oracknows | April 24, 2007Given all the verbiage (see the link list below) about dichloroacetate (DCA) that I've spewed into the blogosphere decrying the hijacking of a promising cancer therapy by conspiracy-mongers (it's the cancer cure "big pharma" is keeping from you because they can't make money on it) and opportunistic entrepreneurs like Jim Tassanno preying on the desperation of terminally ill cancer patients, I had thought that I would be taking a break on the topic for a while. But wouldn't you know it? My blogging colleague Abel at Terra Sigillata unearthed another fascinating article on the effects of this…
oracknows | April 24, 2007As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I've written about this topic before, both in general, in terms of my personal experience "sweating to the NIH paylines," to lamenting at how we as biomedical researchers are in essence treated as freelance money sources for medical schools. Coupling Dr. Niederhuber's talk at the meeting…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike...
What did I ever do to deserve this? Specifically, your remarks about our creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor:
In his "response," "Egnor" manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the "Michael Egnor" articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes...It's been fun while it lasted, but the game's over now. Would whoever is really writing this stuff please take this opportunity to own up to it? Please…
oracknows | April 23, 2007A while back, I posted about news reports that teachers in the U.K. were reluctant to teach about the Holocaust because of fears of offending the sensibilities of certain parts of the population. The subtext, of course, was that Muslims were the ones who would be offended. I lamented that such sensitivity might be causing teachers in the UK not to teach the Holocaust properly, much as sensitivity to the religious beliefs in the US lead to teachers not teaching evolution. I wasn't alone in making this connection. Both PZ and the Bad Astronomer made similar comments.
It turns out that perhaps I…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Those arguing the "conventional" view that sound science and epidemiological studies have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism are often tarred with the "pharma shill" brush. Meanwhile, researchers who have ever taken drug company money (particularly if it's from a drug company that makes vaccines) are castigated for having a serious conflict of interest, even to the point where conflicts of interest are invented or exaggerated beyond any reasonable recognition to tar the investigator with the dreaded "pharma shill" label.
Don't get me wrong. Possible conflicts of interest should…
oracknows | April 22, 2007Ever since the Virginia Tech shootings a week ago, there's been a lot of playing of the blame game in the blogosphere over who or what was to blame for Cho Seung-Hui's deadly rampage. A few days ago, I mentioned one bright spot of heroism among the carnage, where a faculty member, Professor Liviu Librescu, barred the door to his classroom to the gunman, buying his students precious time to escape. He was apparently shot multiple times through the door.
Librescu ended up giving his life so that a few more students could jump out of the windows of the classroom. As it turned out, he was also a…
oracknows | April 22, 2007There is a monster living in our house.
Black and sleek, with nasty, pointy, teeth, it lurks, waiting to deal out death and carnage. Indeed, evidence of its implacable thirst for death was left for me when I returned from Los Angeles late Wednesday night, perhaps left in tribute.
Behold, the face of death!
Fear her! Do not rouse her slumber!
Oh, no! Too late! (Note the eyes glowing with Satanic evil!)
Actually, as you probably figured out, that's our dog. She's the sweetest, lovingest dog in the world, gentle and, as you can see, greatly appreciative of a comfortable spot to take a…
oracknows | April 21, 2007This is just a brief announcement to inform everyone that, as part of a project to update and improve the Skeptics' Circle main site, I've updated the link list in the sidebar to cull broken links, add several new skeptical blogs that I've come across (or older skeptical blogs that I've never heard of before), and to eliminate inactive blogs. To me, an inactive blog is a blog where no posts have yet appeared in 2007, a pretty generous definition, if I do say so myself.
If you have a skeptical blog or website that you'd like me to add it to the sidebar of the Skeptics' Circle main site, drop…
oracknows | April 21, 2007I hadn't planned on writing again about the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech. After all, what more could I say that hasn't been said before in the blogospheric chatter that's erupted in the five days since the killings? Despicably, everyone's blaming their favorite cause. Fundamentalists are blaming atheism, secularism, and even Charles Darwin for the rampage. We have people making the ridiculous claim that more liberal concealed carry gun laws would have stopped the rampage before so many people died. Never mind that the price over the years for maybe--just maybe--stopping a rare homicidal…
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
oracknows | April 20, 2007Chinese scientists have made a remote controlled pigeon. By planting micro electrodes in the pigeon's brain, the scientists can make the bird fly up, down, left or right."I'm looking for a boy named John Conner. Have you seen him?"
