oracknows | July 12, 2007Here's the reason why:
Actor and voice artiste Peter Tuddenham has died at the age of 88 after a short illness.
His vocal talents were used in Doctor Who for The Ark in Space, The Masque of Mandragora and Time and the Rani, but he will also be well-known to cult TV fans for providing the voices of Zen, Orac and Slave in Blake's 7, which was created by Terry Nation.
In addition, Tuddenham was in the Kaldor City audio spin-offs Occam's Razor and Death's Head, which were Doctor Who/Blake's 7 crossovers produced by Magic Bullet.
Tuddenham's voice of Orac was perfect for the character. Combining…
oracknows | July 12, 2007Mike Adams is an idiot.
There, I said it.
Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all things "alternative" medicine. In it, he rails against "conventional" medicine as utterly useless and touts all manner of woo as the "cure" for a variety of diseases. I generally ignore his website these days because I fear that reading it regularly will cause me to lose too many neurons, and, as I get older, I want to hold on to my what neurons I have remaining for as long as possible, or, if I must lose them, to do so in a pleasurable way, perhaps as a result of a fine bottle of wine. But,…
oracknows | July 12, 2007Apparently comic Tim Slagle thinks that my discussion of his comedy routine was horribly, horribly humorless and unfair to him and that I "set him up." I just happen to be at work right now (it's lunchtime, and I have a brief break between cases) and consequently don't have time to address it until much later today, but I will link to Tim and let you see what you think until I get around to dealing with it. Stop by Tim's blog and tell him hi for me. While you're there, you might want to take a gander at this piece by him. The discussion of chemistry and thermodynamics there has to be read to…
oracknows | July 12, 2007It looks as though I've been tagged by Drug Monkey, who apparently thinks that I might have something worth saying about the state of the NIH and its peer review system, about which the NIH is presently soliciting comments, as pointed out to me by Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship. Why Drugmonkey might think this to be the case, I have no idea, but presumably it has something to do with some previous posts that I've made about the NIH, how biomedical research is funded in this country, and the disconnect between vision and reality at the highest level of the NIH. Although I used…
oracknows | July 11, 2007About a month and a half ago, I posted an update to the story of the plight of a group of medical professionals who have come to be known as the "Tripoli 6" or the "Benghazi 6." These are six foreign medical workers who were falsely accused by Libyan authorities intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and then unjustly imprisoned under horrific conditions, where they have remained for nearly eight years. Thanks to the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, leading to an ignorant bloodlust whipped up against…
oracknows | July 11, 2007I thought I'd take a bit of a break for a change of pace. At the risk of falling flat on my face, I'm going to wander far afield from the usual medical and biological topics of this blog into an area that I rarely say much about. The reason is an incident that happened nearly two weeks ago when I was in Chicago. Lately, I've been becoming increasingly interested in how bad scientific arguments make it into the collective consciousness and stay there. While it's true that there are such things as astroturf campaigns and paid flaks whose job it is to get such messages in the medium and keep…
oracknows | July 10, 2007...Tara over at Aetiology is hosting Grand Rounds.
What are you waiting for?
oracknows | July 10, 2007I'm devastated.
Truly and totally devastated emotionally and intellectually. Indeed, I don't know how I'll ever be able to recover, how I'll ever be able to live down the shame and go on with my career.
What could bring me to this point, you ask? I'll tell you. Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon and dualist Dr.Michael Egnor thinks I'm "unprofessional."
Worse, he does it while agreeing with Pat Sullivan's article in which Pat asserts that "Darwinism" has what he calls a "marketing problem," in essence seemingly saying that, because he can't understand "Darwinism" but can understand…
oracknows | July 10, 2007Actions have consequences, as do beliefs. For example, the widespread erroneous belief among many parents of autistic children that the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was used in most childhood vaccines until 2002 somehow caused autism in their children have led some pseudoscientists and parents who have fallen under their sway to subject their children to all manners of "biomedical" interventions to "extract" the mercury and supposedly cure their children of autism. In extreme form, this belief has led to highly dubious "treatments" such as those served up by Mark and David…
oracknows | July 9, 2007Last week, I wrote about the latest attempt to defy the laws of thermodynamics and make a free energy machine and how it went down in flames. Specifically, I wrote about Steorn, the Irish tech company that announced last August that it had developed technology to produce a free energy machine and more recently announced that it was going to demonstrate its amazing technology at the Kinetica Museum in London on July 4. Not surprisingly, Steorn ended up postponing the demonstration, first for a day, and then indefinitely.
