Children. Vaccines Do NOT Prevent Disease - They Are The Disease.
Hmmm. Maybe Lu could take that one on next...
oracknows | March 13, 2009...well, not really.
It's just that I wanted to welcome the newest addition to the ScienceBlogs Collective, Dr. Erik Klemetti, a geologist who spends most of his professional time thinking about magma, and likes to blog about it at Eruptions.
Check it out, and enjoy!
oracknows | March 13, 2009Khaaaaan!
No, wait a minute. I mean: Nooooooo!
No place is safe from the invasion of quackademic medicine. No place. As you will soon see.
As you know, I've documented the infiltration of pseudoscientific and outright antiscientific woo into institutions that really should know better, namely academic medical institutions. Specifically, over a year ago, I created the Academic Woo Aggregator, a list of medical schools and academic medical centers that have embraced "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's more commonly known these days, "integrative medicine" (IM). Of course…
oracknows | March 12, 2009Well, here's a new way of hosting a Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. What we have this time is the combination of a minimalist presentation of the relevant links with a maximalist bit of podcast blather from Theo Clark of The Skeptics' Field Guide. Go check it out!
Next up is PodBlack Cat on March 26. Start firing up your skeptical keyboards and be sure to give her the material she needs for yet another awesome carnival!
In the meantime, we're always--and I do mean always--on the lookout for hosts, both those who've hosted before and newbie skeptical bloggers who want their chance to make a…
oracknows | March 12, 2009Science as it is practiced today relies on a fair measure of trust. Part of the reason is that the culture of science values openness, hypothesis testing, and vigorous debate. The general assumption is that most scientists are honest and, although we all generally try to present our data in the most favorable light possible, we do not blatantly lie about it or make it up. Of course, we are also all human, and none of us is immune to the temptation to leave out that inconvenient bit of data that doesn't fit with our hypothesis or to cherry pick the absolutely best-looking blot for use in our…
oracknows | March 11, 2009I know I've been hard on a lot of legislators, including woo-friendly clods such as Tom Harkin, Ron Paul, and Dan Burton. Occasionally, though, a legislator will show that he "gets it" (or at least hasn't drunk the Kool Aid). Forwarded to me was a letter sent from Representative John Linder (R-GA) in response to a letter from the Autism Action Network, apparently upset over the IACC's not being as excited about throwing good money after bad studying the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. Here is Mr. Linder's response, and it's a good one (for a politician, anyway):…
oracknows | March 11, 2009Advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) frequently make the claim that they are the victims of a "double standard," in which (or so they claim) they are subjected to harsher standards than what they often refer to as "conventional" or "orthodox" medicine, usually because, don't you know, big pharma controls everything and rigs the game. Whatever the sins of big pharma (and they are legion), this claim is, of course, a whole lot of hooey. If there is a double standard (and, indeed there is), it favors CAM. Indeed, CAM itself is a "wedge strategy" to apply a…
oracknows | March 10, 2009Crank alert!
Age of Autism has announced that David Kirby and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be on the David Bender Show at 1:15 PM today.
It would be nice if, to counter the antivaccine activists, reality-based listeners would call in, although I am very pessimistic that Bender would give them a fair shake, given that he has said this about Deepak Chopra:
I had the pleasure of interviewing a man whose work I've admired for many years, but had never met--Dr. Deepak Chopra.
Any man who admires Deepak Chopra's work has a serious problem with reality. I've never listened to Bender's show before,…
oracknows | March 10, 2009...the reasons are threefold.
