oracknows | April 15, 2008As you may know, Ben Stein's execrable crapfest of a movie, Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed, slimes its way into theatres on Friday. From my perspective, the biggest, most vile lie pushed by Ben Stein and produce Mark Mathis is that it's a direct line from their hated "Darwinism" to the Holocaust, as I've pointed out twice before, but another major theme of the movie is that the poor, "truth-seeking" intelligent design creationists are ruthlessly "expelled" by those (pick one or more) atheistic/Stalinist/Nazi Darwinists.
Fortunately, there is a resource to counter Ben Stein's lies (and,…
oracknows | April 14, 2008Between sessions here at the AACR meeting, I started thinking. (I realize that's often a dangerous thing to do, but sometimes I can't help myself.) What I was thinking about was my annual bit of "fluff with a bite," the 2008 edition of "What is an altie?" Why, I don't know, but I was. Then, this morning while quickly perusing a few blogs and reading my e-mail before heading off to the meeting's morning session, I noticed something in yesterday's post about the commonality between creationists (evolution denialists), Holocaust deniers, and other forms of denialists. It was a term, a throwaway…
oracknows | April 13, 2008So there I was, wandering through the exhibit hall at AACR when I came across the National Cancer Institute booth. The NCI has a booth at AACR and ASCO every year, and this year is no different. As I do most years, I wandered through the booth to see if there was anything that caught my interest, such as information that might help me stay funded.
There it was. No, not any information that could help me keep my NIH funding, alas. Worse, it was something that might make it even more difficult if in this tight funding environment the NCI is actually spending money on this stuff. The sign read…
oracknows | April 13, 2008Well, I'm here in sunny San Diego and about to head on over to the convention center to check out the day's festivities and to make sure to check out a friend's poster this morning. (If anyone reading this is attending AACR, you might recognize me by the Plexiglass box full of multi-colored blinking lights and the bad attitude who will have a propensity to whip out a laptop and blog if he finds interesting science to blog about.) The flight sucked, as usual. I was stuck in the middle seat, and the guy on one side of me looked like a bodybuilder and was suitably wide. It occurred to me that…
oracknows | April 12, 2008...I don't know when I'll be back again.
Well, actually, I do. I'll be back Wednesday night. But as you read this I should be in the air and on my way to sunny San Diego to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. It's a big one, too. Around 12,000-15,000 cancer researchers, give or take, will be descending upon the San Diego Convention Center to discuss the latest and greatest basic and translational cancer research. It's one of my two favorite meetings each year, one that I try not to miss. It's also often a good source for blog material about the latest…
oracknows | April 11, 2008It's that time of year again. Actually, it's well over a month past that time of year.
Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my old Blogger blog over three years ago, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative to describe a certain hardcore variety of alternative medicine aficianado who is utterly immune to evidence or reason. The…
oracknows | April 10, 2008Whenever I'm looking at fringe scientific claims, I'm always on the lookout for things that help me conclude whether I'm looking at "legitimate" fringe ideas or pseudoscience and woo. One observation that I've found helpful in leading me in one direction or the other is to look for certain dead giveaways that what we're looking at is almost certainly pseudoscience or woo is the presence or absence of conspiracy-mongering based on unverifiable "evidence." I find a lot of it, and the other day I found one of the best examples of it I've ever seen. It comes, not surprisingly, from Dan Olmsted,…
oracknows | April 10, 2008...at Archaeoporn.
And it's a good one too, served up in a straightforward, no-nonsense style. As much as I like the sometimes wild creativity some hosts bring to hosting the Circle, there's definitely something to be said for a well-organized, well-introduced, "just the facts, M'am" sort of presentation, and that's what we have here. That, and lots of good skeptical blogging served up for your browsing edification. March your way through the links at the 84th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and you won't be disappointed.
Next up to host is Andrea's Buzzing About:. Her shot at hosting the…
oracknows | April 9, 2008I don't much like The Huffington Post.
My dislike for The Huffington Post goes way, way back--all the way back to its very beginnings. Indeed, a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington's little vanity project hit the blogosphere, I noted a very disturbing trend in its content. That trend was a strong undercurrent of antivaccination blogging, something I wrote about nearly three years ago. At the time, I pointed out how Santa Monica pediatrician to the stars and "vaccine skeptic" Dr. Jay Gordon had found a home there, long with David Kirby, author of the mercury militia Bible Evidence of…
oracknows | April 8, 2008I am presenting this without comment, other than that this message from David Kirby and Dan Olmsted was e-mailed to me yesterday evening in response to my open letter from three days ago.
