oracknows | February 23, 2008I recently wrote about the cowardly manner in which Netcetera booted the Quackometer off of its servers unceremoniously in response to a truly vacuous legal threat from a quack named Joseph Chikelue Obi.
Now, the little black duck has found a new ISP. The Quackometer is back in business! Hilariously, "Dr." Obi is already making threats again, only this time not just against Le Canard Noir, but against the entire skeptical blogosphere:
Alighting from the back seat of an Extended Black Daimler Limousine at the start of a Whirlwind Alternative Medicine Tour , essentially spanning right across…
oracknows | February 23, 2008Anyone who reads this blog knows my opinion of homeopathy. Just type "homeopathy" in the little search box on the left side of this blog, and you'll be greeted with many, many posts dating back to the very beginnings of Orac's presence on ScienceBlogs. Of course, science is with me on this one, as it does not support the primary claims of homeopathy, including:
Like cures like
Dilution with succussion makes a remedy stronger
Water has "memory" of remedies that it has come in contact with, which is how homeopathic remedies can "work," even though they've been diluted to the point where, even…
oracknows | February 22, 2008With the invasion of the orbs discussed earlier today, it's become apparent to me that now, more than ever, a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking is imperative. Fortunately, the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and due to land on Thursday, February 28 at the Conspiracy Factory. So, if you're a skeptical blogger who wants to strut his or her stuff, now's the time to submit your best stuff from the last couple of weeks to Factician. Edition-specific instructions, deadline, and contact information are here. General guidelines for submitting and the schedule of future Skeptics'…
oracknows | February 22, 2008Sometimes woo jumps out and hits you from sources from which you least expect it.
Such was the case earlier this week, when I found my self in Detroit lazily watching a local newscast. Now, I realize that local news is not the place to look for skepticism. Heck, just the other day, I mentioned a really egregious example of a newscast from Oklahoma City that credulously regurgitated Generation Rescue talking points as fact. But it's rare in my experience to see such a sterling example of woo appearing in a major market newscast. So there I was, sitting in front of the TV, when I saw a story…
oracknows | February 21, 2008I have to hand it to Abel Pharmboy. No one else I know would live-blog his own vasectomy.
Even though my traffic is greater than his, he's definitely trumped me as a blogger today.
oracknows | February 21, 2008I've written a few posts now pointing out how, its claims that it is not "antivaccine" notwithstanding, for the mercury militia and those who think mercury in vaccines or vaccines themselves cause autism, it really is all about the vaccines, not any single ingredient, even mercury. I first noticed this nearly three years ago, and, if anything, recent events have made my observation even more obviously true. As multiple studies have exonerated the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that was formerly found in most childhood vaccines and now only remains in trace amounts in flu vaccines…
oracknows | February 21, 2008Earlier this month, I was remiss in not noting an update to a story about which I had written before, a story of domestic terrorism carried out by so-called "animal rights" advocates who are utterly opposed to the use of animals in research. The series of attacks began with an intimidation campaign against a UCLA researcher named Dario Ringach that succeeded in frightening him to the point where he gave up doing primate research. Against Ringach himself, the campaign consisted primarily of harassment by phone and other means. However, Ringach was spooked by a botched attack on another UCLA…
oracknows | February 20, 2008A blogger's duty calls:
(Click for the full-sized version.)
It's true: A skeptical blogger's work is never done! When pseudoscience or quackery is noticed on the Internet, no mater what time of day or night, this skeptical blogger cannot resist the call to craft a takedown.
Just ask my wife.
oracknows | February 20, 2008Deep underneath the brick and steel of a nondescript building somewhere in Manhattan, within the very bowels of the city itself, not far from the Seed mothership, Orac waited. After over a year's absence, the monster had returned to consume the most unpalatable brain of a former Nixon speechwriter who had decided that he knew more about biology than biologists and that calling pseudoscience pseudoscience was akin to that tactics of Hitler and Stalin in suppressing dissent. Since then, Orac had noted an uptick in the monster's activity. Hooked into the primitive human computer network known as…
oracknows | February 19, 2008Via WhiteCoat Underground, I've learned of a most disturbing development.