Reason #1 is my iPhone. As I mentioned the other day, the microphone mysteriously stopped working while I was in Phoenix. At first I thought it was a network thing, as on less rare than I would like occasions I had had difficulty with AT&T in which I might have trouble making a phone call or people I called couldn't hear me even though I could hear them. But the problem persisted after I got home. (In restrospect, I wonder if the occasional problems I had had when people couldn't hear me after I connected were the canary in the coal mine for this total…
oracknows | March 9, 2009
Regular readers of this blog know pretty much what I think of Jenny McCarthy. In brief, she's an opportunistic, scientifically ignorant but media-savvy twit whose hubris leads her to believe that her Google University education, coupled with her personal anecdotal experience, render her proclamations that vaccines cause autism and that "biomedical" quackery can cure it more convincing than all that boring science, epidemiology, and clinical trials. Indeed, her critical thinking skills are so poor that she was once a huge booster of the "Indigo Child" movement, but had to try to purge the…
oracknows | March 9, 2009
PZ's muscling in on my territory. Apparently, ruling the Darwinian, creationist-destroying atheist cephalopod blogging world isn't enough, and he has to start moving in on medicine. No problem, given that this time around he brought some rather interesting woo to my attention, suggesting it as perhaps a suitable topic for Your Friday Dose of Woo called God's Answer to Cancer. Besides, it's PZ's birthday; so as a birthday present, instead of reposting the same silly picture that I have for the last two years, I'll simply link to him now and add, oh, perhaps 1% to his traffic total for today…
oracknows | March 8, 2009So here I sit in the Phoenix airport, which (woo-hoo!) has free wifi, contemplating a most puzzling problem.
My iPhone, which was working just fine last night and which still seems on the surface to be working fine is behaving most strangely. My wife tried to call me, but I couldn't pick up because it happened to be while I was on my way through security. So I called her back, and, while I could hear her, she couldn't hear me (although on one attempt it seemed that I couldn't hear her either). 3G and Edge networks both work fine for surfing the net, sending and receiving calls (except for the…
oracknows | March 8, 2009Sadly, the meeting's over, and I'm winging my way back home as this very post shows up on the blog for your edification. Because it's Sunday and, more importantly, because I'm too tired to produce anything substantive, I leave you with this bit of Asian weirdness sent to me by my sister. It left me scratching my head:
My sister informs me that this is actually a parody of this band:
Wow. This is just...incredible.
You know, I really have to get back to serious blogging about medicine and science. I can hear my traffic plummetting after this. Oh, well. Perhaps people more in the know than…
oracknows | March 7, 2009It's a rare thing indeed for this to happen, but words fail me here:
Wow. Just wow.
Because clearly the Obama administration is getting ready to fire up the ovens for responsible borrowers who paid their mortgages on time. Truly, a black hole of stupid in a single cartoon! The stupid burns on so many levels at once, that I remain astonished.
Either there was nothing for the Hitler Zombie (you remember, that undead dictator whose feeding on a victim's brain leads to incredibly dumb Hitler, Holocaust, or Nazi analogies) to find here, or the Undead Führer so thoroughly snacked on Mike…
oracknows | March 7, 2009I realize I'm a bit late on this, but it's hard not to take the antivaccine movement's icon and apply her own misinformation about vaccines being "toxins" injected into the bloodstream against her. In fact, doing so is far more justified, given that last week she was quoted in an interview as singing paeans of praise to one of the most deadly poisons known to humankind: Botulinum toxin. See:
I think plastic surgery is fun if it makes you feel good. I'm all for looking better, so I plan on doing whatever I want when the time comes. I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally, so I…
oracknows | March 6, 2009I have two brief observations to make before I launch into my latest bit of insolence. First off, it figures that, whenever I go away to a meeting, there's simply an embarrassment of blogging riches. People have been sending me stuff to which, even if I were at home and having a slow week, I could probably never get. Good stuff. Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I'm now forced either to try to blog about them when I finally get home, which might as well be months later in blog-time, or let them go by uncommented upon, which hurts Orac's mighty ego. Oh, well. My next observation is that I feel…
oracknows | March 5, 2009Damn, wouldn't it have been cool to have been the guy who found this? A Dalek, lost from Doctor Who since the 1970s or 1980s:
Workers were baffled how the Dr Who relic ended up there, but it may have been in the murky water for more than 30 years after being dumped during location filming in the '70s.
Marc Oakland, 42, who made the discovery, said: "I'd just shifted a tree branch with my foot when I noticed something dark and round slowly coming up to the surface. I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up in front of me.
"It was covered in mould and weed, and had quite a bit of…
oracknows | March 5, 2009I realize I've said it before, but I still can't believe as many people read what I like to lay down on a daily basis right here on this blog. Believe me, it has nothing to do with an sort of false sense of modesty. After four years at this, I know I'm good at blogging. Real good. But good isn't always enough to make much of a difference or even to garner an audience. Whether I've done the first, I don't know. I like to think that I have. As for the second, I've done pretty well for myself. Indeed, after a year of stagnant traffic, January and February were the best months, traffic-wise, in…