oracknows | February 10, 2009Poor Jeni Barnett.
You remember Jeni Barnett, don't you? She's the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for "copyright infringement" in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett's show. Yes, LBC, the radio station on which Barnett's show runs, threatened to sue, forcing Ben to take down the audio. However, as almost always happens when a blogger is threatened in such a manner, the specter of legal action led to the audio files…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…
oracknows | February 9, 2009I should have seen this one coming.
After all, the economy's been in the crapper for several months now. Things are bad and getting worse, with the bottom not yet in sight. So who could prosper in this environment, except for repo men and liquor stores?
Psychics, of course:
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The housing crisis will deepen, the country could fall into a depression and laid-off workers may need to start their own business.
New York psychic Roxanne Usleman says the bad economy had been good for her business.
If this sounds like the advice of a financial planner or an economist, think again. It's…
oracknows | February 9, 2009Not again.
I have no way of knowing if the media in my hometown happen to be more credulous when it comes to pseudoscience than average, but, given the number of stories referred to me emanating from Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, you'll forgive me if I'm very depressed right now. For instance, we have "investigative reporter" Steve Wilson of WXYZ Channel 7 Action News, who, although claiming the title of "Chief Investigator" for that station, clearly couldn't investigate his way out of a paper bag--at least when it comes to medical stories--given that he is known for routinely…
oracknows | February 7, 2009Pity Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound…
oracknows | February 7, 2009Sometimes, woo makes the news.
Does anyone remember "Professor" Bill Nelson, the cross-dressing "inventor" who created a most amazing woo machine? I've written about it three times before:
Your Friday Dose of Woo: Miraculous quest for the quantum
Your Friday Dose of Woo: Serious woo from Down Under
The SCIO, Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, and Bill Nelson: Better late than never--or maybe not
This guy sells his device for $20,000 a pop and claims he sells 40 machines a month.
Now, check out this Marketplace episode, Miracle Makers or Money Takers? Watch the whole thing.
It never…
oracknows | February 6, 2009If I lived in the U.K., I don't know if I could blog. After all, the U.K. has some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world, far more so than here in the U.S., in that in a libel case it is up to the defendant to prove that what he wrote is true, not the plaintiff to prove it false and defamatory. Just go back to 2000 and the most depressing exhibition of that very principle, namely disgraced pseudohistorian David Irving's libel suit against Professor Deborah Lipstadt for having referred to him as a Holocaust denier (which he undoubtedly is) in her book Denying the Holocaust:…
oracknows | February 6, 2009
I realize that I've been neglecting my woo. Indeed, yesterday I noticed that it's been a month and a half since I did a real Friday Dose of Woo. Of course, that particular installation of my long-running blog series (over two and a half years!) was some incredibly powerful woo. In fact, it was titanic, mind-bogglingly amazing woo. We're talking Lionel Mllgrom-grade woo. Actually, we're talking Lionel Milgrom himself, a level of sheer looniness that few, if any, can match, much less surpass. Once you've experienced the sheer power of his quantum homeopathic madness, it's hard not to become…
oracknows | February 5, 2009I guess even the Vatican responds to public pressure, if it's intense enough.
Last week, I noted an extremely disturbing story, a story that outraged me, a story that I would have found even more disturbing were I still a practicing Catholic but that I found disturbing enough even though I no longer am one. I'm referring to the difficult to explain decision on the part of Pope Benedict XVI to rehabilitate four heretical bishops who had been ordained without the Vatican's permission and who all belonged to a conservative Catholic organization known as the the Society of Saint Pius X. This…
oracknows | February 4, 2009Lately ScienceBlogs has been "buzzing" with a story that, at the risk of needing to don an asbestos suit for the insults that may come my way, I find utterly ridiculous. Here's the context:
The Blogosphere is abuzz about an article in the LA Times regarding Second Lady Jill Biden's preference to be acknowledged by her honorific title of "Doctor," which references her Ph.D in education. The article states that many prominent newspapers, including the LA Times and the Washington Post, only use the honorific title in articles if the doctorate degree in question is in a medical field, calling…
oracknows | February 4, 2009It's really hard to take David Kirby seriously any more.
