oracknows | December 13, 2007Oh, no, not again.
Respectful Insolence⢠has been invaded over the last few days by a particularly idiotic and clueless homeopath named Sunil Sharma, who's infested the comments of a post about how U.K. homeopaths are complaining about all of us mean skeptics who have the temerity to point out the mind-numbingly obvious about homeopathy, namely that it is based on magical thinking, goes against huge swaths of well-understood science and thus would require some very compelling evidence indeed to be worth being taken seriously by scientists (evidence that homeopaths have been thus far unable…
oracknows | December 12, 2007
It's times like these that I wonder if I've been at this blogging thing a bit too long. I ask that question because I've done it again. I've done the same thing in 2007 that I did a year ago in 2006.
I missed my own blogiversary.
Yes, believe it or not, yesterday was the third anniversary of a cold and dreary Saturday when, more or less on a whim, I sat down in front of my computer and wondered if I could do this blogging thing that had been written about in the media so much over the preceding few months. After all, I had had several years' experience sparring with Holocaust deniers,…
oracknows | December 12, 2007Let's see, the ScienceBlogs collective started out in English. Earlier this week, our German partner Hubert Burda Media soft-launched ScienceBlogs.de, a German version of the ScienceBlogging collective that you've come to know and love (or, in some cases, hate).
Now, our benevolent (well, most of the time, anyway) overlords at the Seed Collective Mothership in New York ask:
What language shall we tackle next?
Personally, I vote for French, but that's just because French is the only language other than English that I used to be able to speak and can still understand to some extent.
oracknows | December 12, 2007Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and its propagnda arm (Discovery Institute) in particular have done their best to try to portray Gonzalez as a martyr who was "persecuted" for his beliefs and denied his "academic freedom." Despite the attempts of the DI to milk it for all its PR value, as usual, the…
oracknows | December 11, 2007How could I have been so remiss? I totally forgot to plug a new blog carnival that I really should be plugging, given my area of scientific interest. Yes, indeed, it's a new edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival, with lots of scientific bloggy goodness to enjoy.
Worse, I forgot to submit anything to it. I'll have to remedy that next time...
oracknows | December 11, 2007It's been a while since I've visited the cesspool that is Uncommon Descent, a.k.a. Bill Dembski's home for wandering sycophants, toadies, and lackeys. There's a good reason for this; I just get tired of the sheer stupidity that routinely assaults my brain every time I make the mistake of taking a look at UD's latest attempt to try to refute evolution. Worse, there's lots of other pseudoscience there these days, from the promotion of the use of cancer therapies that haven't been subjected to clinical trials yet to anthropomorphic global warming "skepticism." Yes, every time I peruse the posts…
oracknows | December 10, 2007...here's an example where the conspiracy obviously failed and failed miserably.
And if you like their Chanukah specials, you'll love their Ramadan lunch specials.
You'd think they'd know better in New York City, though.
oracknows | December 10, 2007If you've hung out in forums where Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers, and other conspiracy theorists hang out, as I have done, one thing you'll notice is that these particular purveyors of dubious conspiracy-mongering seem to have a particular love of demonizing Jews (or, as the smarter ones tend to call them in order to try to skirt obvious charges of anti-Semitism, "Zionists"). If you believe such nuts, Jews are responsible for exaggerating the Holocaust, for destroying the World Trade Center, or even for for the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia or even Hurricane Katrina. Indeed,…
oracknows | December 10, 2007Dr. Rashid Buttar is a quack. There, I've said it. It's my opinion, and there's lots of evidence to support that opinion. As you know, I seldom actually invoke the "q-word." Indeed, for the longest time after I started blogging I tended to go out of my way to avoid using it, even to the point of being a bit ridiculous, but in Dr. Buttar's case I now have little choice but to make my opinion of him plain.
I've noticed before that, as far as antivaccination cranks and the mercury militia go, when it rains it pours, and stories about such lunacy seem to come in waves. Weeks can go by without my…
oracknows | December 9, 2007Andrew Wakefield is an incompetent "scientist." Of that, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever, given how poorly he and his collaborators did the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies that he did looking for measles RNA sequences in colon biopsy specimens taken from autistic children, studies in which they failed to do even the most basic, rudimentary controls for detecting false positives due to contamination with plasmid DNA sequences. The harm that came from his now falsified findings of that study, in which he claimed that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and…
oracknows | December 8, 2007See what happens when I actually manage to keep myself from checking my blog for nearly 24 whole hours?
The trolls take over.