This is Kirby and Olmsted's reply to me:
We both take this matter very seriously, and strongly oppose any effort to subpoena the records of Ms. Kathleen Seidel. We have also clearly expressed our feelings to Mr. Shoemaker. While we may not agree with her opinions, we consider Ms. Seidel to be a colleague. Rights to privacy, and to free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment, must be upheld for all. We…
oracknows | April 8, 2008Here's another case of measles associated with failure to vaccinate:
Health officials in Milwaukee County are urging parents to make sure their kids are up to date with vaccinations. This comes on the heels of a confirmed case of measles in a 23 month old Franklin resident.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne virus that's easily spread. Symptoms are similar to a common cold: coughing, a runny nose, a high fever and eventually, a red blotchy rash that starts on the head and spreads to the arms and legs. While health officials aren't sure how the 23 month old contracted the virus, they do…
oracknows | April 8, 2008I thought I might start developing chest pain when I read it, but to my shock NCCAM has actually funded some worthwhile research! Even more amazingly, NCCAM described it in a press release!
Too bad it supports the contention that acupuncture is nothing more than placebo and that the attention given by the practitioner is what really accounts for much of the perceived therapeutic effect that patients attribute to it.
I'll explain.
The press release to which I refer leads to a rather interesting study that examines the components of the placebo effect. The article, published online yesterday in…
oracknows | April 7, 2008...or so says #1 Dinosaur, who was buried under a blizzard of radiology reports.
I tend to agree up to a point, but the only problem from my perspective is this: Until recently, it was not at all uncommon for me to get seemingly millions of copies of every radiology report for mammography, ultrasound, and core needle biopsies on my patients. There's a preliminary report, a final report, an amended report, a report with the pathology report added, a report with the pathology report and the estrogen/progesterone receptor status added, and then multiple copies of the final report. We ended up…
oracknows | April 7, 2008This story, first brought to my attention by Drugmonkey, is something that I've been meaning to blog about since I first saw it. The reason, of course, should be obvious, given that my career is an example of the end product that the medical school described is going to be designed to produce: that of a physician-scientist:
The Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Health are working to set up what they hope will be the nation's first medical school entirely geared to training physicians for dual careers in research and patient care.
[...]
The Scripps institute must raise $150 million in…
oracknows | April 6, 2008Holy crap, time flies. In fact, it flies to fast that I actually forgot to do this when I normally do: the Friday announcement of an impending Skeptics' Circle. This Thursday (that's April 10, folks), the host is Archaeoporn (who, by the way, posted a really hilarious April Fools' Day post about the upcoming Indiana Jones movie). Contact information for submissions can be found here, and guidelines for what the Circle is looking for can be found here.
As always, if you're interested in hosting your very own Circle, peruse the guidelines for hosts and drop me a line.
oracknows | April 6, 2008Dear Mr. Kirby and Mr. Olmsted:
You are both journalists. I realize that neither of you at present work for the traditional press and that both of you seem to devote yourselves mainly to blogging (Mr. Olmsted at the Age of Autism and Mr. Kirby at the Huffington Post), but I have to believe that you both still consider yourselves to be at heart journalists. That is why I am writing this to you and posting it publicly on my blog. If you've ever read any of my posts on this issue, you probably realize that I strongly disagree with your positions and that at times I have been quite harsh in my…
oracknows | April 5, 2008...at the Cancer Research Blog Carnival #8, hosted over at The Skeptical Alchemist.
Just the thing to while away a Saturday afternoon!
oracknows | April 5, 2008How on earth did I miss this article, which describes a paper to be published in the journal Neuroquantology showing how teens can actually have telekinetic powers?
Oh, wait. Look at the date it was published. Never mind.
Not bad, though.
oracknows | April 4, 2008Woo has patterns. I've learned to see them, and, if you read Your Friday Dose of Woo on a regular basis, perhaps you're starting to see them too. Not that I had originally intended to become so well-versed in woo that I start to notice these things. What really happened is that I just sort of fell into it when one day I happened to come up with the idea for this little Friday feature. Truth be told, it seems to have grown and taken on a life of its own, such that on weeks when I don't do it (like last week), something about the blog just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, it sometimes…
oracknows | April 4, 2008Your Friday Dose of Woo has been interrupted to bring you an important rant. The previously scheduled installment will be delayed and will appear later on in the day.
This is more important.
A common characteristic of cranks and denialists, be they antivaccinationists or large corporations or whatever, is an intolerance of criticism for their views. All too frequently, this has taken the form of the abuse of the legal system in order to try to silence their opponents. The Society of Homeopaths did it to a blogger a while back. A quack by the name of Joseph Chikelue Obi did it to the same…