oracknows | August 4, 2008Remember how I mentioned last Friday that the ScienceBlogs Reader Meetup is scheduled for 2 to 4 PM on Saturday, August 9 at the Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History?
There's apparently been a change in plans. Don't worry; it's not canceled, but apparently the venue is going to change. There were some major concerns about the number of people who said they were to show up and early weather reports for Saturday afternoon that do not look favorable (thunderstorms predicted). Because of these factors, our benevolent Seed Overlords have decided that a new location must…
oracknows | August 4, 2008It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable.
Remember back in February, when I discussed how animal rights terrorists had been harassing a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)? At the time, protesters attempted a home invasion of a researcher, leading to a police response where a home was searched by the police. This time around, however, these thugs have turned violent:
SANTA CRUZ -- The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to…
oracknows | August 4, 2008I've lamented time and time again how much woo has managed to infiltrate academic medicine, even to the point where prestigious medical schools such as Harvard and Yale have fallen under its sway. I've even gone so far as to lament that resistance is futile when it comes to the rising tide of woo threatening to wash over academic medicine, although lately I've been in a more pugnacious mood.
But what good is a pugnacious mood when denialist pseudoscience starts popping up credulously reported in news sources tailored for physicians and other health care professionals? That's exactly what…
oracknows | August 3, 2008I realize half the world has probably seen this, given that it's been making the rounds on the Internet last week, but it amused me to no end:
http://view.break.com/293055 - Watch more free videos
Don't mess with Leonardo. Or is it Leonardo? Or Raphael? Or Donatello? No doubt this little guy is protecting Master Splinter from the evil cat.
oracknows | August 2, 2008It's Saturday, and what better way to spend it than in front of the computer? Who cares if it's sunny and in the low 80s, temperature-wise? Why would you care about that when there's so much great blogging about science, specifically cancer research, at the latest installment of the 12th Edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival over at nosugrefneb.
oracknows | August 1, 2008I mentioned last week that I was going to be in New York the weekend of August 9, the better to commune with my fellow Borg at the Cube (no, not that cube, although I may have to make a stop there too) in Manhattan known as Seed Media Group. As part of the festivities, our benevolent overlords at ScienceBlogs wanted to host a reader/blogger meetup.
It turns out that the date, time, and location have now finally been set, and here they are, courtesy of NYC Skeptics:
Join New York City Skeptics and ScienceBlogs for a special get-together Saturday August 9 with over a dozen science bloggers,…
oracknows | August 1, 2008For those out there who think it was "beneath" me to have responded to PhysioProf's rants about doctors and medical students last week, I present to you Steve Novella's take on the matter. Leave it to Steve to generalize the issue beyond my relatively narrow take on the matter. I also point out that Steve is nowhere near as--shall we say?--insolent as I am. If he's bugged enough to post a rant, it reassures me that I wasn't as off the mark as I feared I might have been.
One thing that came out in my post was an observation that skeptics, including those attending TAM 6, share in these…
oracknows | August 1, 2008Remember how on Monday I posted a dissection of some truly execrable reporting on vaccines and potential conflicts of interest (COIs) by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News that aired one week ago today? As you may recall, my main point was that Attkisson's reporting was lazy, describing nothing that couldn't be found from public sources, and biased in that it intentionally used inflammatory language in order to bias the reader/audience against Dr. Paul Offit and the American Academy of Pediatrics right off the bat before even describing the supposed COI. I further made the point that it's rather…
oracknows | July 31, 2008It's that time again, the time that comes around once a fortnight for skeptical bloggers and blog readers to gather together to celebrate that best that skeptics have had to offer since the last time they gathered. It's time for the 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. This time, it's hosted by Martin over at The Lay Scientist and it tells the tale of Team Skeptic at the Ideology Olympics, starting with a press conference:
Team Skeptic Manager Martin gave a rousing press conference today as his team moved into their training centre in advance of the Ideology Olympics, but concerns remain…
oracknows | July 31, 2008Has it really been a whole year? The longer I blog, the faster time seems to fly. Or maybe it's just because I'm getting older. Whatever the case, you may (or may not) recall that about a year ago I got into a little tussle with a certain Libertarian comic and some smoking cranks over the issue of whether secondhand smoke is a health threat. The discussion escalated a bit, and some serious smoking cranks entered the fray, complete with quote-mining. I ended up discussing a couple of studies that claimed to have found a decrease in hospital admissions for acute coronary syndrome (colloquially…
oracknows | July 30, 2008
Sadly, I haven't seen any good pareidolia stories lately, you know, stories in which someone, usually Jesus, Mary, or the Pope (or sometimes Elvis, who, let's face it, is basically the same thing as Jesus, Mary, or the Pope), shows up as a seeming image on some sort of object or other. It can be a piece of sheet metal, a tree, under an expressway underpass, and even on a dog on his--well, best not to say.