Remember Le Canard Noir? He's the skeptical blogger whose Quackometer was one of my favorite websites and tools for identifying pseudoscience and quackery caused him to run afoul of the Society of Homeopaths and a highly dubious practitioner named Joseph Chikelue Obi, both of whom tried to get his Internet service provider to boot him off of its servers using vacuous legal threats of libel actions? Both led to an outcry from the medical and skeptical blogosphere in the form of many, many copies of the offending text…
oracknows | February 19, 2008In response to my post yesterday castigating J. B. Handley of Generation Rescue for hypocritically accusing the American Academy of Pediatrics of "manipulating the media" when manipulating the media is Generation Rescue's raison d'être, Mike the Mad Biologist turned me on to a rather fascinating article in the New York Times by its Public Editor Clark Hoyt entitled The Doctors Are In. The Jury Is Out. It discusses a topic very near and dear to my heart, namely how newspapers report scientific or medical controversies, specifically, how the NYT covers controversies in which one side is the…
oracknows | February 18, 2008David Colquhoun, eminent scientist and maintainer of the excellent blog DC's Improbable Science, has recently returned home to the U.K. after a trip across the pond to the U.S. and Canada, where, among other things, he gave a lecture at the University of Toronto, as well as the Riker Memorial Lecture at the Oregon Health and Science University. Now that he's back, he's made some observations about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into U.S. medical schools, the same infiltration of woo that I've lamented in my Academic Woo Aggregator.
Among his commentary on several "luminaries" of the…
oracknows | February 18, 2008Three weeks ago, I wrote about some truly irresponsible antivaccination propaganda masquerading as entertainment that aired in the form of a television show called Eli Stone. This show, which portrayed its hero taking on the case of an autistic boy whose mother blamed his autism on thimerosal (going under the fictional name "mercuritol") in vaccines and scoring a $5.2 million settlement in the process. One consequence of this show was that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was shaken out of its inaction enough to draft a letter protesting the show and urging its cancellation of the…
oracknows | February 17, 2008Due to the unfortunate intrusion of real life into blogging resulting in the inability of this week's previously scheduled host to be able to fulfill his hosting duties for the February 28 edition of the Skeptics' Circle, there has been a last minute change of hosts for the next Circle. The 81st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will now be hosted by Factician at the Conspiracy Factory. Instructions for submitting posts are now found here, and I will forward the submissions that were sent to me to our new host. Help him out and send him your best skeptical entries following the usual guidelines.
oracknows | February 17, 2008Dave Munger has done the science blogosphere a service by spearheading the effort to highlight and aggregate serious posts about peer-reviewed research through his Research Blogging aggregator website and his Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting blog. It's a great idea and a great source for what science and medical bloggers say about the latest published research. Dave is to be commended for creating such a useful site.
Of course, aggregating serious research blogging is all well and good, but the assumptions behind it are that the research and the blogger are serious and honest and…
oracknows | February 16, 2008Must. See. This. Movie.
It doesn't matter that Harrison Ford is 65 and getting a bit long in the tooth for the whole action thing. I need my fix.
oracknows | February 16, 2008When you don't have the facts on your side, can't get published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and have consistently failed to make a case for your hypothesis, what do you do? Well, if you're a real scientist, you might just finally pack it in, admit that you were probably wrong, and move on to another scientific question or to another hypothesis about the same question to investigate.
Not "intelligent design" creationists.
To them, it doesn't matter just how bad their arguments are, how untestable and incoherent their hypothesis is, or how obvious it is that they are simply…
oracknows | February 16, 2008I don't know about you, but I find Mr. Deity to be hilarious. This time around, with the most recent episode, he takes on fundamentalism of all stripes and whether there should be an afterlife or not. (For a commercial-free direct link to the iTunes version, go here.)
And, of course, who doesn't want third party apps on their iPhones?
oracknows | February 15, 2008I've become known as an advocate for evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the three years since I started this little bit of ego gratification known as Respectful Insolenceâ¢. One thing this exercise has taught me that I might never have learned before (and that I've only reluctantly begun to accept as true) is one huge problem with EBM. Not surprisingly, it has to do with how EBM is used to evaluate so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) therapies, many of which are highly implausible on a scientific basis, to put it exceedingly generously.
Consider homeopathy, which on a…
oracknows | February 15, 2008Balance.
It's what the woo-meisters who believe in "Feng Shui" tell us that it will bring to those who use its principles to arrange the objects in their life, be they furniture, homes, the design of buildings, or even the layouts of whole cities. Indeed, Feng Shui tells us that the way we arrange objects in our environment, choose a place to live, or even choose burial plots can allow us to achieve "harmony" with our environment. Obviously, this is true in a trivial sense. If your house is full of crap piled everywhere in seemingly random distributions, it is going to have a negative impact…