oracknows | March 7, 2007I've posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate "vaccine-injured" children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines for lots of bad things, be it autism, immune problems, "autistic enterocolitis," and generalized "mercury toxicity," all the while asserting piously (and, most amazingly of all, with a straight face) that, oh no, they aren't in any way "…
oracknows | March 6, 2007Last week, I wrote a quick and (semi-) facetious piece about how my colleague and I are sweating to the NIH payline, as we wait to find out whether our R01 application will be funded or not. With its being rumored that National Cancer Institute (NCI) paylines will be in the range of the 12th percentile, it's going to be really, really tight whether we make it below that line or not, although my colleague's being a new PI will certainly help.
Wouldn't you know it that Writedit, the blogger whose excellent and highly useful blog, Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship I discovered and…
oracknows | March 6, 2007The latest Grand Rounds has been posted at the abode of everyone's favorite blogging emergency medicine doc, GruntDoc. It's the fourth time that he's hosted; so he's an old pro at it now.
Enjoy!
oracknows | March 6, 2007One byproduct of blogging that I had never anticipated when I started is how it sometimes gets me interested in scientific questions that I would never have paid much attention to before or looked into other than superficially. One such scientific question is whether dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule that was shown to have significant anti-tumor activity against human tumor xenografts implanted in rats, media reports about which caused a blogospheric hysteria in late January representing DCA as a "cure" for cancer that "big pharma" doesn't want you to know about, mainly because it's…
oracknows | March 5, 2007Sorry I'm a bit late on this. (Yes, I know that Tara and John pimped this contest nearly a month ago, but somehow it slipped by me to mention it myself; that is, until Skepchick reminded me of it as I caught up on my blog reading over the weekend.
If you've read my Medicine and Evolution series, you'll know I'd be interested in this contest. From the Alliance for Science, it is an essay contest for high school students. The topic is Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? They're asking for an essay of 1,000 words or less, and the due date is March 31. Official rules are here.…
oracknows | March 5, 2007One of the claims most frequently made by "alternative medicine" advocates regarding why alt-med is supposedly superior (or at least equal) to "conventional" medicine and should not be dismissed, regardless of how scientifically improbably any individual alt-med modality may be, is that the treatments are highly "individualized." In other words, the "entire patient" is taken into account with what is frequently referred to as a "holistic approach" that looks at "every aspect" of the patient, with the result that every patient requires a different treatment, sometimes even for the same disease…
oracknows | March 4, 2007
I'm not sure if the group above, Clowns for Christ, Inc. (complete with Gideon the Parrot, Precious the Super Dog, and illustrated Bible messages, songs, and clown tricks), is the group responsible for the training videos that I posted yesterday. If it's not, though, apparently clowning for Christ is more widespread than I thought, because Googling "Clowns for Christ" or "Clowns for Jesus" brought up a lot of hits, including:
Clown Ministry
Clowns for Christ (a different group)
Clowning4Christ
Christ the Rebel Clown (which led to The Rebel Clown Army, which bills itself as wanting "to…
oracknows | March 4, 2007In all the confusion, work, and excitement of the last week, including an NIH study section and a trip to give a talk, you may have thought that I've forgotten about a monthly feature that has been ongoing here since the very beginning and that will likely continue as long as (1) this blog exists and (2) Fleet keeps sending me calendars.
If you're in college, as apparently our intrepid blog mascot and promoter of colon health is, March is usually the month during which your spring break appears. Of course, when I was in college at the University of Michigan, spring break used to be at the…
oracknows | March 3, 2007It's history time, both good and bad!
First, there's the latest History Carnival.
Next, there's the Carnival of Bad History.
Enjoy!
oracknows | March 3, 2007In which Christian "clowns" are being trained to invade a nursing home to "entertain" the unfortunate residents trapped within.
Money quote: "If people are in need of touch, you touch them."
Coming from clowns, that just sounds a bit creepy to me.
Or maybe, "Clowns can look a bit intimidating if you see a lot of them in one place." (Substitute "creepy" for "intimidating.")
