oracknows | November 3, 2006Time flies.
In fact, it flies so fast that it seems only yesterday that Kev put together a great Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, but in fact it's been over a week and the time for a new host to take on the responsibility is fast approaching. This time around, it's Thursday's turn to host the Circle at Polite Company. (Appropriate name, given that the Circle is scheduled to appear next Thursday, November 9.) It's going to be hard to top Kev, but I have high hopes. But Thursday can't do it without your skeptical entries. So, if you're a blogger and have written something in the last couple of…
oracknows | November 3, 2006I feel for you, ScienceBlogs compatriot Afarensis. I really do.
Sure, your Cardinals beat my Tigers in the World Series last week. Sure, the Tigers made a lot of embarrassing errors and showed every sign of letting their youth and inexperience lead them to choking under the pressure. Sure at times the Tigers looked like a Little League team, throwing balls away hither and yon to let unearned runs score, looking nothing like the lean, mean baseball machine that had earlier dispatched the mighty Yankees with such aplomb after losing the first game. Sure the Cardinals managed to win it all after…
oracknows | November 3, 2006There are times when the struggle to keep cranking out Your Friday Dose of Woo every week starts to get to me. No, it's not because I don't enjoy putting together these little light-hearted but pointed analyses of some of the strangest woo that I've come across. Believe me, many times it's the highlight of my blogging week. It's just that, now that I've been doing this a while, no matter how hard I try to put something together the weekend before, so as to be ahead of the game, somehow I almost never quite manage to do it. Thus, all too frequently I end up writing away late Thursday night…
oracknows | November 2, 2006Let Abel Pharmboy put all the hype over the study showing that resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, can extend the lifespan of mice by 20-30% in better perspective for you.
oracknows | November 2, 2006The History Carnival XLII has been posted at Holocaust Controversies. Sergey runs a great blog about Holocaust denial and history; you should add Holocaust Controversies to your regular blogroll.
One entry that particularly saddened me was the story of how Deathcamps.org, which was a great resource for information on the Aktion Reinhard camps, self-destructed. Sergey gives an insider's account of its unfortunate demise in the wake of a dispute between members over the introduction of photos and documents of dubious authenticity, which Sergey strongly resisted while providing arguments and…
oracknows | November 2, 2006Suzanne Somers annoys me.
She annoys me because, despite the fact that her statements and activities over the last 25 years reveal her to be probably no more intelligent than the character that she played on Three's Company, she still feels the need to spread misinformation about diet and medicine in several books that she has written. Indeed, my annoyance at her was manifested very early in the history of this blog, when I mentioned her in the context of testimonials for alternative medicine treatments for breast cancer. The reason? In 2001, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer. She…
oracknows | November 1, 2006The latest edition of Change of Shift, the blog carnival about nursing, has been posted at DisappearingJohn RN.
oracknows | November 1, 2006Seen pulling into the hospital parking lot this morning, a cardiologist with a vanity license plate on his car. The vanity plate read:
LUB DUB
(For nonphysicians who may not be aware of the significance of the above, "lub-dub" is the way the two parts of the heart sound with each beat are usually represented in medical texts, as in lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.")
That's got to be about the best physician vanity plate I've ever seen.
oracknows | November 1, 2006I had been planning on finally getting around to writing that review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion that I've been meaning to write since I finally finished the book two weeks ago. Then a Google Alert hit my mailbox last night for a preset search that I keep active on "Abraham Cherrix," and the article that the link in the search results lead to not only contained a a disturbing amount of credulity towards alternative medicine (in the form of he-said-she-said "balance" when two outlooks are not anywhere near equally supported) but offered a positive portrayal of Abraham Cherrix and Dr.…
oracknows | October 31, 2006No Alice Cooper this time. Instead, given that this is the blog that conceived of the Hitler Zombie, how could I not post a clip involving an actual cinematic brain-eating zombie on Halloween? (Warning: In the interest of full disclosure, this clip contains a brief and poorly lit topless shot and a couple of uses of the F-word.)
Intelligent talking zombies who understand how to use pulleys. Now that's scary! Maybe this'll assuage PZ's disappointment that the Halloween edition of The Synapse didn't have any jokes about brain-eating zombies.
I mean, what's Halloween without brain eating…
oracknows | October 31, 2006More Halloween-appropriate mania from Alice Cooper, this time with Vincent Price!
And more:
More to come, but not necessarily Alice Cooper...
oracknows | October 31, 2006A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an "alternative medicine" practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as an "allergist" and an alternative medicine practitioner. Tariq's tragic and unnecessary death lead to a round of posterior covering by mercury militia enabler David Kirby and a rather blithe acceptance and dismissal by some who routinely go ballistic whenever someone…
oracknows | October 30, 2006it's Halloween, and I thought I'd celebrate by posting a few appropriate YouTube! videos. And what says Halloween quite like Alice Cooper?
oracknows | October 30, 2006Last week, I wrote a couple of posts about Rush Limbaugh's despicable attacks on Michael J. Fox for appearing in an ad for a Democrat who supports loosening the federal ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research. Somehow, I missed the fact that Jon Swift also wrote on the topic. And, as is typical, he did it in a much more humorous fashion than I could.
oracknows | October 30, 2006Institutional review boards (IRBs) are the cornerstone of the protection of human subjects in modern biomedical research. Mandated by the federal government in the 1970's in the wake of research abuses of the 20th century, in particular the the horrors of the infamous Nazi biomedical experiments during World War II that were documented in during the Nuremberg trials and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which black men with syphilis in rural Alabama were followed without treatment in order to study the natural course of the disease, a study that lasted into the early 1970's. In the wake of…
oracknows | October 29, 2006Remembering two rather frivolous posts that I made last weekend, you might have an idea of what this costume might be.
Yes, you too can Be The Hoff.
Of course, if The Hoff is not your style, you can also Be The Magnum.
(Via Attu World.)
oracknows | October 29, 2006It seems to be the time of the year for this sort of thing.
Yes, I realize that the Harry Potter novels have come under attack from various fundamentalist Christians, who view them as somehow indoctrinating children into witchcraft, Wicca, demon worship, or whatever. I also realize that I may be a bit behind the times on this story. But, with Halloween coming up and all, I thought I'd mention it anyway, because this time one such parent, Laura Mallory, has taken her beef with Harry Potter all the way to her state Board of Education in Georgia, after having been slapped down before in her…
oracknows | October 28, 2006Mitch Albom sums the World Series and the Tiger's 2006 season up far better than I ever could.