oracknows | August 3, 2007Michael Behe, that Don Quixote of "intelligent design" who never tires of tilting at windmills of "fatal flaws" in evolutionary theory that he think he's identified, did quite a bit of tilting at HIV in his book.
Watch his blathering taken down by a pre-graduate student named Abbie. It's so good it's been republished at Panda's Thumb.
Enjoy.
oracknows | August 3, 2007Unfortunately, I was way too busy this week to come up with a new edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. However, there's still stuff to be mined from the ancient history of this blog, stuff that most of you, my readers, have probably not seen. This one, for instance, dates back nearly two years (September 2, 2005) and features this blog's mascot, everybody's favorite real colon cleansing product. In this installation, our mascot shows the woo being sold by a colon-cleansing altie for the product of his action that it is.
Rrrrr.
As you may recall, last month's appearance of everybody's favorite…
oracknows | August 2, 2007This week, the 66th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle just so happens to coincide with the 66th Meeting of the International Society of Skeptics; so they decided to hold a joint meeting. This week's host, Mark Hoofnagle, has the abstract book all lined up for you to peruse. Excellent stuff. If only real scientific meetings could be like this.
Next time around, the Skeptics' Circle will land at The Bronze Blog, whose Doggerel series is a fantastic repository of rebuttals to common--well--doggerel that the credulous like to repeat in defense of their woo.
And, as always, if you're interested in…
oracknows | August 2, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines again (and that topic seems to me less and less rancorous these days, not because antivaccination "activists" have gotten any less loony but because the smoking cranks, at least the ones showing up on my blog these days, threaten to make antivaccinationists seem low key by comparison), it turns out that one of the premiere journals of medical research, Nature Medicine, has weighed in on the topic. If you want any more evidence that the antivaccination movement is becoming more and more like the radical animal rights movement in its willingness to try to…
oracknows | August 1, 2007How low will Andrew Wakefield supporters go in protecting the discredited and disgraced doctor whose shoddy and biased research sparked an antivaccination hysteria that led to falling vaccination rates in the U.K. and the subsequent return of measles and mumps?
This low.
Yes, it's a Wakefield apologist website. It misrepresents the science; whines about the hearings in the U.K. looking at Wakefield's dubious science, unreported conflicts of interest, and parrots the antivaccination lies that the MMR vaccine and thimerosal on vaccines causse autism.
In actuality, the purveyors of this…
oracknows | August 1, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike, why did you have to show me this story?
Don't you know that stories like this drive me crazy?
Basically, the story from Boston Now reports on how more and more parents in are claiming religious exemptions to vaccination in Massachusetts:
More Massachusetts parents are sending their children to school without the required vaccines, and some may be lying to get around state law.
Records obtained by Team 5 Investigates show that while the number of medical exemptions has remained flat, the number of parents claiming that vaccines violate their religious beliefs is going up -…
oracknows | July 31, 2007Since this seems to be the day for applying Respectful Insolence⢠to people who say stupid things about me...
Everyone knows that Dean Esmay and I don't exactly see eye to eye on a lot of things. Indeed, it could be safely said that Dean has nothing but contempt for me. It doesn't bother me. After all, I have to respect someone before his negative opinion of me can possibly bother me in the least. Between his HIV/AIDS denialism, his ignorant rants about cancer research, and his know-nothing conspiratorial "critiques" of the peer review system, Dean is clearly someone who has a far higher…
oracknows | July 31, 2007I was going to write about a recent study that purports to claim that smoking pot causes schizophrenia that's been making the rounds lately. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it), this week's host of the Skeptics' Circle, Mark Hoofnagle, beat me to it.
Can you say, "Correlation does not necessarily equal causation"?
The reporters who hyped the study and the investigators who enabled them should repeat this 100 times. Maybe it'll sink in.
oracknows | July 31, 2007A couple of weeks ago, inspired by a somewhat drunken encounter two weeks prior, against my better judgment, I waded into the evidence supporting the contention that secondhand smoke is harmful to health, increasing the risk of heart disease and lung cancer in workers chronically exposed to it. In response to a list of quotes going around the Internet claiming that relative risks less than 2 are so unreliable that they may be ignored (conveniently enough, most relative risks reported for exposure to SHS are in the 1.2 to 1.3 range), I pointed out what a load of dishonest quotemining the list…
oracknows | July 30, 2007If you want to know how clueless our current President is about healthcare and the uninsured, just check out this quote from a speech he gave recently:
The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.
