oracknows | November 10, 2008I had been planning on taking on a couple of articles about breast cancer to start out the week. However, between having to deal with a tsunami of leaves before Monday, when the giant trucks come along to pick them up today and a number of other issues, I didn't have time. As much as I love taking a recent study and doing an in-depth analysis, such posts take probably twice as much time for me to do as the average post. Unfortunately, various issues this weekend prevented that, at least for today.
Fortunately, there's always homeopathy.
Yes, homeopathy is always there for the easy post. Even…
oracknows | November 8, 2008Seen on the discussion boards of that other repository of antivaccinationist wingnuttery (other than The Huffington Post), Mothering.com, a commenter by the 'nym of naupakamama exults over the possible appointment of antivaccine wingnut Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to run the Environmental Protection Agency:
We could have a strong anti-vaccine voice leading the EPA! I am so excited!
If anyone doubts that the antivaccine fringe views RFK, Jr. as one of their own, the rejoicing going on in antivaccine circles should put those doubts to rest. In more reality-based circles, including very liberal ones…
oracknows | November 7, 2008Geez, it's getting ugly. When FOX News reports this about Palin, you know she was bad:
Of course, it's possible, even likely, that McCain campaign staffers are trying to make Palin the scapegoat for the failure of their candidate and them, but there's abundant other evidence that Palin was pretty ignorant about a great many things--far too ignorant to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Regardless of whether this report is true or not, that makes it easy for the knives to come out, now that the election's been lost.
oracknows | November 7, 2008As I've said before many times, herbal or plant-based medicines are about the only kind of "alternative" medicine that has significant prior scientific plausibility based on what we know about science. That's because plants often contain biologically active molecules; i.e., they often contain drugs. Of course, the problem with plant-based medicines is that they are, in essence, highly contaminated drugs, the predictability of whose responses is variable because the amount of active ingredient can vary widely.
There's also a problem when claims for a plant-based compound become grandiose. It…
oracknows | November 6, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about a very disturbing development (disturbing, at least, to the science-based community) in the transition to an Obama Administration. That disturbing development is the multiple reports that antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being seriously considered to head the Environmental Protection Agency or even the Department of the Interior. Given RFK, Jr.'s conspiracy-mongering over vaccines, his utter failure to change his belief that mercury in vaccines causes autism in the face of overwhelming evidence that it does not. My argument was that appointing someone who is…
oracknows | November 6, 2008Unbelievable.
It really is. It's simply amazing that The Skeptics' Circle has been around so long. It's been around so long that we're already up to the 99th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at Ferret's Cage. The new generation of skepticism has landed with a great addition to the lore of the Skeptics' Circle.
Next up is...well...me. Given how long it's been since I've hosted a Circle, I decided to take the organizer's prerogative and host the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. So send your entries to me by November 19, and I'll see what sort of twisted and entertaining Circle I can…
oracknows | November 6, 2008I wrote about this study the other day, but clearly I didn't have the final word. As usual, The Onion nails it.
oracknows | November 5, 2008One of the aspects of the Barack Obama candidacy that raised my hopes and those of so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, as well as scientists tired of the crass politicization of science under the Bush administration, was the prospect of an Administration in which science and reason were valued and in which cranks were not allowed to impose their agenda on agencies whose policies should be driven by the science. That's one reason why I was very disturbed when I read a post on Election Day suggesting that antivaccinationist crank and activist extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was being…
oracknows | November 5, 2008...is Joseph at Autism Natural Variation.
It turns out that he can't find the correlation between precipitation levels and autism diagnoses that Waldman et al study; he too points out that urbanicity was not controlled for; and he even thinks a bit of cherry picking may have occurred.
Meanwhile, Steve Novella is a bit less harsh, but his analysis is pretty skeptical as well.
oracknows | November 5, 2008I guess Barack Obama's mad hypnotic powers worked.
One non-political thing that this election has reminded me of is that when you've been blogging as long as I have (nearly four years now--almost as long as a Presidential term!--assuming you're good and have found a niche in the blogosphere, you can become one of the "go-to" bloggers for certain subjects. Even though I've taken on the pseudonym (and, some might say, the persona) of a cranky talking computer with a bad attitude that looked like a cheap Plexiglas box of multicolored blinking lights and was featured in a 30 year old British…
oracknows | November 4, 2008...after all, I'm not a political blogger, except occasionally and maybe once every four years. If I'm still blogging four years from now, we'll see if I feel like morphing into a political blogger again, just for one day.
However, I found this nifty little widget that does the job for me:
There, you can just keep coming back to this page to follow election night returns. Of course, it is MSNBC; so its projections may or may not be accurate, but over time it will have to tell the story, as more and more returns come in.