Here's the President of Steorn Sean McCarthy trying to explain what went…
oracknows | July 9, 2007Last week, I was forced to face the fact that I'm definitely, solidly, undeniably now middle-aged.
Oh, I could delude myself before and say that I'm "mature" and even pretend to some extent that the slow deterioration that time causes biological organisms doesn't apply to me. I could even dismiss the increasing creakiness in my knees and the ache in my lower back that I seem to notice more and more upon rising in the morning as "nothing," because they only cause me minor annoyance. Indeed, I could pretend that the little niggling bits of evidence that my body is aging, just like that of…
oracknows | July 9, 2007I just don't understand it.
I just don't understand how anyone can take discredited antivaccination loon Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore. In particular, I don't understand how any reputable newspaper can actually take him seriously anymore, given how thoroughly he and his "work" have been discredited. First came the news in late December that at the time he did his "research" that purported to show a link between the MMR triple vaccination and autism and bowel problems, Dr. Wakefield was in the pay of lawyers looking to sue for "vaccination injury" and failed to disclose his clear conflict…
oracknows | July 8, 2007Given that my electronic leash is always with me and that ubiquitous pagers and cell phones make doctors reachable 24 hours a day, it's amazing to contemplate a time when a PA system at a hospital was considered new and high tech:
I especially like the part touting the volume control, as if that were some technological wonder that one wouldn't expect on a P.A. system!
Personally, when I see such a system, I can't help but think of the Three Stooges in Men In Black. Of course, when it comes to any paging system, be it a PA system or a pager, there are times when I feel like doing exactly…
oracknows | July 8, 2007As I mentioned yesterday, I recently perused all the e-mails that Gmail had flagged as spam and to my dismay found a lot of legitimate e-mail, including mailing list e-mails and Movable Type e-mails notifying me of comments being caught up in the filter. However, I found something scarier than that. In fact, I found perhaps the scariest spam that I've ever encountered.
Did you know that spammers are claiming to be selling chemotherapeutic agents from India? Check it out:
From: euroasias@ricmail.com
Subject: Anti-Cancer Drugs
Date: July 6, 2007 10:32:56 PM EDT
To: [ORAC]
EUROASIA's TRANS…
oracknows | July 7, 2007Wow. That's all I can say.
The unreconstituted Led Zeppelin geek in me is amazed. That kid can really channel Jimmy Page.
oracknows | July 7, 2007Time to take a break from science and medicine again.
The Rambo movies happen to be a guilty pleasure of mine. Little did I know that there was a Turkish knockoff of the character:
I particularly love the rocket launchers in this one. Their "action" has to be seen to be believed.
oracknows | July 6, 2007A bit of blog housekeeping here...
Normally, I find out about new comments on my blog through e-mail notifications that get sent to me shortly after you, the reader and commenter, post your comments. I find it much easier simply to scroll through the e-mails and see what the reaction is to my posts and to note any comments to which I think a response from me is warranted. In addition, usually about once a day, I check the "Junk Comments" folder on Movable Type to see if there are any comments that fell victim to the spam filters that I need to retrieve and publish. (As an aside, the most…
oracknows | July 6, 2007Thanks to a commenter going by the 'nym of djm, I found in a comment yet another hilarious example of how credulity towards pseudoscience of one form often goes hand-in-hand with other forms of pseudoscience. It looks as though the "intelligent design" creationists are down with Steorn's claimed free energy machine as "evidence" against materialism:
Steorn's findings totally undermine the basic premise of materialism, simply by demonstrating a confirmed physical effect that materialists predict cannot happen. These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated that the principles of…
oracknows | July 6, 2007It was a rough day yesterday. I spent a long time in the O.R. It was one of those days that I couldn't figure out what happened. The number of operations that I had to do should have allowed me to finish operating by around 2 PM, leaving me time to do other things that needed to get done. But between delays in getting a patient back from nuclear medicine, long turnover times between cases, and a case that took me nearly two hours longer than it should have, it was well after 5 PM by the time I was done--and I still had a bunch of work to do. I'm not complaining; these things happen and there…
oracknows | July 5, 2007As hard as it is to believe, it's that time again, time for a bracing dose of reality in response to the rampant credulity that permeates the blogosphere. I apologize for my announcement being later than usual; I was in the O.R. all day and only this evending did I have an opportunity to do my usual plug. So here it is now, the 64th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle presented to you at the Skeptical Alchemist. It's good to know that our intrepid skeptics are muscling in on woo territory.
Next up is Dr. Steve Novella at Neurologica. And, as always, if you're interested in tryng your hand at…