oracknows | December 1, 2006It's been five months since I first started Your Friday Dose of Woo. I started it on a whim, after wondering if I should have a Friday feature, as so many other ScienceBloggers do (Friday Cephalopod, Friday Sprog Blogging, The Friday Fermentable, among others). In those five months, this thing has taken on a life of its own, producing woo more woo-ey than any that I had ever encountered before, woo like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, Dr. Emoto's water woo, spiritually guided surgery, detoxifying boots, and the global orgasm. Sometimes the woo had religious overtones; sometimes it abused…
oracknows | November 30, 2006More carnival-ly goodness! The History Carnival XLIV has been posted over at Barista. Enjoy!
oracknows | November 30, 2006Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been post at Fat Doctor.
oracknows | November 30, 2006I have to take this opportunity to express a bit of disappointment in one of my fellow SB'ers.
When I encounter a study that seems to confirm my biases, as a skeptic, I try very hard to be even more skeptical than usual, because I would hate to be caught trumpeting a weak or bogus study as evidence supporting a belief of mine. That would be very embarrassing to me. At the very least, although I might not always succeed, I usually try to be very candid about limitations of studies that I cite. Unfortunately, yesterday, Bora (via Archy) failed to heed that rule. Indeed, he clearly let his…
oracknows | November 30, 2006When I wrote a post about how Richard Dawkins was being unjustly smeared as supporting Hitler-style eugenics by the religious blogosphere, I figured I might provoke some criticism, particularly since I didn't just stop there. No, in a bit of what some may consider blogging hubris, I couldn't resist trying to discuss under what circumstances eugenics might be morally justifiable and under what form. (Of course hubris is almost a job requirement to be a blogger; so none of this should be surprising.) In any case, not surprisingly Vox Day wasn't all that happy about what I wrote. (If you're…
oracknows | November 29, 2006Andrew Mathis over at Flavor Country does it well. Indeed, his demolition of Holocaust deniers on Usenet on the newsgroup alt,revisionism undoubtedly had an influence on what later became my special brand of Respectful Insolenceâ¢.
So, sit back and enjoy as he thoroughly fisks an article by Mark Glenn, the webmaster of the Crescent and Cross (WARNING: Glenn likes to post extremely gory pictures), a website that is, as Andrew puts it, dedicated to "uniting Christians and Muslims against Jews."
Here's a little taste of Andrew's response to one of Glenn's claims that Jews are "exploiting in a…
oracknows | November 29, 2006I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get a bit bored with Deepak Chopra. He's like the Energizer Bunny of woo; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Unfortunately, one of his sycophants going under the 'nym "ChopraFan" appears to have infested my blog, posting plugs for Chopra's latest idiocy in the comments of unrelated blog posts. it's almost as though he wants me to trash Chopra's latest incursion into woo, a breathtakingly inane piece called The God Delusion? Part 5 (or here on The Huffington Post).
PZ's already chewed over the woo, but I can't resist getting a couple…
oracknows | November 28, 2006I know I'm a bit late in on this one, and almost everyone's already commented on it. Obviously Richards' gratuitous use of the N-word was about as funny as a crutch, but Trey Ellis tells us why as he addresses Richards:
If you had just said the n word you might have one day been forgiven but you went for a lynch joke. Yes, a lynch joke. Is that being cheeky and irreverent? Is that like that wigger shit Tarentino tries to pull, crowbarring the n word into every script because he thinks he's that bad of a white boy?
I don't think so.
Suggesting that your obnoxious hecklers should be lynched for…
oracknows | November 28, 2006Grand Rounds, vol. 3, no. 10 has been posted at the blog of fellow skeptic Dr. R.W. Enjoy!
oracknows | November 28, 2006Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755.
Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.)
Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…
oracknows | November 27, 2006I've mentioned one particularly odious (well, more odious) subset of Holocaust deniers, a type that I call the "Holocaust never happened but the Jews deserve it" type of Holocaust denier. These Holocaust deniers claim that either the Holocaust never happened or that it was greatly exaggerated, while at the same time spewing anti-Semitism along the lines of, "The Jews deserved everything they got" from the Nazis. (Never mind that the denier just said in the previous breathe that the Jews never got much of anything as far as persecution from the Nazis). If you don't believe that this type of…
oracknows | November 27, 2006With the internecine sniping that's been going on lately throughout ScienceBlogs ove Larry Moran's intemperate "flunk the IDiots" and "Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists" remarks, or, more specifically, whether opposing ID requires that one oppose religion in general as well, I hesitate to tread here. However, given my interest in the Holocaust, World War II history, and how Nazi racial hygiene programs laid the groundwork for Germany's plan to exterminate the Jews and all others viewed as threats to the regime, I can't resist putting my two cents in about this issue.
Before I…
oracknows | November 26, 2006I can't believe I forgot to post this on Thanksgiving Day itself, but I'll make up for it now. What better way to finish off the Thanksgiving Day weekend than with one of the funniest Thanksgiving Day promotions of all time, courtesy of one of what TV Guide has ranked as one of the greatest episodes in television history, an episode from WKRP in Cincinnati?
oracknows | November 26, 2006On this, the last day of the long holiday weekend that I've spent mostly holed up in my home office studying for my surgery boards recertification examination, I feel a bit too burned out to post anything much serious today, unless I happen to become aware of something that's just too good not to post. Don't worry, there'll be a heaping helping of the usual Respectful Insolence⢠tomorrow to start your post-holiday week off right. In the meantime, though, here's some music. Anyone who knows me knows that I couldn't stand Journey back in the days when the band was popular, and I still can't…
oracknows | November 26, 2006If I taught a class in these days of professor evaluations depending so much on student evaluations, I'm not sure I'd have the guts to respond to a student's request to be excused so that he can go to a bowl game the way the Angry Professor responds.
Of course, if the school were the University of Michigan, the request would only be granted if the Wolverines were playing in said bowl game.
oracknows | November 25, 2006The PathGuy makes the case, with a large number of case studies of rock and pop stars who died at young ages. Unfortunately, there's no systematic epidemiological study that I'm aware of about whether rock 'n' roll stars have a shorter life expectancy or higher rate of traumatic death or death due to disease. We could certainly postulate that certain aspects of the lifestyle of a rock 'n' roll star would be detrimental to health, such as polysubstance abuse, long months on the road (probably eating lots of fast food along the way), and sleep deprivation, but there's no hard data that I'm…
oracknows | November 25, 2006Here's something I've been meaning to post for a while that somehow got buried in my list of cool, weird, or interesting links. One of the things they teach surgeons and emergency medicine doctors about is how to use common materials at hand to do, MacGyver-like, a cricothyroidotomy to save the life of someone who has an airway obstruction and is choking. But that's just so inelegant. Why use such crude methods (and take the chance that the necessary materials, like a straw or a Bic pen whose plastic body you can use as a tube, aren't readily available)? Get a hold of LifeStat, the…
oracknows | November 24, 2006One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR.
INTERNET SQUATTER: J…
oracknows | November 24, 2006I haven't done this in a while, but it's a long holiday weekend during which time I'm ensconced within my Sanctum Sanctorum studying for my once a decade recertification examination in Surgery. I need tunes! So iTunes, lay them on me:
The Yardbirds, Happenings Ten Years Ago (from the album Ultimate!). Not their best work, but a solid blues psychedelic piece. Personally, my all-time favorite Yardbirds tunes are Heart Full of Soul and Still I'm Sad.
The Pogues, Fiesta (from the album If I Should Fall From Grace With God). I love the Pogues. True, Shane McGowan had a serious drinking problem…
oracknows | November 24, 2006For the holidays, I thought I'd include a brief little bit of woo that seems not quite extensive enough for a full treatment in Your Friday Dose of Woo but is nonetheless a tasty woo morsel for your edification that fits in with the usual Thanksgiving theme of overindulgence in various foods and the deleterious effect such overindulgence can have on one's waistline. Here's one that I've never heard of before, namely ear stapling for weight loss:
Marie Fallaw says she lost 83 pounds in six months simply by "stapling" her ears.
The Mississippi entrepreneur, owner of Staple Lean LLC, has…