oracknows | December 4, 2008I've long had an interest in World War II history. Ever since I was around 11 or 12 years old, a major portion of my reading diet has consisted of books and articles about World War II. Back when I was young, my interest was, as you might expect, primarily the battles. The military history of World War II fascinated me, and I build many, many models of World War II fighter aircraft and warships when I was in my early teens. (No cracks about how the airplane glue obviously affected me, although it is true that back then it was real airplane glue, chock full of toluene and lots of other organic…
oracknows | December 3, 2008A small part of me is glad that my inquiries a while back to get a job at Northwestern University in Chicago came to nothing when I read stuff like this on, of all places, Julie Deardorff's blog:
Next appointment? Sept. 21, 2009
It now takes 10 months to get an appointment for a regular screening mammogram at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which runs the largest single-site breast center in Illinois. And if that causes you any stress or inconvenience, Northwestern officials are sorry.
"The growing national shortage of radiologists who have advanced training in reading mammograms has had a…
oracknows | December 3, 2008Ever since I started paying attention to it, acupuncture has, at least until recently, inspired ambivalence more than anything else in me. As a skeptic and science-based physician, I found it very easy to dismiss utter quackery like homeopathy or the various "energy healing" modalities, such as reiki or therapeutic touch strictly on the science alone. After all, homeopathy is based on magical thinking more than anything else, specifically the concepts of "like cures like," the concept that dilution with vigorous shaking can make a remedy stronger, and the idea that water has "memory" all are…
oracknows | December 2, 2008Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time.
Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…
oracknows | December 1, 2008Chalk this up under "Yet another example of U.N. incompetence":
UNITED NATIONS - Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech.
Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year.
But while the draft's sponsors say it and earlier similar measures are aimed at preventing violence against worshippers regardless of…
oracknows | December 1, 2008I tell ya, I'm on the light blogging schedule for a mere four days, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the happy invasion of family on Thursday and Friday, and a significant amount of grant writing I've had to deal with on Saturday and Sunday, and somehow I missed not only a study relevant to my field of interest, but the reaction of antiscientific quackery apologists to said study. First, let's look at the reaction, then the study, which reports that as many as 22% of mammographically detected breast cancer may spontaneously regress.
First off the block is Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
It's…
oracknows | November 30, 2008Why, Sithmas, of course! Just ask Palpatine if you don't believe me:
Yeah, this beats Squidmas hands down.
Also, the Star Wars geek in me can't help but mention that Emperor Palpatine is more than happy to answer many other of your questions, including "Why didn't you kill Jar-Jar Binks?"; the sex lives of emperors; "How does Darth Vader use the bathroom?" (I've always wondered this myself); answers about the design defects in two Death Stars and Jedi methods to sway the ladies; and, perhaps my favorite, "Is Tom Cruise a Sith Lord?"
Yes, only a geek like me could find this amusing.
oracknows | November 30, 2008I don't read ScienceBlogs.de for the simple reason that I don't understand German beyond a few words and phrases. Consequently, I don't know what our German counterparts are up to. However, a reader sent me a link that gives me reason to be very concerned about at least one of the blogs in the German ScienceBorg Collective. It's a blog called Lob der Krankheit, which apparently means something like "Praise of Illness." Specifically, my reader referred me to a post entitled "Aluminium muss raus aus Impfstoffen!" because it concerned him. In essence, it means "aluminum must be removed or…
oracknows | November 29, 2008Having finally hosted the Skeptics' Circle myself last week after a long absence and having had a blast doing it to celebrate the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, I know it's time for me once again to turn over the reins to the next host, who will inaugurate the beginning of what will (I hope) become the second 100 Meetings of the Skeptics' Circle.
Scheduled to take on that task is Mike Meadon at Ionian Enchantment this coming Thursday, December 4. So, please, help Mike out with your best skeptical blogging. Let's get the second 100 of the Skeptics' Circle going with a bang!
oracknows | November 28, 2008You know what my answer to this question would be. But what about puppet Steve Colbert's answer? He disagrees. Or does he:
"Now sure, she's not the kind of expert who relies on facts and figures....She knows what she feels is true. She's that kind of expert."
Heh.
Oh, damn. PZ beat me to this. Damn it, making fun of Jenny McCarthy and antivaccinationists is my turf on ScienceBlogs!
oracknows | November 28, 2008Believe it or not, sometimes even Orac has a life. I know, I know, between the ridiculously logorrheic blogging here and other online activities, coupled with even more ridiculous long hours working at his day job, it's hard to conceive. However, my wife and I had a whole passel of relatives over, several of whom spent the night. This puts a crimp in the blogging activity, but for once I don't care that much. Fortunately, there's a lot of good reading out there, of which I picked a few examples:
The "Gonzalez Trial" for Pancreatic Cancer: Outcome Revealed. Remember the Gonzalez trial? It was…
oracknows | November 27, 2008Continuing the theme from yesterday one last time this week and bringing our long disused blog mascot front and center, I wish all my readers a happy Thanksgiving!
oracknows | November 26, 2008...EneMan thinks he's "too sexy":
Unfortunately, someone else is claiming EneMan as her mascot:
We can't have that. Remember, EneMan has been this blogs mascot since December 2004. Maybe he's getting restless because he hasn't been featured very often the last couple of years. I wonder if I should remedy that...
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
oracknows | November 25, 2008Detroit's my hometown. I was born in the city, spent the first ten years of my life within the city limits, at least until my parents moved to the suburbs. Given that, I've been watching events unfold with regard to the impending bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler (and, less likely but still possible, Ford) with increasing dismay. The economic devastation that would be visited upon Detroit were even one, much less all three, of the Big Three to fall would be beyond imagining. On the one hand, my disgust at the mismanagement at the top that wants to see the heads of the Big Three executives on a…
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
oracknows | November 24, 2008
There are times when I see a quote by someone who is clearly extremely intelligent, but the quote is so utterly dumb, so devoid of any evidence that a single functioning neuron was behind it, that I can only shake my head in disbelief. Thanks to Dr. Val, Dr. Wes, and Walter Olson, I've found one more such quote. It's by a trial lawyer named Gerry Spence, who was awarded the CAOC Lifetime Achievement Award and bestowed this gem of brain-sucking stupidity on the assembled throng of lawyers attending the awards ceremony:
"We have to redefine who we are: We are the most important people in…
oracknows | November 24, 2008One of the handful of key themes that run through this blog day in, day out, week in, week, out, and year in, year out is that science and the application of the scientific method represent the most successful strategy that humans have yet come up with to improve human health. A consequence of this theme, of course, is the consideration of unscientific "therapies," specifically those known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, sometimes, "integrative medicine" (IM). As chronicled here (and many other places), the vast majority of CAM therapies are based on prescientific…
oracknows | November 23, 2008I figure after expressing dismay at a certain member of Canada's government yesterday, I should point out that something cool did happen in Canada the other day. Specifically, a police video camera caught a meteor streaking across the night sky in Saskatoon, to land somewhere in western Canada:
And news reports:
It must have been an impressive sight to see.