oracknows | September 20, 2008We've had Jesus, Mary, and a variety of others make their holy presence known on blessed pieces of toast. Now it looks as though we have a new sacred image:
That's right, Sarah Palin has proven her most sacred presence by appearing on a piece of toast! What more evidence do you need that her being elected Vice President is ordained by God Himself and that God Himself will smite John McCain shortly after he takes office in order to usher in a Palin administration that will lead straight to The Rapture? And what did the owner of this most holy miracle do?
He's auctioning it on E-bay, of…
oracknows | September 20, 2008I know I don't blog about pure politics much, but it's the weekend, I'm too tired to do anything heavy-duty about medicine or science, and this depressed me.
As much as I'd like to delude myself that things have changed, it turns out that they haven't changed nearly as much as I'd like to think, as this poll demonstrates:
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks -- many calling them "lazy," ''violent" or…
oracknows | September 19, 2008Apparently, among some circles today is some sort of holiday. Its virus has apparently infected some of my fellow ScienceBloggers.
I do not understand this holiday.
I never really have. I tend to doubt that I ever will.
Consequently, there'll be no "arrrrr" here today, nor, most probably, on any future September 19. Consider me a conscientious apathetic objector to the whole weird thing. Either that, or a buzz killer.
oracknows | September 19, 2008As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I've been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if they hadn't decided upon woo rather than good old-fashioned surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I've become aware of enough such cases and seen the dishonest marketing of quackery enough to drive me to maintain this blog and undertake other activities to promote…
oracknows | September 18, 2008This one's been floating around the intertubes, at least those parts of the intertubes I frequent, for several days now at least. But it's so good that I just can't resist posting it myself.
I had no idea John Cleese had a video podcast...
oracknows | September 18, 2008I feel a bit bad this week.
You see, since Tuesday I've been pretty much wallowing in some of the most outrageous woo, antiscience, and abuses of logic and reason I've ever come across, courtesy of the merry band of clueless antivaccinationists over at Age of Autism. I had thought that I should try to do a serious science post for today. But I got back from work too late, and those sorts of posts are a lot more work than the usual run-of-the-mill post. There's all that reading, analysis, and sometimes looking up of references. True, they're intellectually satisfying, but I can't do them every…
oracknows | September 17, 2008Well, well, well, well.
Sometimes science and ethics do win out after all:
CHICAGO (AP) -- A government agency has dropped plans for a study of a controversial treatment for autism that critics had called an unethical experiment on children.
The National Institute of Mental Health said in a statement Wednesday that the study of the treatment -- called chelation -- has been abandoned. The agency decided the money would be better used testing other potential therapies for autism and related disorders, the statement said.
The study had been on hold because of safety concerns after another study…
oracknows | September 17, 2008Well, looky here:
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back!
From October 1 through October 10, we'll be discussing Autism's False Prophets, by Dr. Paul Offit.
Dr. Offit will be joined on the blog by a panel of experts, and we're inviting all of you to join in by reading the book at home, and contributing your thoughts, questions, and comments in the 'comments' section of the posts. Our panelists will be reading them and responding.
More good news: Columbia University Press is giving away 50 copies of Autism's False Prophets free to ScienceBlogs Book Club readers.
Here are the details.
Also, one of…
oracknows | September 17, 2008Forgive me, dear readers.
I realize that I've already subjected you once to the contagious supernova of stupidity that is an Olmsted on Autism blog post. I broke my usual rule about not directly linking to the crank blog Age of Autism unless there is a compelling need. One reason is that I hate to drive traffic there, Even though I do always make sure to use a rel="nofollow" tag whenever I link to AoA or any other blog whose Google ranking I don't want to contribute to, increasing AoA's traffic risks letting its "management" (such as it is) charge higher rates for advertising for the…
oracknows | September 16, 2008Ah, science!
In no other fields can we ask such amazing questions and, through rigorous experimentation, get the answers.
Answers like this:
A study commissioned by a phallically named insurance company proves beyond all doubt that the unbridled roar of an Italian supercar turns women on but the soft purr of a fuel-efficient econobox doesn't stimulate anyone's MPG-spot.
