oracknows | October 13, 2007The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS:
I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son."
[...]
The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…
oracknows | October 12, 2007Knowing a certain recurring character on this blog, I so wish I had the time to take a trip into New York City on Sunday afternoon to participate in this.
How do you plan to spend next weekend?
With 200 zombies. Doing Yoga. In New York.
* Tattered clothes. Severed Limbs. Blood. Guts. Brains. The works.
** Chanting. Meditating. Posturing. The usual.
*** Where else would you do it?
'Nuff said.
oracknows | October 12, 2007Although his taste in music is questionable at best, Snowball the Cockatoo definitely knows how to get down and get funky.
I can't say I've ever seen anything like this before. Now maybe if we introduced Snowball to some old Parliament-Funkadelic. Tear the roof off the sucker, Snowball, and give up the funk!
oracknows | October 12, 2007Woo-meisters will not be pleased. While perusing this week's Skeptics' Circle, I was reminded of something that I had meant to post about a couple of days ago.
I don't know how he did it or where he got it, but somehow he has found the Holy of Holies for woos everywhere. He found The Woo Handbook. In it, he finds the twenty main strategies for dealing with Skeptics. They're pretty much all there: shifting the goalposts, labeling skeptics as "close-minded," introducing quantum mechanics, and appeals to ignorance, along with #18, the technique of woos that probably annoys me the most (at least…
oracknows | October 12, 2007
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my general opinion about Reiki and other "energy healing" modalities. In short, they're woo, pure and simple. Consequently, one might reasonably ask why I've never featured the woo that is Reiki in Your Friday Dose of Woo. There's a simple reason for that.
Basic Reiki is boring.
Really, I mean it. In and of itself, it just doesn't reach the level of sheer ecstatic nuttiness that I like to feature every week. Oh, sure, there's lots of handwaving about "channeling the universal energy" through the healer to augment the life force of the…
oracknows | October 11, 2007One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine.
So what happens when…
oracknows | October 11, 2007Yes, it's that time again, time for the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle to land on the blogosphere like a nuclear explosion of reason, rationality, and science designed to demolish the credulity that is so rampant.
OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but we here at the Skeptics' Circle do try to do our part for critical thinking.
This time around, the Circle is being hosted at Infophilia. In an unusual take on the Circle, this time around it's been presented as a series of puzzles that will challenge and (hopefully) amuse skeptics everywhere.
Get ye to the carnival!
Remember, too, that it won'…
oracknows | October 11, 2007I should have guessed.
Leave it to uber-crank (a. k. a. One Crank To Rule Them All) Mike Adams, the "intellect" behind what is perhaps the crankiest website known to humankind (at least when it comes to medicine), NewsTarget.com, to try to slime Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As fellow ScienceBlogger Mark points out, in his "report" Breast Cancer Deception, Adams accomplishes this by characterizing Breast Cancer Awareness month as nothing more than part of a conspiracy by the "male-dominated" cancer industry to keep women down.
I have to admit, in the realm of sheer wingnuttery, I've seldom…
oracknows | October 10, 2007Here we are, a third of the way into Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I haven't yet written a piece about breast cancer. Given that it's my primary surgical specialty, perhaps some readers were wondering why not. Truth be told, I've always been a bit ambivalent about Breast Cancer Awareness month. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my job makes every month Breast Cancer Awareness month. Or maybe it has something to do with the crassness of some of the promotions designed to attract donations, well-meaning though such campaigns undoubtedly are. From my perspective, any month…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One of the most important responsibilities of health care workers and hospitals is to protect the privacy of the patients for whom they care. Unfortunately, in the case of George Clooney's recent hospitalization for injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash, a consequence of electronic medical records was revealed when dozens of employees, some of whom apparently leaked the information to the press, accessed Clooney's medical records. Of course, these employees didn't seem to realize that EMRs allow the tracking and identification of anyone who logs on to the system. Anyone who logs on leaves…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
oracknows | October 9, 2007I love it when my efforts are noticed by those at whom they are directed. It's all the reward I need. (Warning: Depending on your place of employment, link may not be work-safe.)
oracknows | October 9, 2007Let me just take a moment to join fellow ScienceBloggers Ed, Revere, RPM, Zuska, Nick, PZ, Razib, Steve, and Bora in encouraging everyone to vote for one of our own, Shelley over at Retrospectacle, for a $10,000 Student Blogging Scholarship.
Don't do it just because I asked you to. Do it because she runs an excellent blog and deserves it. Also, if you don't vote for Shelley, we'll shoot this dog.
Well, not really. I could never shoot a helpless dog. I love dogs. But vote for Shelley anyway. Or maybe we'll give this dog a bath whether he needs it or not.
oracknows | October 9, 2007The game ended too late last night, and I was too tired to do a quick celebratory post, but better late than never.
In case you were wondering, Orac is pleased. Not as pleased as he would have been if it had been the Tigers who beat the Yankees, but pleased enough.
Look out, Boston!
oracknows | October 9, 2007On occasion, I've thought of inaugurating awards for the looniest quackery, alternative medicine, or antivaccination craziness of the year. I was thinking of calling them the Woo Awards, but I've never actually gotten off my lazy posterior to do the work it would take to set up some sort of voting system, and I'm not so sure that a list picked out only by me wouldn't just end up reflecting my personal idiosyncrasies. Be that as it may, with the end of the year fast approaching, if I were going to do it now would be the time to start looking for nominations.
If I were going to give a prize for…
oracknows | October 8, 2007No IgNobels here, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies for a technique that is so incredibly important to modern biomedical research that it's a wonder they didn't get the prize before:
This year's Nobel Laureates have made a series of ground-breaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals. Their discoveries led to the creation of an immensely powerful technology referred to as gene targeting in mice. It is now being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine - from…
oracknows | October 8, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It's gotten such a foothold that it's even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I've speculated before that academic medical centers probably see alternative medicine as both a marketing ploy to make themselves look more "humanistic" and a new revenue stream, given that most insurance companies won't pay for therapies without solid evidence of efficacy, meaning that…
oracknows | October 7, 2007I've had this story sent to me by a few readers over the weekend, and I think it's worth a brief comment.
I'm basically a child of the 1970s. Although I didn't watch it much, if ever, I remember Charlie's Angels when I was in junior high and high school. Like any adolescent who came of age in the late 1970s, I remember the famous and hot-selling poster of Farrah Fawcett, which graced the bedroom of more than one of my friends, although I never actually owned a copy. A while back, I heard that Fawcett had been successfully treated for anal cancer. Now, I hear from my readers that her anal…
oracknows | October 7, 2007Richard Dawkins really should know better.
That's why it's frustrating to see him put his foot in his mouth in a big way in a recent interview. Indeed, he did it in a way that leaves himself wide open to charges of anti-Semitism:
In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence…
oracknows | October 6, 2007Ah, yes, it's that time of year again. The winners of the 2007 IgNobel Prize have been announced. There have been several "worthy" winners, for example:
Mayu Yamamoto from Japan won the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for her development of a novel way to extract vanillin, the main component in vanilla bean extract, from cow dung. In tribute to Yamamoto's achievement, Toscanni's imitated her achievement and distributed samples of the resulting ice cream to Nobel laureates seated on the stage. Loud chants of "Eat it! Eat it!" from the audience finally persuaded the skeptical Nobel laureates to try…