oracknows | January 2, 2007OK, folks. The holidays are over. It's time to get back to blogging. For you skeptics out there, it means that it's time to contribute to the Skeptics' Circle, which is being hosted at See You at Enceladus. Babbler's a little short on entries, but there's still a day left. Please send him some of your best stuff, so that the Circle, scheduled to appear this Thursday (January 4) will be a success. Then join us for the carnival on Thursday!
Submission instructions are here, and guidelines are here.
oracknows | January 2, 2007Believe it or not, there are times when I really, really wish I weren't right.
No, I'm not implying that I'm right so much of the time that I wish I were wrong more often. I'm human and therefore perfectly capable of being wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. (Of course, as we all know, that sort of thing rarely happens on this blog, right? Right?) But sometimes, even as I know I'm right about something, deep down I hope that I'm not. Usually such cases involve watching patients choosing alternative medicine reach the point where they have to the consequences of their choice. Despite all my…
oracknows | January 1, 2007Sadly, for many, today marks the end of their vacation (or at least of their long weekend). Fortunately, I was smart enough (as well as able) to take one last precious day off tomorrow to head into the city and check out an exhibit at the Met that my wife and I want to see.
As I prepared to take a week and a half off just before Christmas, I had been concerned that I had not heard anything from my intrepid blog mascot (no, not the Hitler Zombie). Would 2007 be a year without him?
Fortunately, the answer is a resounding "No!" He's back, and badder than ever. In fact, you might even say he's…
oracknows | January 1, 2007This should come as no surprise. Thanks to Brian Deer, the journalist who uncovered so much of Dr. Andew Wakefield's shady research and dealings, we now know that Wakefield was paid by lawyers before his infamous MMR study and that he failed to disclose this clear conflict of interest:
ANDREW WAKEFIELD, the former surgeon whose campaign linking the MMR vaccine with autism caused a collapse in immunisation rates, was paid more than £400,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe.
The payments, unearthed by The Sunday Times, were part of £3.4m distributed from the legal aid…
oracknows | January 1, 2007What a lovely way to start the New Year, catching up on all the blogging I missed while I was on vacation. While doing so, via Skeptico, I came across a most worthy project: Stop Sylvia Browne. In this site, Rob Lancaster has accumulated in one easy stop a lot of useful information that helps to show how Sylvia Browne cannot really do what she claims she can do and how what she does appears indistinguishable from cold reading. Rob's manifesto:
Over the years, Sylvia Browne has been the focus of a number of skeptical pages on the web, but I don't think that there has ever before been one site…
oracknows | December 31, 2006Star Wars geek that I am (the original three movies, anyway), I couldn't resist posting this....
Happy New Years, all! If you're partying tonight, don't drink and drive.
oracknows | December 31, 2006The host of next week's Skeptics' Circle asks: What's the worst argument you can think of?
I think it's as good a question to close 2006 up with as any, and certainly there have been a lot of really bad arguments used during the last year. Perhaps if we air some of them, we can be inoculated against their return in 2007. Certainly near the top of the list has to be the argument by many pseudoscientists that "all sides deserve to be heard" about issues like evolution/creationism or certain forms of alternative medicine, like the exceedingly ridiculous pseudoscientific treatment known as…
oracknows | December 31, 2006One of the great things about blogging is that I can do things that I always wanted to do but would never get hired in a million years to do, for example, to be a rock critic. Prior to blogging, the only time I ever got to indulge my critic wannabe side was in high school, where I wrote a couple of (in retrospect) badly done reviews of a couple of prominent albums from the 1979-1980 period. I don't know if I'm any better at it now, but I am a lot older and have developed much more varied tastes in music. Consequently, even from the very beginning of this blog, every year I've done a "Top Ten…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 30, 2005 and is the followup to the first article I did (reposted earlier today). I debated whether to repost…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 21, 2005 and is the first of a two-part discussion of what has come to be known as the Al-Bayati Report. Part 2…
oracknows | December 30, 2006Yes, after a week off, both from work and (mostly) from blogging, I'm back. I know I promised the occasional new material, but I found that not blogging for a week was actually a good thing and thus didn't post anything new after Christmas. Even though I'm back, though, I'm taking one more day off before firing up the blog again. In the meantime, I've scheduled for this afternoon the reposting of a couple of tasty posts that were--shall we say?--a bit controversial in their day. I think they're definitely worth reposting, even at the possible expense of drawing an even larger horde of trolls…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 16, 2005. I'm now wondering why I never wrote more in this series...
Last week, I wrote about my visit to the…
oracknows | December 29, 2006New Years Day is almost upon us, and soon 2006 will be history. It's been a great year for the Skeptics' Circle, with some truly creative and entertaining takes on what, nearing the end of its second year of existence, has become almost a venerable institution. (Two years is almost ancient by the standards of the blogosphere, you know.)
In any case, it just so happens that the very first Skeptics' Circle of 2007 (the 51st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle) will be hosted at See You at Enceladus on Thursday, January 4, 2007. The guidelines for submissions and schedule of past and future Circles…
oracknows | December 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 7, 2005. As for this particular post, it occurs to me: Geez, why haven't I continued this series past part 2?
Over…
oracknows | December 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 9, 2006 and seems to fit in with the whole "Friday Dose of Woo" thing; so I'll repost it as such. Enjoy!.
I was…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 22, 2005.
A couple of months ago, there was a minor dust-up here regarding an unfortunate autistic boy who died…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 5, 2006.
Remember how I said yesterday that I was going to post something today that I had been planning since…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on December 30, 2005, and I'm reposting it today because today marks one year since my uncle died. I rarely blog about…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on April 22, 2005.
Unfortunately, Blogger was down for "scheduled maintenance" last night in my prime blogging time, meaning I…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 25, 2006
I hate spammers.
On the scale of Internet scumbags, spammers rank just one notch above pedophiles (barely…