oracknows | March 24, 2008I really didn't want to get involved with the whole "framing" debate again. For whatever reason (and they are reasons that I've failed to understand), the very mention of the word seems to set certain members of the ScienceBlogs collective into rabid fits of vicious invective that leave rational discourse behind. And, yes, I know that by saying that I risk setting myself up as a target of said invective, but I don't care. It must be the natural cantankerousness that my low level death crud is inducing in me or maybe it's a lack of judgment brought on by large doses decongestants and…
oracknows | March 23, 2008...because Boston skeptics get to have all the fun with a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub on Monday, March 24 at The Asgard (great name for a pub!) in Cambridge at 7 PM. Keynote speaker for the night is our very own Mike the Mad Biologist. We've done a little blog tag-teaming in the past of some idiotic arguments by creationists claiming that evolution is unnecessary to understand the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria; so it's a shame I don't live in Boston.
Oh, well. One of these days I need to find out if there's a skeptics' group in my neck of the woods.
oracknows | March 23, 2008Sadly, unlike his namesake, Orac is not immune to human foibles and human vulnerabilities. In particular he's not immune whatever virus is going around at the moment. The damned thing felled my wife for over a week. I thought that I had avoided it, but apparently not. Now I'm starting to feel the unmistakable signs of its infestation of my body. Consequently, I don't feel up to any blogging today, and all I can hope for is that my version will not evolve into the debilitating death flu that I watched my poor wife suffer through. Fortunately, however, I've found a little something to make me…
oracknows | March 22, 2008I've been remiss in not mentioning that one of the newer and better docs dedicated to skepticism and science= and evidence-based medicine has joined the SB collective. I'm talking about PalMD, formerly of the blog White Coat Underground. He's joined up with the Hoofnagles over at Denialism.com and is already posting away.
It's always good to see another doc dedicated to reason and science show up, especially one who can help me tag-team responses to the woo in the blogosphere.
oracknows | March 22, 2008The other night, I wrote about how the painfully inept and just plain dumb actions of the producer of Expelled!, the neuron-apoptosing movie that's basically an extended argumentum ad Nazium against the dreaded "Darwinism" that blames Hitler, Stalin, and, apparently, puppy hatred on Charles Darwin himself. Basically, the producers were having one of their private screenings (although how one can call a screening for which almost anyone can sign up on the web "private" is beyond me), and, by serendipity, the screening happened to be in the Mall of America on the Thursday before a large atheist…
oracknows | March 21, 2008If you ever have any doubt at the sheer level of unscientific fearmongering and lunacy antivaccinationists like to foment, all you have to do is head to the comments section regarding the David Kirby article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that I deconstructed yesterday. Given that the Age of Autism site linked to it to send its ravening horde of antivaccinationists to descend upon the unsuspecting editors there, I feel that balance demands that I send my ravening hordes there to provide a modicum of counter-argument. (Well, I would send my ravening hordes if I actually had any; instead,…
oracknows | March 21, 2008Sometimes a topic demands to be included in my little Friday bit of hubris and tweaking. Usually when that happens, it's obvious because somehow the topic is synergistic with what's been going on during the preceding week on the ol' blog, in the same way that herbalists claim that all the various compounds and contaminants somehow produce a synergistic therapeutic effect. Wait a minute. That's not such a good example, mainly because woo-meisters usually make this claim without much in the way of evidence, and the examples of true synergism between components of an herbal remedy are few and…
oracknows | March 20, 2008...to see Expelled!
In perhaps the funniest incident I can recall involving a fellow ScienceBlogger since there has been ScienceBlogs, earlier this evening scourges of "intelligent design" creationism P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins went to see a screening of the antievolution pro-ID creationism movie Expelled! in the Minneapolis area. The guards recognized P.Z. and wouldn't let them in the movie.
They apparently didn't recognize Richard Dawkins and did let him in to see the movie.
Let's get this straight. The producers scheduled a screening in the Minneapolis area on the same weekend that…
oracknows | March 20, 2008I have to hand it to Dan Olmsted. As Dr. Michael Egnor is for "intelligent design" creationism, ol' Danny Boy is the Energizer Bunny of antivaccinationism. Tag-teaming with fellow "journalist" David Kirby, who seems able to live rather well without actually, you know, having a regular job, ex-UPI correspondent Olmsted form the not-so-dynamic duo of vaccine and autism pseudoscience, the unrelenting propagandists who, despite all evidence to the contrary, keep insisting that it really, truly is the mercury in the vaccines and then, when science shows that it really isn't the mercury in…
oracknows | March 20, 2008It's a rare, rare situation, but the sheer craziness of this (hat tip PZ) knocked the wind out of me, so that I'm having a hard time finding something to say about it:
Health officials in the Philippines have issued a warning to people taking part in Easter crucifixion rituals.