David Moxon subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff -- a measure of their…
oracknows | September 16, 2008Dr. Paul Offit's book Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure has hit the bookstores, and, as predicted, the mercury militia is going into a frenzy of spin and smear. As is usual, because they have no science to support their viewpoint, they are reduced to extended ad hominem attacks. For example, the clueless wonder of a reporter who couldn't find the Clinic for Special Children and the autistic children treated there but nonetheless confidently exclaimed that he couldn't find any autistic Amish children, goes for a full frontal assault in a little…
oracknows | September 15, 2008One of the aspects of blogging that I've come to like is the ability to follow a story's evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you're good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of "signature" issues for which you become known and about which people come to you for commentary as new developments arise. Indeed, now that the fourth anniversary of the start of this blog is fast approaching (December 11, in case you don't remember!), I can look back and see a number of issues that I've done this with,…
oracknows | September 14, 2008...sometimes the good guys win.
Congratulations to Ben Goldacre for taking on the supplement quack Matthias Rath and prevailing. That he did it even in the notoriously plaintiff-friendly U.K. court system is even better. Indeed, The Guardian also deserves kudos for supporting Ben in this.
This case could be as momentous in terms of its implications for going after health fraud in the U.K. as the David Irving case was in terms of Holocaust denial. No, I am not calling Rath a neo-Nazi or Holocaust denier. There is no evidence, at least as far as I'm aware, that he subscribes to such vile views…
oracknows | September 14, 2008Heh.
"Please, ask this one about dinosaurs."
"I invite the media to grow a pair. And if you can't, I will lend you mine."
oracknows | September 13, 2008After yesterday's lovefest that really did go to my head. Really, when I wrote it I wasn't trolling for praise, although in retrospect it now does kind of look that way to me. I was simply expressing amazement that anyone would listen to a pseudonymous (although not really anonymous anymore) blogger. Fortunately for my ego, which threatens to expand until it pops like an overinflated balloon, there are are readers who aren't all that impressed by me. Heck, there's even a whole blog, every blogger of which really, really detests me. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess to which…
oracknows | September 12, 2008Even after over three years at this, I still find it amazing that as many people read my verbal meanderings as in fact do. In fact, I still can't believe that I'm one of the more popular medical bloggers out there. True, I'll probably never approach the traffic and readership of the huge political blogs or of our very own P.Z. Myers (who has at least ten times my traffic), but I appear to have become a fixture in the medical and scientific blogosphere.
Even more amazingly (to me, at least), I appear to have developed a bit of influence. I know it's hard to believe, but I was forced to accept…
oracknows | September 12, 2008I've often written about the intersection of medicine and religion. Most commonly, I've lamented how the faithful advocate inappropriately injecting religion into the doctor-patient relationship in a manner that risks imposing the religion of the health care practitioner on the patient, sometimes through physicians feeling no obligation to inform patients of therapeutic options that violate their religious beliefs or pharmacists refusing to dispense medications that (they claim) violate their beliefs. Another common thread running through this blog is criticism of religion when it leads…
oracknows | September 11, 2008The 95th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been posted by Bob Carroll over at Skeptimedia:
Seven years ago, The Very Lost Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus were found by Quantum Beam Radium and Harvard Veritas Schwartz in a Peruvian cave. Dr. Schwartz's validated spirit guide directed the pair to the cave by interpreting entangled stains found by Radium on a South Park urinal. We now know, after doing a thorough meta-analysis and finding odds against chance of a trillion to one, that the Great One predicted it all.
With that begins one of the longest, cleverest, and most varied we've seen,…
oracknows | September 11, 2008There are some days when I just don't feel like posting the usual stuff, and September 11 is just one of those days. So today there'll be no woo-bashing, no evisceration of postmodernist nonsense, no sarcastic assaults on antivaccinationists. In a more serious vein, there won't be any analyses of scientific papers, clinical studies, or the usual prolonged discourses on medicine, surgery, or science. There won't even be any discussions of Holocaust denial, although a Holocaust denier is mentioned in the post that is to follow.
Instead, I'll do what I've taken to doing every year or two and…
oracknows | September 11, 2008This video was shot by Bob and Bri, who in 2001 lived in a high rise a mere 500 yards from the North Tower. On this seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I think it's important to post this again. It is the most prolonged and continuous video of the attack that I have seen, and, as such, It is difficult to watch.
That's why it's so important to watch.
Very likely I will continue to post this every year on September 11 while I'm still blogging, so long as I feel the need to do it.