See for yourself:
Worse, there's a Part 2, in which the clowns invade the personal rooms of the elderly nursing home residents and then use the residents in wheelchair races:
This stuff could scare the crap out of…
oracknows | March 2, 2007I was in Lansing, MI giving a talk at MSU the other day. Although time was very constrained and I didn't get to see much of the campus at all, on the way back to the airport, I saw a very odd fundamentalist billboard. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of it with my cell phone camera; so I'll have to do the best that I can by memory to tell you what it says.
The billboard said something like this (I could be off considerably in the exact phraseology, but this was the gist of the sign):
Forgive us, O Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Too long we have relied upon the automobile industry…
oracknows | March 2, 2007I didn't get back home until late last night; unfortunately there was no time to do a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo that was up to my standards. Fortunately, there's something that I've been holding in reserve for just such an occasion that fits right in. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my blog, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined about three or four years ago on…
oracknows | March 1, 2007I apologize for submitting you to the previous three creationist videos. I realize that they were pretty mind-numbing, and then there was that cheesy Christian rock ballad.
So here's one antidote. (Warning: The video is nearly two hours long; even I haven't had time to watch the whole thing yet.) And it happened at one of my old alma maters, Case Western Reserve University.
it's good for what ails you. Watch it a little at a time if it's too long to watch all at once.
oracknows | March 1, 2007Here's the finale of my audience participation project for today. I've saved the "best" for last. This short video, called Science Refutes Its Own Laws?, is the target. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the questions contained therein and/or demonstrate why they represent typical creationist canards, and do it without reference to Talkorigins.org. It's pretty easy, but it's also depressing that this crap persists. Also, don't be too depressed. There's one more of these coming, but it's an antidote.
It's also amusing how confident the tone of the video is. Forgive me…
oracknows | March 1, 2007Here's part 2 of my audience participation exercise. This is a continuation of my audience participation/open thread set of posts for today. It's called "list the creationist fallacies." This post is part 2 of this endeavor. This short video, called Which came first, the DNA or the protein?, is the target. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the questions contained therein and/or demonstrate why they represent nothing more than the typical creationist canard. It's pretty easy, but it's also depressing that this crap persists. If that's not entertaining enough, feel free…
oracknows | March 1, 2007Busy, busy, busy last night and all day today until late, namely because I'm out of town on business. My schedule has been packed, and I won't be home until late. There's no time to post one of my characteristic pearls of verbosity. So what do I do when this happens?
Be grateful that YouTube exists, that's what. With a little planning ahead and a few minutes' work, I can make sure that the Respectful Insolence you all know and love keeps flowing while I'm away, only this time with some help. This time around, I'm going to do a couple of audience participation/open thread kind of posts. It's…
oracknows | March 1, 2007The 55th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been posted at The Second Sight, and EoR has
bowed to the higher energies of the universe in organising this edition based on the numerological vibrations of the submitters. Numerology is, of course, a science that has been proven by thousands of years of traditional use, dating back to at least Babylonian times. And they probably got it directly from the Atlanteans. Who got it from the interdimensional Martians.
Glad to hear it.
I think. (It sounds as though EoR is going to see the new Jim Carrey movie.)
Of course, as always, EoR has done a bang-…
oracknows | February 28, 2007Another one has fallen.
Yes, another prestigious medical school has given in. First I lamented the decline in basic science education in medical schools. Then, I lamented even more the infiltration of woo into the curricula of far too many medical schools, spurred on by patient demand, a desire for a nice, high profit cash-on-the-barrelhead set of treatments, and, most depressing of all, the misguided and highly credulous advocacy of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). Worse, my own alma mater, the University of Michigan, has infiltrated serious woo into its curriculum. But at…
oracknows | February 27, 2007Like many biomedical investigators, I've been sweating it over the resubmission of an R01 grant my collaborator and I worked furiously on and submitted on November 1. He's the principal investigator, but I'm a coinvestigator with 25% effort; I also wrote one of the three specific aims and most of another, the justification for animal use, and the IACUC (animal use) protocols for the project. Consequently, I have almost as much invested in the success or failure of this grant proposal as its PI does, although he certainly gets props from me for pulling us two co-investigators together with…
oracknows | February 27, 2007Kristjan Wager points out to me that Respectiful Insolence was listed as the Blog of the Day by the L.A. Times on Monday.
Oddly enough, I hadn't noticed any traffic coming my way from the link...