Cats, of course, felt left out in this pareidolia arms race. Consequently, one cat decided it was time to take action, as CNN reports. That's right! It's the Jesus Cat (not to be confused…
oracknows | July 30, 2008I've been a bit remiss in my duty toward a fellow ScienceBlogger.
No doubt a few were wondering (or maybe not), why I, as the resident breast cancer expert here, didn't point out that my fellow ScienceBlogger Janet live-blogged her very first screening mammogram last week. Truth be told, I had meant to mention it a day or two after she first posted it, but it plumb slipped my mind. Maybe it's early stage Alzheimer's disease. Whatever the case, I had meant to use her post to point out that, as a breast cancer surgeon, I sometimes forget just how annoying and cumbersome getting a mammogram can…
oracknows | July 30, 2008With all the negativity around this blog lately, thanks to the continued moronic antics of the anti-vaccine contingent, which have irritated me more than they do usually, so much so that I can't recall a time since Jenny McCarthy's "Green Our Vaccine" anti-vaccination-fest nearly two months ago that they've been so flagrant in their lies, I thought it was time for some good news for a change. Fortunately, by way of the latest issue of The Lancet, some good news showed up in the form of a study. This study, reported late last week by the Antiretroviral Therapy Cohort Collaboration, a…
oracknows | July 29, 2008I just can't escape them. Even when I want to, even when I'd like to take a break, they're there.
The anti-vaccine nutcases.
This time around, they showed up at, of all places, Netroots Nation, where the deceptively named National Vaccine Information Center, an explicitly antivaccination group that spreads nothing but lies, set up a booth. Fortunately, the reaction to this incursion was not positive, but it just goes to show that these groups are trying to insinuate themselves anywhere they can.
oracknows | July 29, 2008Somehow, someway, a bit of slime oozed its way into a Manhattan church to insinuate itself into that fair city and thereby contaminate it. Somehow, I managed to miss it.
Sadly, the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving, is touring the U.S. to give aid and comfort to anti-Semites, racists, and Nazi wannabes all throughout the United States. I can't figure out why he's allowed in the U.S., but somehow he is, and he takes full advantage of the situation to replenish his coffers with the dollars of the American white power ranger Jew-hater contingent, all the while claiming he is not…
oracknows | July 29, 2008The stupid continues to metastasize.
I wrote yesterday about a truly bad and irresponsible hit piece on Paul Offit and the American Academy of Pediatrics written by the anti-vaccinationist sympathizer Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News. Since I've already rehashed what was so bad about it, I won't go on about it. However, it appears that Alicia Mundy at the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog picked up the story yesterday and ran with it--stupidly, as demonstrated by this passage:
Drugmakers have given millions in grants and other kinds of payments to the AAP and helped build its headquarters, CBS…
oracknows | July 28, 2008
I demand the sum of.....three MILLION visits! Muhahahahahaha!
Yes, I know I did that bit before--twice, even!---but I liked it so much that I wanted to do it again, at least until my readers run screaming away, annoyed that Orac, of all people, would recycle the same old joke over and over.
The horror, the horror.
Sometime overnight, this blog hit another milestone. Sometime early in the morning, Respectful Insolence⢠recorded its 3,000,000th visitor. Unfortunately, "sometime this morning" occurred while I was happily sawing logs, making me unable to record the 3,000,000th visit for…
oracknows | July 28, 2008You know, I think I've found a bride for Steve Wilson.
You remember Steve Wilson, don't you? He's the local "investigative reporter" in my hometown who recently did a truly awful "report" (it actually makes me cringe to call it a "report," but I couldn't think of anything else to call it) a couple of weeks ago, in which he regurgitated just about every anti-vaccine talking point about mercury and thimerosal there is out there. I hadn't seen anything like it, ever (at least not that I can recall). So bad was it that I feared the hyperconcentrated stupid might lower my blog bud PalMD's IQ by a…
oracknows | July 26, 2008I'm a bit late with this plug, but hopefully our host this week won't be too mad at me. It's that time again, time for those interested in the application of critical thinking to dubious claims to gather, as we do every two weeks, to celebrate the best the skeptical blogosphere has to offer (and "celebrate" the worst that the credulous blogosphere has to offer). It's soon going to be time for the 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics Circle. This time around, it will be hosted at The Lay Scientist on Thursday, July 31. Martin's call for submissions is here. Guidelines for what the Circle is looking…
oracknows | July 26, 2008Late Thursday night, I posted a full-out rant about what I considered to be an incredibly unfair and stupid generalization of the bad behavior of a single surgeon to an overblown and hysterical indictment of medical students, doctors, and surgeons by a fellow ScienceBlogger, posted on his own blog and on Feministe. Fellow ScienceBloggers Mark Hoofnagle and PalMD posted similar criticism, all of which, in my humble opinion (or IMHO, in Internet-speak) were justified. One thing I didn't mention was that I debated for a while whether or not to post my criticism, because the reputation and…