oracknows | October 20, 2007I can't say I saw this one coming, but it turns out that Albus Dumbledore is gay:
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has revealed that one of her characters, Hogwarts school headmaster Albus Dumbledore, is gay.
She made her revelation to a packed house in New York's Carnegie Hall on Friday, as part of her US book tour.
She took audience questions and was asked if Dumbledore found "true love".
"Dumbledore is gay," she said, adding he was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, who he beat in a battle between good and bad wizards long ago.
The audience gasped, then applauded. "I would have told you…
oracknows | October 20, 2007I must lead a sheltered life, at least when it comes to the creationism-evolution wars.
Sure, I'm more than aware about how much creationists and their more common (these days, at least) bastard offspring "intelligent design" creationists like to cherry pick, twist, and mangle data to make it seem to support their case, or, when all else fails, just lie outright about it. That's no surprise to me. Neither is the mendacious manner in which creationists try to blame Darwin and evolutionary theory for Hitler and the Nazis, as well as the horrors of Stalin and Mao, and just about every other evil…
oracknows | October 19, 2007Don't forget, once again the time is fast approaching.
Soon yet another installment of the Skeptics' Circle will be upon us. In fact, it's less than a week away and due to land at the quackometer blog on Thursday, October 25. Our host this time has achieved a fair amount of notoriety by being the victim of an attempt by the Society of Homepaths, through the use of legal threats against his ISP, to silence his criticism against it for failing to do anything to enforce its own ethical standards. Sadly, Le Canard Noir's ISP folded and told him to take the post down. Quite predictably, this ham-…
oracknows | October 19, 2007DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…
oracknows | October 18, 2007PZ seems to think that the whole "LOL" thing has gone too far. He may be right. In fact, I've even commented on it before.
Even though I have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the whole "LOLCats" phenomenon and its various bizarre spinoffs, I do have to admit that I've found one LOL spinoff that's pretty darned amusing.
Are you ready for LOLQuacks?
Some examples:
OK, I know the above has nothing to do with quackery, but as a fan of the Fantastic Four and a connoisseur of pareidolia, I couldn't resist. On with a few homeopathy-related examples:
This one is amusing because I…
oracknows | October 18, 2007Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I'm totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of the ideas, but rather solely because they are religious ideas. Many of these ideas, if they were not based on religion, wouldn't be given anywhere near the respect or deference that they are now. But, because they are based on a faith in the supernatural, for some reason we as a…
oracknows | October 17, 2007Via Health Care Renewal, I've learned of a study that, certain people may be surprised to learn, troubles me. Published yesterday in JAMA, it is, as far as I know, the most comprehensive quantification of one type of tie between industry and academia, specifically how many department chairs have ties to industry and what kind. Here's the abstract:
Institutional Academic-Industry Relationships
Eric G. Campbell, PhD; Joel S. Weissman, PhD; Susan Ehringhaus, JD; Sowmya R. Rao, PhD; Beverly Moy, MD; Sandra Feibelmann, MPH; Susan Dorr Goold, MD, MHSA, MA
JAMA. 2007;298:1779-1786.
Context…
oracknows | October 17, 2007One of my favorite phenomena that represents better than perhaps any other how humans are wired to look for patterns, whether there is a pattern there or not, is the phenomenon known as pareidolia. As a Catholic-turned-sort-of-heathen, in particular I like Virgin Mary pareidolia, and have blogged about multiple such incidents. Of course, the Virgin Mary is not the only sort of image seen in pareidolia. Jesus shows up quite frequently as well.
Now, would you believe that the late Pope John Paul II is showing up in flames? No, really:
This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II…
oracknows | October 17, 2007I've written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between "alternative" and "conventional" medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of "pharma shill." It's happened so often ever since my Usenet days that I even sometimes joke about it preemptively sometimes when writing skeptical posts or make smart aleck comments asking where I can sign up to get those big checks from big pharma, given that they'd almost certainly…
oracknows | October 16, 2007I know, I've been a bad blogger about this lately, but better late than never. A couple of blog carnivals for you:
surgeXperiences #106
Cancer Research Blog Carnival #2
Grand Rounds, vol. 4, no. 4
oracknows | October 16, 2007Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there's still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn't been moved over to the new blog. This one originally appeared on March 7, 2005.