Chief scientist Su Xuecheng explains, ""The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon's brain according to electronic signals sent by the scientists via computer, mirroring natural signals generated by the brain."
Whether or not the pigeon is going to defend the city of Detroit from a gang of criminal masterminds, who are headquartered in a toxic waste dump…
oracknows | April 20, 2007
Pity poor Nikola Tesla.
A sure sign of the most potent woo is when the woo-meister responsible claims to base it on the work of a great scientists, particularly a great scientist who's been dead well over 60 years.
Like Nikola Tesla.
The deader the scientist is and the longer he or she's been dead, the more sure the woo-meister can be that only the few actual scientists who pay attention to woo and bother to refute will have the necessary background knowledge to refute it. Moreover, the longer ago the scientist lived, the less chance of any pesky relatives caring enough to tell the woo-…
oracknows | April 19, 2007Remember Jim McGreevey, the former Governor of New Jersey, who resigned nearly three years ago in disgrace because of an adulterous homosexual affair, as well as his having tried to give his boy toy, Golan Cipel, a high-ranking state job for which he was utterly unqualified, namely Homeland Security Advisor?
What do you think would be the perfect job for him now? In New Jersey, it would be teaching a course at Kean University on ethics, of course:
James E. McGreevey, who resigned the governorship under a cloud of scandal, has a new job teaching law, ethics and leadership at one of New Jersey'…
oracknows | April 19, 2007Bear with us on this one...it might get a little complicated:
Wasps from the genus Copidosoma lay two eggs into a host egg (for example a moth or butterfly egg). One of these two eggs is male and one is female. The male and female larvae then begin multiplying--much like single celled organisms--into a thousand copies of themselves inside the egg. Thus the female "sisters" are more closely related to each other than they are to their brothers, and vice versa. The host egg, however, can only accommodate about half of the thousands of larvae now writhing around within it.Congratulations! It's…
oracknows | April 19, 2007Richard Dawkins will be interviewed by Bill O'Reilly on the O'Reilly Factor on Monday, April 23.
Talk about walking into the lion's den! I'm not sure this is such a good idea on Richard Dawkins' part. The problem, of course, is that Bill O'Reilly blusters and yells and doesn't let guests that he doesn't like talk. I have to wonder if Dawkins knows what he's in for. Even though he's almost certainly capable of handling a bully when both are on equal terms, O'Reilly controls the microphone and the show; he won't tolerate being slapped down the way he deserves. Being on The Colbert Report (…
oracknows | April 19, 2007The latest Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at Blissful Entropy (cool blog name). Check it out!
oracknows | April 19, 2007Earlier this month, a "mercury mom" named Christine Heeren posted a most disturbing video to YouTube. Not long after, Kevin Leitch became aware of it and wrote about it, shortly after which the video was made a "private video" that only those given permission could view. Fortunately, Kevin had also downloaded the video and has made it available here.
It's a disturbing video on many levels, portraying, as it does, Ms. Heeren's autistic son being subjected to chelation therapy with EDTA, a therapy based on a failed hypothesis (that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines "causes" or "contributes…
oracknows | April 18, 2007A small pod of narwhals, Monodon MonocerosFor centuries, humans have speculated on narwhals' bizarre horns, believing them to be everything from supernatural appendages to spear fishing weapons to tools for poking around on the ocean floor. In 2005 a team from Harvard and the National Institute of Standards and Technology put a horn under an electron microscope and discovered that it was actually covered in nerve endings, more than 10 million total, tunneling from the center of the horn to the outer surface. As it seems, the horn is a highly advanced, completely unique sense organ, probably…
oracknows | April 18, 2007The latest Grand Rounds was posted yesterday at Fat Doctor. Lots of great stuff, as usual.
oracknows | April 18, 2007I remain confused.
Yes, I know that people who don't like me very much or at least don't like the message that I lay down here day in, day out, week in, week out probably aren't surprised at this startling admission, but I don't mean it in a general fashion (although no doubt those aforementioned people will take it that way). No, in 10 days or so since I first weighed in about it, I remain confused at the vociferously hostile reaction that Chris Mooney's and Matthew Nisbet's recent article in Science, Framing Science, and their follow up article published on Sunday in the Washington Post.…