oracknows | August 12, 2007While trying to avoid working on my grant yesterday, I was idly flipping channels. I had planned on killing a few minutes while psyching myself up to go back into the Bat Cave that is my office, ignoring a gloriously perfect sunny day with temperatures in the low 80s, to do battle with the grant application again, when I came across it: The greatest movie ever made!
The movie is called Fiend Without a Face, a low budget science fiction/horror movie from the 1950s.
It's awesome, and I'll tell you why. The monsters are disembodied brains. Yes, this is (mostly) a medical blog, and talking about…
oracknows | August 11, 2007This is disturbing.
Yesterday, I did a rather light-hearted edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo about "ionic foot detoxification." A reader pointed out that in a story in which Randi had also discussed this woo, there was a comment along the lines of "I think autistic children should really do this."
How prophetic! Sadly, it turns out that autistic children are already being subjected to this woo. For example, I found this particular video on YouTube that has to be seen to be believed:
It's a woman named Ashley discussing "ion cleanse" foot detox for her 4 year old autistic son Braden. Her…
oracknows | August 10, 2007Don't forget, everybody, that the 67th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is due to land at The Bronze Blog on Thursday, August 16. Bronze Dog will host. As you may know, Bronze Dog is the creator of a great list of "doggerel" commonly used by the credulous to defend pseudoscience or the paranormal. It's up to 117 items as of this writing and is a great resource whenever you come across...well, doggerel directed at you to attack your use of skepticism and critical thinking.
The instructions for submitting to this week's carnival are here. If you don't know what blog carnivals or The Skeptics'…
oracknows | August 10, 2007After over a year of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I can't believe I've never come across this one before. Sometimes there's a bit of woo that comes my way that's so off the wall, so unexpected, the claims for which are so unrelated to reality that it startles even me. Moreover, unlike truly over-the-top woo like quantum homeopathy, DNA activation, or the SCIO, this one is utterly brilliant in the simplicity of its concept. It also makes me wonder about whether certain alties have a thing about feet. We know they have a thing about "detoxification" (without, of course, ever being able to…
oracknows | August 9, 2007Somehow, I don't know how, I managed to wind up on the mailing list of über-woomeister Dr. Joseph Mercola, who's almost as bad as Mike Adams, only less blatantly crazy in pushing conspiracy theories.
Yesterday, I received this pitch by e-mail:
I've got a quick question for you:
How does your energy compare to the salmon swimming and jumping upstream for hundreds of miles?
Facing tremendous obstacles -- fish ladders, rapids, predators -- they swim and jump for hundreds of miles to complete their incredible journey (without eating along the way).
Could it be that their ocean diet gives them…
oracknows | August 9, 2007I'm a bit cranky right now.
Long time readers are familiar with the logorrhea that usually characterizes this blog. Fans love it; detractors hate it, Some may have noticed a bit of paucity of blogging, at least relatively speaking. There's a good reason for this. Not only was I out of town last weekend, but I got to come back to be on call (i.e. on service) for the group while at the same time trying to finish a grant application that my institution had "honored" with a nomination to fill out--only two weeks before it was due. Yes, now is not a great time to be around Orac; his crankiness is…
oracknows | August 8, 2007This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
oracknows | August 8, 2007Turns out the monkey isn't the only creature in the forest getting bombed. Check out this video of the African booze tree.
Special thanks to Tom Ferriss for finding this clip.
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oracknows | August 8, 2007Check out the Carnival of Healing (which should be called the Carnival of Woo, if this recent edition is any example).
They're looking for hosts, you know. Perhaps I should volunteer. Or maybe one of my favorite skeptical bloggers would volunteer.
I know, it's an evil thought.
oracknows | August 8, 2007I learned the other day that one of the most renowned historians of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, passed away at the age of 81:
WILLISTON, Vt. --Dr. Raul Hilberg, a world renowned Holocaust scholar has died. He was 81.