Now, I suppose I'll have to think about analyzing that study that…
oracknows | November 4, 2008I have a bit of a love-hate thing going for Keith Olbermann of MSNBC news. On the one hand, when he takes down Bill O'Reilly for defaming U.S. troops or Sarah Palin for anti-science idiocy, I have to admit, he's effective and sometimes even amusing. However, like some others, I often find him diving too far into meanness, becoming in essence a left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. That's why I found this SNL parody particularly amusing:
I used to kind of like Keith Olbermann. These days, though, I tend to find him to be almost as much of a blowhard as any rightwing pundit--…
oracknows | November 4, 2008OK, even though I have said time and time again that I rarely do any posts that are strictly political in nature, mainly because political bloggers are a dime a dozen, great political bloggers are rare, and I don't consider myself anything better than an at best passable political blogger. However, when politics intersects my areas of medical interest, I can't resist diving in, and unfortunately, Walter Olson gave me a reason to dive in today. In fact, to some extent he killed my election day buzz about the prospects for an Obama victory and a return to a government that respects science and…
oracknows | November 4, 2008As hard as it is to believe, it's finally here.
Election Day.
After two years of painful, annoying, surprising, infuriating, and, on rare occasions, uplifting campaigning, it all comes down to this: Voters, alone in little booths, casting ballots that will decide which direction our nation goes for the next four years. I know that there were times when you (and I) thought this day would never come. The length and intensity of American Presidential campaigns have turned into more of an endurance contest than anything else, a two year Iditarod through the wasteland, not to mention a test of…
oracknows | November 3, 2008Once more, it's rapidly approaching that time again. The 99th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be landing at Ferret's Cage in less than three days. That means there's still time to get your entries to the Ferret King in time to be included in the blog carnival. The cool thing is that Ferret King is only 15 and thus represents the new generation of skepticism. So, if you have a blog and regularly write about skepticism, reason, and/or critically thinking, then help nurture the next generation by submitting your best work to the Skeptics' Circle. Instructions are here, and the guidelines…
oracknows | November 3, 2008Remember the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)?
It's been a long time since I've written much about the AAPS, of course, but refreshing your memory will be easy. It's the ultra-libertarian wingnut medical "association" that routinely scrapes the bottom of the barrel, as far as pseudoscience goes, as long as that pseudoscience fits in with their schizophrenic combination of Ayn Randian "superman" libertarianism mixed with a toxic brew of anti-immigration, antivaccinationism, HIV/AIDS denialism, and social conservatism that leads them to lie about the evidence to argue that…
oracknows | November 2, 2008I got this e-mail the other day, and I urge everyone who's ever linked to Robert Lancaster's excellent site to do as Tim Farley requests. (While you're at it, you should consider linking to Farley's equally useful What's the Harm?):
I'm writing you because your site is one of the top ranked sites (according to Google) which hyperlinks to the site Stop Sylvia Browne. As you know, Robert Lancaster has done a fantastic service to the community by creating and maintaining this site over the last two years. Â Robert is currently in the hospital recovering from a stroke that he had in August.…
oracknows | November 1, 2008Thus far, the first decade of the 21st century not been good to that man who is arguably the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving.
The decade began its very first year with his crushing defeat in the libel lawsuit he instigated against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a defeat so resounding that it accomplished exactly the opposite of what he had intended: It ended with the judge concluding that he was, in fact, an "active" Holocaust denier (not just a Holocaust denier but an active Holocaust denier) Unfortunately, it cost Prof. Lipstadt and supporters a couple of…
oracknows | October 31, 2008I feel bad.
I realize that I've been completely neglecting my Academic Woo Aggregator. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don't you? It was my attempt to compile a near-definitive list of academic medical centers that had "integrated" woo into their divisions or departments of "integrative medicine" (i.e., departments of academic-sounding quackery). Perusing it, I now realize that it's been over five months since I did a significant update to it. You just know that, given the rate of infiltration of unscientific medical practices into medical academia as seemingly respectable treatment…
oracknows | October 30, 2008I ask this question because I have seen something I have never seen before, something so earth-shattering that I wonder if the very axis of the earth has shifted, something so incredible that I have to pinch myself to make sure that I'm not living some unbelievably bizarre dream. I half expect the heavens to open and reveal the Second Coming. What could provoke such incredulity in me?
WorldNetDaily has published an article that is science-based and makes sense. A sample:
Much more disturbingly, McCarthy attacked Peet for daring to disagree with her. "She has a lot of [nerve] to come forward…