Isn't that one of the biggest problems with health care in our nation? Patients without health insurance flood the emergency rooms, which by law have to treat them regardless of ability to pay, leading to higher costs all around for unreimbursed care, for…
oracknows | July 30, 2007I've been a bit remiss about reporting an update on the Tripoli Six, six foreign health care workers who were falsely accused of intentionally infecting children at a hospital in Libya with HIV, leading to their being convicted and sentenced to death. The evidence against them was crap, and scientific analyses showed that the strain of HIV in question had been in the hospital before the arrival of the Tripoli Six. After a lot of international wrangling between Bulgaria, the EU, and Libya involving diplomacy and more than a bit of money, the Tripoli Six are free. The arrangement involved the…
oracknows | July 30, 2007Saturday, I thought that I knew what I'd be writing about for Monday, which, I've learned from my two and a half years of blogging, is a great thing when it happens. A certain Libertarian comic had decided that he wanted to argue some more about secondhand smoke and indoor smoking bans, starting a few days earlier with a rather specious analogy (which was handily shredded by you, my readers) and then finishing by annoying me with a comment and a post that implied that I didn't "care about the little guy." It looked like great fodder for a post to start out the week and a chance to apply a…
oracknows | July 29, 2007
(LOL Oscar from Lauren.)
While I expressed skepticism the other day regarding the media reports that a cat named Oscar could predict which patients at the nursing home in which he resides were within hours of death, some of you believed it, some even going so far as to speculate that not only could Oscar detect impending death but that he hangs out by the dying because he wants a snack.
But none have gone so far as Mighty Ponygirl in speculating about Oscar's true motivation.
Personally, I like my explanation that it's just confirmation bias better. It's less--shall we say?--disturbing. I…
oracknows | July 29, 2007Continuing this weekend's silliness, I found a contender for Gene Simmons' throne, at least as far as the tongue action goes:
I don't know why I find this video disturbing, but I do.
Don't worry. I promise to post something substantive tomorrow.
oracknows | July 29, 2007Here's something that's not a good idea:
Boston, MA (AHN) - The Board of Registration in Medicine, which is the governing authority issuing licenses to Massachusetts doctors, has reportedly suspended a Boston anesthesiologist from the practice of medicine for dozing off during an operation.
However, the headline is misleading. It turns out that this doctor has a bit more of a problem than just dozing off during an operation:
In December 2005, Thomas Ho admitted inhaling anesthetic gas while on lunch break on another occasion. The Board also added that following month Ho had taken a…
oracknows | July 28, 2007Ya gotta love The Cramps. Their style of rockabilly is so bizarre that it's been dubbed by some as "psychobilly." And, if you happen to be unlucky enough to have to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, I can't imagine a much better bit of therapy than to see The Cramps perform at your hospital.
Enjoy!
There's more:
And, while we're at it, here's a Cramps classic:
(Via Mt. Holly Major's Office and Boing-Boing.)
oracknows | July 28, 2007I guess that's where I've been thus far in my life:
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
How about you? Has anyone been to 100% of the states?
oracknows | July 27, 2007copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy copy…
oracknows | July 27, 2007The Brothers Bleiman
Since early childhood, Andrew and Ben Bleiman have shared an obsession with zoology, corresponding with the mammalogist George Schaller before puberty and memorizing more than one illustrated animal encyclopedia. Although they currently both work in the software industry, Zooillogix is both a hobby and a secret outlet of forbidden passion...
Andrew studied biology and animal behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he is an active member of the auxiliary boards of both the Shedd Aquarium and Lincoln Park Zoo. Additionally, he manages pro-bono consulting…
oracknows | July 27, 2007Zooillogix has been invited to join ScienceBlogs and we have decided to take them up on the offer. ScienceBlogs is a unique community of science related blogs that run the gamut from highly informed and technical to... errr.... us.
What this means for you the reader (e.g. the bored desk slave, bored 12 year old boy or renowned zoologist doing research on your next paper):
The Content Won't Change: You can expect the same fascinating stories and questionable attempts at humorTechnical Difficulties: There may be a short "outage" period of a day or two, during which time you will be forced to…