Well, actually, it's been hard to take him seriously for at nearly four years now, ever since he wrote his paean to antivaccinationists, Evidence of Harm, in which no conspiracy-mongering related to mercury as an alleged cause of autism was too out there, too ridiculous, for Kirby to parrot. Since then, he's become antivaccine apologist number one, the go-to guy for the antivaccine movement whenever the twisting of science, logic, and reason was needed to spin an event or a study that refutes the "vaccines cause autism" hypothesis. He's…
oracknows | February 3, 2009Ten months ago, I thought I was joking. I really did.
Regular readers may (or may not) remember back in March, when, in one of my usual flights of fancy, I decided that I could write a short fictional interlude, a combat scene. True, I didn't do it because I wanted actually to write a fictional story (although I have always wondered if I could write decent short stories or a novel if I put my mind to it). Rather, I did it to make a point, and argument, a reductio ad absurdum, if you will, of a program in the Air Force to bring "battlefield acupuncture" to the our fighting men and women in the…
oracknows | February 2, 2009I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned this before at least a couple of times, but I am an alumnus of the University of Michigan twice over. I completed a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors there and then I stayed on to do obtain my M.D. Several of my longtime friendships were forged or solidified during those years. Consequently, I still care about the place. That's why it distresses me when I see my alma mater shoots itself in the foot. Now, I'll grant you that what I'm about to discuss probably doesn't bother me as much as the plight of the Michigan Wolverines bothers me, given that never before…
oracknows | February 2, 2009I love Tim Minchin.
I also totally understand where he's coming from when it comes to confronting woo, though, as I've described here. In any case, see Tim in action (parts may be NSFW due to profanity):
Enjoy, as I'm running a bit late in producing my usual content for Monday. Fear not, it's coming later today!
oracknows | February 1, 2009Sometimes, coincidence is a strange thing indeed.
Friday, I wrote this post about yet another meta-analysis whose results are completely consistent with acupuncture being nothing more than an elaborate placebo. Later that day, less than four hours after my post went live, I received this e-mail sent, not to my work account or my other Gmail account, but rather to my account for this blog:
For immediate release
Contact: Karla Shepard Rubinger, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (914) 740-2100, ext 2153, krubinger@liebertpub.com
21st Annual Symposium of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture to Be…
oracknows | January 31, 2009I've been a bit remiss about writing about this story. For that, I apologize. I realize a lot of you sent me links. For some reason, this week was an embarrassment of riches in terms of blogging material, and I didn't have time to get to it all.
With that out of the way, let me just say that I find it very ironic that this particular story came to light during the week of the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. If the Pope is truly appointed by God to rule over the Roman Catholic Church, in this case God chose someone who has an exquisitely bad sense of timing. Actually, he…
oracknows | January 30, 2009
Sometimes I come across something so bizarre, so utterly wrong, that my mind reels in confusion and amazement, not to mention horror, that anyone can actually think or write something something like it. In fact, for a moment I considered offering up this one bit of horrifically inspired craziness up as an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo, but I decided against it. The reason, I'm afraid, is the same reason that I've considered some bits of woo previously for this "honor" but then ultimately declined and covered them as normal posts, dripping with my usual brand of Respectful and not-…
oracknows | January 29, 2009Sorry I'm late announcing it, but better late than never.
Right on schedule, the 104th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has arrived at Space City Skeptics. In fact, it's the sort of thing that will test your mind and cleverness in that it's...well, a test. But don't worry. It's not one of those nasty tests that you took in school and perhaps later in college. It's a fun test. So go forth and enjoy.
And don't forget to join us again two weeks hence, when the 105th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be held at It's the Thought That Counts.
oracknows | January 29, 2009I think my title says it all: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we?
The reason I ask this question is because yet another large meta-analysis has been released that is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that acupuncture is a placebo. Because I've written about so many of these sorts of studies over the last year or two that I really had a hard time mustering up the will to write about one more. But I got in pretty late last night and therefore knew I could handle this in a reasonably expeditious fashion. Besides, it is a fairly…
oracknows | January 28, 2009...it smells like...fisking.
In this case, it's a fisking of a particularly annoyingly self-righteous and scientifically ignorant antivaccinationist by a medical student. The annoying drinker of the "vaccines cause autism" Kool Aid is Ginger Taylor. The medical student is Adina Cappell. The slapdown is utterly comprehensive, methodical, and ruthless, pummeling Ginger's panoply of pseudoscience, logical fallacies, defenses of Jenny McCarthy, and conspiracy mongering under a barrage of science, reason, and fact, leaving nothing but smoldering ruins of antivaccinationist misinformation.
Even…