The short answer is: Yes. The long answer is below.
When I first posted on this yesterday, I had hoped things weren't as they appeared. Although representing himself as a free-thinking skeptic who proudly trumpets his atheism and calls religion a "neurologic disorder," Bill Maher has, sadly, apparently officially passed from the realm of "smug but…
oracknows | October 16, 2007Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there's still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn't been moved over to the new blog. This amusing little trifle originally appeared on August 25, 2005.
Well, I'm back.
Yes, I know I blogged a fair amount while on vacation, my promise to restrain myself notwithstanding. Nonetheless, with the exception of the posts about the traffic wreck that screwed up our trip home and the tragic death of an autistic boy receiving chelation therapy this week, it was mostly fluff or carnival barking.…
oracknows | October 15, 2007It's rare that one sees an editorial this spot on, but it happened a couple of days ago in The Washington Post:
The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between vaccines and developmental disorders or autism is now in the double-digits (including a September 27th CDC study in the New England Journal), critics are effectively demanding that scientists prove that thimerosal does not cause illness -- an impossible standard.
The very success of…
oracknows | October 15, 2007About a week ago, I wrote about how the wooiest of woo, reiki, has infiltrated one of the best academic trauma centers in the U.S. In it, I lamented that I was feeling increasingly alone in being disturbed by this infiltration of religious pseudoscience into bastions of scientific medicine.
Fortunately for me, Dr. RW is as dismayed as I am:
Out here in the hinterlands I can only wonder what's going on in academic medicine these days. Is there anyone there for whom the standards of science mean anything at all? Well, there must be. There are plenty of people who teach and write about evidence…
oracknows | October 15, 2007Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn't be more different other than their being twits.
One of the longest-running and best autism blogs, Left Brain, Right Brain, is closing.
It would be one thing if the trials and tribulations of everyday life had led Kev to make this decision, as they do for so many other…
oracknows | October 14, 2007Yes indeed, if you ever want to cite any of the pearls of brilliance laid down on a regular basis here, you can. Heck, you can even cite comments on blogs!
So now you know.
Here's a sample citation.
oracknows | October 14, 2007About a week ago, I posted about a truly execrably credulous article on alternative medicine published at CNN.com, which basically took a panel of true believers and asked them which five alternative medicine modalities had the best evidence to show that they "work."
Now, Steve Novella weighs in. His key point, with which I agree, is that "alternative" medicine advocates (or "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM) have been wildly successful in framing their favored woo as being on an equal footing with "conventional" medicine, all the while carving out a double standard that allows…
oracknows | October 14, 2007I was so busy mentioning how the Society of Homeopaths was using legal threats to try to shut down the free speech rights of the host of the next Skeptics' Circle, Le Canard Noir, that I forgot to mention that he also turned me on to a great web comic. The comic, Cectic, is highly unusual in that it is clearly a comic by a skeptic for skeptics. Some examples (click for a larger version):
Herbal cancer remedies:
Homeopathy:
Psychics:
Biblical "inerrancy":
"Intelligent design" creationism:
Astrology:
Cephalod abuse with alternative medicine (don't tell PZ):
And lots more.…
oracknows | October 13, 2007
Will Smith is the last man on earth. The movie is directed by Ridley Scott. The last take on this story (Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic I Am Legend), The Omega Man, is one of my all time favorite science fiction movies. (Yes, I know it didn't follow the story that closely, but it stood on its own.)
'Nuff said.
oracknows | October 13, 2007I don't do this very often, but this picture of Pope Benedict XVI struck me as amusing:
One suggested caption is here.
Not bad, but surely my readers can do better than that. Add your own caption!