They have urged them to get tetanus vaccinations before they flagellate themselves and are nailed to crosses, and to practise good hygiene.
On Good Friday dozens of very devout Catholics in the Philippines re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
[...]
The health department has strongly advised penitents to check the…
oracknows | March 20, 2008There's no doubt about it: Stem cells are hot.
Yes indeed, they're not only hot, but they're hip, they're happenin', they're right now, baby. Scientists are falling all over themselves with excitement at the potential applications that could potentially come from stem cell technology. True, no validated therapies for embryonic stem cells have yet made it into clinical practice, and the challenges that need to be overcome before that can happen are arguably greater than what was believed in the heady days a few years ago, before President Bush declared his ill-advised restriction on embryonic…
oracknows | March 19, 2008Imagine that you're a soldier in Iraq. Imagine further that you're on patrol in a dangerous area in the middle of summer, the desert heat penetrating your 80 lb pack much the way boiling water penetrates the shell of a lobster. Your heart is racing as you and your unit nervously dart to and fro, every shadow a potentially deadly threat, every alley a refuge from which the enemy can attack and kill. The area's thick with insurgents and terrorists, and you feel as though you have a huge bullseye painted on both your chest and back.
A loud roar fills your ears, and you feel as though you have no…
oracknows | March 18, 2008You be the judge.
Words fail me (an incredibly rare thing, I know). Obviously, "Dr." Walid Al-Rashudi's brain failed him when he uttered the words above, and somehow I get the impression that that is not a rare thing at all.
oracknows | March 18, 2008Imagine you're a medical student in a dreaded "allopathic" medical school other than Georgetown. Imagine further that you're finding the grind of learning science- and evidence-based medicine a bit tiresome. After all, there's so much to learn: principles of biochemistry, physiology, anatomy (and not with acupuncture points), and neuroscience. You're reading multiple chapters a night, staying up all night cramming your mind full of minutiae of various signaling pathways and eponyms for anatomic structures. All those facts, all that evidence, it's all so...hard! It's all so soulless. Where's…
oracknows | March 17, 2008Thursday through Sunday, I happened to be in Chicago for the Society of Surgical Oncology annual meeting. Leave it to surgeons to schedule a meeting the weekend before St. Patrick's Day in Chicago.
In Chicago.
That means the drinking in the city started Friday after business hours and continued all the way through Sunday--and that was just the natives. Everywhere I went on Friday and Saturday night, there were staggering people dressed in green hanging on to each other. Another lovely thing was that the meeting was at the Sheraton (one of my favorite hotels in Chicago, it's crappy, slow, and…
oracknows | March 17, 2008One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research uses mice to study breast cancer and neurologic disease while she and her husband were having a birthday party for one of their children and assaulted her husband, who had gone to the front of the house to confront them. This unrelenting attack on the use…
oracknows | March 16, 2008I'm about to head home from the conference; so I don't have much time to do one of my usual posts. However, there is a brief bit that irritated me regarding the Hannah Poling case, and it comes from Dr. Sanjay Gupta:
I want to continue the discussion today. Couple of points. First of all, it seems as if parents bring up concerns about vaccines, they are automatically portrayed as anti-vaccine. Why is that? Is it possible to completely believe in the power and benefits of vaccines, but still have legitimate and credible concerns?
This statement shows that Dr. Gupta is rather clueless about the…
oracknows | March 15, 2008I got in somewhat late last night and was tired from the meeting, but there's been something that's been bugging me more and more, and Kimball Atwood's recent posts about the distortions of language used by "complementary and alternative medicine" advocates brought it to the forefront. I first noticed this particular term being used by alties a few months ago by quantum homeopathic woo-meister supreme Lionel Milgrom, and I've been seeing it more and more, particularly in antivaccinationist circles.
I'm talking about the term "dis-ease."
Believe it or not, I'm not all-knowing about such issues…
oracknows | March 14, 2008The must-read post of the day comes from Mark Crislip of the (in)famous Quackcast and was posted over at the Science-Based Medicine blog. It's about two things primarily: How evidence and science result in physicians practicing science- and evidence-based medicine to change their practice and why that seems disturbing to those who don't understand how science works and would prefer unchanging certainty and how this changeability of practice based on the lastest evidence is in marked contrast to most so called "complementary and alternative" medicine, the vast majority of which is based on…
oracknows | March 14, 2008Readers who have followed my little Friday bit of fun every week have probably, like me, at times sat in front of their computer screens, jaw drooping, a little bit of spittle starting to drip out of the corners of their mouths, and eyes agape with wonder at just how anyone on earth could believe some of this stuff. Indeed, it is truly unbelievable to anyone with just a modicum of critical thinking skills. Sometimes, as I have, you've almost certainly laughed out loud at the silliness. Sometimes, as I have, you've probably had to stop reading because you feared that the concentrated woo in…