Well, they're not exactly trolls. Trolls often don't believe in what they post; they merely post it to get a reaction, for example, like rabid Hillary Clinton opponents posting on pro-Clinton discussion forums. However, true believers invading the discussions on blogs that oppose their viewpoint can produce much the same result as trolls who troll just for the sake of getting a reaction. Think creationists or fundamentalist Christians posting on Pharyngula or HIV/AIDS…
oracknows | December 8, 2007Sorry, but I can't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude over this. Chelationist extraordinaire Dr. Rashid Buttar is, it would appear, in a bit of trouble:
A Huntersville doctor is facing charges of unprofessional conduct.
Dr. Rashid Buttar's alternative medicine clinic treats autism patients from the around the country, but tonight there are questions about his treatment of cancer patients.
The North Carolina Medical Board's allegations are spelled out in a 10 page document.
They could ultimately lead to the revocation of Dr. Buttar's medical license.
He is accused of offering therapies that…
oracknows | December 7, 2007A few weeks ago, Martin over at Aardvarchaelogy, Steve Novella, and I speculated about how alternative medicine modalities might evolve and what the selection pressures on them might be. We all agreed that, to some degree, there is definite selection pressure for remedies that do no harm but that also do no objective good either. In other words, there is selection pressure for placebos.
Obviously, the evolution analogy is imperfect, but there is also another possible explanation for the persistence of something like homeopathy, which is, in essence, no more than water and thus nothing more…
oracknows | December 7, 2007After last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo, which featured an amazingly extravagant bit of woo that took up 10,000 webpages of some of most densely-packed woo language that I've ever seen, I feel the need for a change of pace. It's time to simplify this week. After all, if I were to do nothing but woo on the order of sympathetic vibratory physics, the Wand of Horus, quantum homeopathy, or DNA activation every week, your brain might well fry. And, if your brain didn't fry, my brain would for subjecting myself to such material week after week. Every so often, I need just a little wafer to…
oracknows | December 6, 2007This video would argue that the answer to the question in the title is no:
"I don't think anything predated Christians"?
What about Judaism? You know, the Old Testament, the book in which, Christians say, many prophecies of Jesus' coming were made?
I'd try to reassure myself that she's just more ignorant than average about history, but I'm not sure that she is.
(Via Pure Pedantry and Crooked Timber.)
Of course, this is the same woman who doesn't accept evolution and wouldn't commit to an opinion about whether the world is flat, as seen in this video:
Any bets on how long before we hear…
oracknows | December 6, 2007...because, via Skeptico and DC's Improbably Science, I've learned something that could only warm the coldest cockles of my evil scientific and skeptical heart. It's something that tells us that, maybe, just maybe, what we bloggers do in favor of evidence-based medicine may actually be having an effect. British homeopath Manish Bhatia, Director of hpathy.com, has sent out a frantic e-mail bemoaning how those poor, poor homeopaths are having trouble making a living, going so far as to say that homeopathy is "bleeding to death" (great analogy, given that homeopathy is a lot like the medieval…
oracknows | December 6, 2007It's hard to believe that two weeks have flown by once again. It's even harder to believe that the Skeptics' Circle has been around long enough to reach its 75th edition, which this time around comes straight out of Denmark, courtesy of longtime Respectful Insolence commenter and now blogger Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science. Kristjan's a just-the-facts kind of guy and he delivers a just-the-facts kind of Circle, chock full of skeptical bloggy goodness.
Next up to host on December 20, just in time for Christmas (and what better Christmas gift than the gift of skepticism?) is fellow ScienceBlogger…
oracknows | December 5, 2007Lest I forget to mention this one, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. The Ethicist, answers a question. Here's the question:
I work at a hospital where several nurses practice therapies like healing touch and therapeutic touch, said to adjust a patient's energy field and thereby decrease pain and improve healing, although there is no significant evidence for this. If those nurses believe in these treatments, may they tell the patient they are effective? If the treatments provide merely a placebo effect, telling patients about this lack of evidence might undermine that benefit. Would that justify withholding…
oracknows | December 5, 2007The other village quack of the Chicago Tribune has decided to enter the breast cancer fray again.
No, I'm not talking about the main village quack of the Chicago Tribune. That would be Julie Deardorff. Rather, I'm talking about the Chicago Tribune's newly minted breast cancer crank, Dennis Byrne. We've met him before, parroting credulously an incredibly bad study claiming that it had found a slam-dunk association between abortion and breast cancer. How bad was the study? Well, it was so bad that it was published in that bastion of politically-motivated pseudoscience, the Journal of American…
oracknows | December 4, 2007Fortunately, I've never had this happen when I've placed a central venous catheter:
See that bright line with the "J" at the end of it? That's the guidewire over which a central venous catheter is threaded. It's a very bad thing when you push it in so far that you lose it. Worse, is not reporting or admitting that you lost it before transferring a patient to another hospital. (You'd have to be really, really stupid not to realize that you lost it.)