Hilberg, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, died Saturday from a recurrence of lung cancer although he never smoked, his wife Gwen said. He died with her at his side at the Vermont Respite House in Williston.
Hilberg was the author of The Destruction of the European Jews, (1961), a landmark study of the Nazi killings of more than 5 million…
oracknows | August 8, 2007&uotI've been on call and grant writing, both of which have put a major crimp in my blogging time, preventing my usual daily magnum opus and leaving me reposts and pithy link-and-comment posts, at least for today. Since having become a little irritated by comparisons to Nazis by a certain opponent of bans on indoor smoking, I thought now would be a great time to show you something that I've been meaning to show since the time that I moved the old Blogspot blog over to ScienceBlogs. Yes, I'm talking about the origin of the Hitler Zombie. This post, which appeared on June 2, 2005, is in…
oracknows | August 7, 2007The third season of Doctor Who is over. There's nothing on the horizon for many months (such as the return of Doctor Who or Torchwood) that's interesting enough to me coming out of the U.K. that I'd go to the trouble of firing up BitTorrent to check it out, rather than wait until it somehow finds its way to these shores.
Until now.
Yes, it's Richard Dawkins' long-promised investigation of alternative medicine and New Age practitioners, entitled The Enemies of Reason:
Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
oracknows | August 6, 2007Seen on the road on my way into work this morning:
I passed a bus going the other way. I noticed that it had a prominent sign over its front window scrolling, "NOT IN SERVICE." We both stopped at the light, the bus on the other side going the other way from me. I then noticed that the sign switched to scrolling "GOD BLESS AMERICA." It kept alternating between those two messages.
Make of this observation what you will. Was it a message? Or was it just strangeness?
oracknows | August 6, 2007I hate flying these days.
I'm almost certainly not alone in this dislike of what air travel has become. After all, between widespread flight cancellations and delays, service that would make even cell phone tech support seem attentive and pleasant by comparison, and the necessary but degrading security gauntlet, in which old ladies are treated with the same level of suspicion as someone wearing an Osama bin Laden T shirt, that one has to run before boarding the plane, flying has become downright ugly. The only time it's tolerable these days is on the rare occasion when I can score first class…
oracknows | August 5, 2007Now I remember why breakdancing got on my nerves in the 1980s:
(Via Attuworld.)
Thus endeth the silliness for this rainy Sunday.
oracknows | August 5, 2007...Eneman!
I was remiss in July. It happens that I totally forgot to post the monthly feature that has become a tradition over the last two years of blogging. Oh, I tried to make up for it by resurrecting a rather amusing EneMan article from nearly two years ago as an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo when I didn't have time to come up with new material.
What I can't figure out is this: If EneMan is so busy being the industrious and hard-working student, where does he get the time to do all this extracurricular stuff?
JULY 2007
I have to say, I'd be pretty scared if I saw a 6 foot…
oracknows | August 4, 2007In case you haven't seen it yet...
Sad.
I can't believe Behe is still using the mousetrap analogy for "irreducible complexity" when the very concept has been so thoroughly debunked over the last several years.
oracknows | August 4, 2007I really, really wish the Discovery Institute would stop putting out idiocy like this:
We have blogged in the past about the growing numbers of doctors who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution to explain the complexity of life.
Those numbers are continuing to grow, and conesquently doctors are beginning to organize themselves and reach out to others who hold similar positions. Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI) has for sometime had a website at www.doctorsdoubtingdarwin.com. Recently they have begun using the site to organize and promote conferences about Darwinian…
oracknows | August 3, 2007So what do you do when you didn't have time to write something new? Well, you could leave the blog blank, which is anathema to me) or you could do the time-honored space-filling technique valued by bloggers everywhere once they reach a certain level of traffic.
Yep! It's one of the very rare times for an open thread on Respectful Insolence. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I did one of these.
Don't let Orac down. Take advantage of it and speak your piece! Or don't, and let the tumbleweeds roll through the ol' blog this afternoon, metaphorically speaking...