oracknows | May 16, 2007One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it's the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Indeed, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that vigorous peer review is a major part of science that keeps pseudoscientists from attaining the…
oracknows | May 15, 2007The latest Grand Rounds has been posted at the Medical Humanities Blog. Time for your fix of the week's best medical blogging.
oracknows | May 15, 2007Good God Almighty....(From Sir David Attenborough's "Life in the Undergrowth")
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oracknows | May 15, 2007The winners of the Alliance for Science essay contest that I mentioned a couple of months ago, where high school students were asked to write an essay of 1,000 words or less about the topic Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?, have been announced.
My only question is why the actual essays aren't posted on the Alliance's website. I did find, however, that the winner, Gregory Simonian, has a blog, where he describes his struggle to write the winning essay:
I'll give you some behind-the-scenes commentary. I had a super tough time cutting that essay within the word limit. I had…
oracknows | May 15, 2007A while back, I coined a term for woo so irrational, woo so desperate to masquerade as reason and science, that it could be spewed forth into books, the Internet, and the blogosophere by only one man.
The man is Deepak Chopra, and the term is Chopra-woo, examples of which can be found here and here.
I had thought that there was no man quite as capable of producing such concentrated woo cloaked in the language of science (well, except perhaps for the DNA Activation guy or the guys at Life Technology, but their woo is so utterly over-the-top that I have a hard time accepting that they actually…
oracknows | May 14, 2007While trolling the deepest, darkest, most vile racist parts of the Internet, as I am wont to do looking around for new Holocaust denial idiocy to take down, I came across something unexpected, so unexpected that it made me curious. Basically, Bill White, Commander of the American National Socialist Workers' Party, apparently annoyed that he can't edit Wikipedia pages to conform to his racist views, proposed a strategy for "destroying" Wikipedia. Apparently, according to white racists, Wikipedia is full of "Jewish bias," whatever that means.
I'm sure there must be Wikipedians out there. (Heck…
oracknows | May 14, 2007Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it.
I say this in light of a commenter, who decided to show up in one of my old posts to claim "positive results" from dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule experimental cancer drug that has shown promising activity in rat models of cancer but has not yet been subjected to testing in human trials, and invite me to check out new testimonials. Because DCA is a small molecule that is inexpensive to produce and can't itself be patented (although a patent for its use in treating cancer, a weaker form of patent, is possible), pharmaceutical…
oracknows | May 13, 2007This week has been a bit of a rough and depressing week on the old blog, with the news that Battlestar Galactica will probably be entering its last season,the appearance of annoying conspiracy theorists in new posts and trolls in old posts, really irritating technical difficulties the ScienceBlogs site, and the need to debunk two particularly bad commentaries about the state of cancer research in this country. Worse, I see a further need to revisit at least one rather depressing topic from the past next week. To top it all off, I was on call last week. Given this, I think I need a dose of…
oracknows | May 13, 2007I don't know where EoR finds this stuff, but I like the way Deborah Ross thinks when she discusses offering alternative medical practitioners alternative methods of payment. Not surprisingly, they aren't interested:
There has been much fuss this week about the 'scientific status' of homeopathy, just as there is always a fuss about 'alternative' treatments generally. Personally, I have no patience with the dismissive and often contemptuous attitude these therapies can attract, as there are many useful treatments and products on offer out there. These include:
THE ALTERNATIVE CREDIT CARD (…
oracknows | May 13, 2007From a variety of sources, I've learned that the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica is probably going to be the last and that the beleaguered humans will find Earth. Here it is, right from Admiral Adama himself:
iF MAGAZINE: What's coming up for season four?
EDWARD JAMES OLMOS: It's fantastic. I think they're going to discover some very important issues about what the fan base really, really wants to see and what's to understand about this show. We're heading into the final season. This is the final season as we speak. All of us are very saddened by that, but we always knew there was going…
oracknows | May 12, 2007I haven't seen it summed up quite as well as here:
Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren't starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.
[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.]
[From the kitchen, there…
oracknows | May 11, 2007As many of you may have noticed, we're having some technical difficulties, with prolonged posting times for comments, errors, etc. I assure you that, however much it might annoy you to watch your browser chug away slowly and seemingly endlessly after you've composed your pithy and erudite comment and hit "Post," only to deliver an error message at the end, it annoys me infinitely more because it's happening to me nearly every time I try to edit or save a post or comment and has been for several days now.
I've learned that what's going on is tha apparently traffic at ScienceBlogs has finally…
oracknows | May 11, 2007Remember the SCIO? It was featured in Your Friday Dose of Woo two weeks ago. It's an amazingly woo-ey piece of woo that was just perfect for my little weekly feature.
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates my having a little fun with it. For example, one of the woomeisters responsible for the SCIO has appeared on my blog to complain and defend Professor William Nelson, the luminary of woo who's had a hand in not one, but two pieces of woo featured in YFDoW. This woomeister, who signed his comments "Dr. D," is displeased and showed up in the comments to tell me so:
ill Nelson hasn't yet won…
oracknows | May 11, 2007I really love Life Technologyâ¢. I really do. Heck, I could spend the next several weeks mining it for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo. The stuff there's so over-the-top that I find it hard to believe that these guys are serious. I mean, really, look at some of their products, a couple of which I've featured on YFDoW before; specifically the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0⢠(a.k.a. The Ultimate in Financial Abundance Engineering Technologyâ¢) and the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ¢, two pieces of such amazingly tasty woo that it's pretty hard to top them.…
oracknows | May 10, 2007A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of knowing, invoke postmodernist nonsense claiming that science is just one way of knowing that is not any better than any other ways, or both. The most outrageously absurd example of postmodernist silliness in this regard that I've ever seen was the…
oracknows | May 10, 2007It's that time again! Has it really been a fortnight since the last time the skeptics of the blogosphere met to apply desperately-needed critical thinking skills to the woo, credulity, and general lack of critical thinking in which the blogosphere is continually awash?
I guess so.
This time up, we have a rather unusual presentation of the Circle for the 60th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at Infophilia. This time around, the threat is real:
"So, here's the situation. Woos have struck at the foundation of reality, and it's now determined by the popularity of ideas. Simply put, the…
oracknows | May 9, 2007Since today seems to be World War II history day on the old blog, I just can't resist posting this little gem for geeks:
A full resolution version can be found here.
Of course, the nitpicker geek in me can't help but point out that, not only is the Swastika on the left arm of the robot reversed, but I'm really quite sure that the Nazis didn't have giant robots to use to attack U.S. Naval bases in the Pacific.
OK, OK, back to medicine tomorrow.
oracknows | May 9, 2007I'll admit it.
There have been at least two times since I started blogging that I fell for a dubious story because I exercised insufficient skepticism. The first time occurred very early on in my blogging history when swallowed a story about how legalization of prostitution was claimed to lead to the requirement that unemployed women take jobs as prostitutes or lose their unemployment benefits. More recently, I backpedaled a bit over a story about how supposedly history teachers in the U.K. were not teaching about the Holocaust out of concern for offending the sensitivities of certain of…
oracknows | May 8, 2007Via Kevin, MD, here's a piece that almost could have been written by me:
CAM exists in an alternate universe from real medicine. It wants to be legitimate but manages to avoid the responsibilities and liability of real medical practice. As most CAM treats nebulous symptoms with equally nebulous modalities, there is no measurable standard for efficacy of any of the treatments. Acupuncturists, for example, diagnose perturbations of "qi," a mystical life force which apart from serving as the basis for Star Wars has no physiological equivalent and cannot be measured in any way except through…