oracknows | October 21, 2006
Die-hard Tolkien fan that I am, I was struck at how breath-takingly stupid an analogy this was, even for Rick Santorum. For one thing, as Lance Manion points out, the forces of good didn't start the war. For another thing, Frodo in essence failed. He succumbed to the temptation of the One Ring at the last minute and claimed it for himself. Only the greedy intervention of Gollum, still lusting for the Ring, saved the day. (Of course, if Frodo hadn't shown mercy to Gollum earlier in the story, Gollum wouldn't have been alive to unwittingly save the day, but that's another matter.) The most…
oracknows | October 20, 2006Don't forget, everyone, my favorite blog carnival (favorite, of course, because I happen to be the one coordinating it) the Skeptic's Circle is fast approaching and will appear at Left Brain/Right Brain on Thursday, October 26. Naturally, because of Kev's interest in debunking autism quackery, his decrying of the fall in vaccination rates resulting from the bogus MMR/autism scare, and his lampooning of the conspiracy theories popular among the "vaccines cause autism" crowd and the mercury militia. I naturally expect to see a lot of posts about autism and the dubious "therapies" used to treat…
oracknows | October 20, 2006I had considered putting Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus this week. It seemed rather superfluous. After all, for whatever reason, whatever confluence of strangeness, this blog has read like Your Friday Dose of Woo for nearly the entire week. I mean, come on. I started out fisking that über-woo Deepak Chopra on Monday, and then, not satisfied with one deconstruction of Choprawoo, I took him on again on Tuesday! Then, not content that enough woo had been dealt with on the blog this week, for whatever reason, yesterday I decided to write about what is arguably the ultimate in woo (at least in…
oracknows | October 20, 2006
Sadly for some of my readers, it won't be a Mets-Tigers World Series. The Cardinals pulled it out in game seven in a classic fashion, winning the game 3-1.
FOX isn't going to like an all-Midwest World Series. You could almost hear the disappointment that there wouldn't be a big market team like the Mets in the Series this year to generate better ratings.
But I love it and can hardly wait. Unlike fellow SBer Afarensis, I'm hoping the end result is a repeat of 1968. But without the Tigers falling behind three games to one before coming back. I don't know if I could take that sort of suspense…
oracknows | October 19, 2006A while ago, I pointed out some cool plush toys depicting giant microbes. Apparently, though, urologists and colorectal surgeons want in on the action.
Are you ready for...Pee & Poo?
oracknows | October 19, 2006Well, this is encouraging to see: A scientific journal publishing an article debunking pseudoscience, in this case the pseudoscience of homeopathy. (Grrrlscientist might object to the use of Hogwarts in the title, in essence comparing homeopathy to the wizardry of Harry Potter's world. So would I, actually. Such a comparison is an insult to Hogwarts.) In any case, I thought it'd be a nice little tidbit, a warmup for tomorrow's Your Friday Dose of Woo, if you will, to discuss it briefly.
It starts out with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Do you think I don't understand the hydrostatic…
oracknows | October 18, 2006Tom Verducci makes the case that the greated reversal in baseball history has just occurred with the Tigers making the World Series. Although they didn't have the worst record of any World Series team in the season before they reached the World Series (that "honor" belongs to the the 1991 Atlanta Braves), they had the largest number of consecutive losing seasons before their day in the sun, twelve seasons of futility:
Does all this make the Tigers the most shocking World Series team of all time? Yes. At the very least, they are on the short list with the 1914 Braves, '69 Mets and '91 Braves.…
oracknows | October 18, 2006Due to long delays because of rain on the East Coast that resulted in an air traffic delay and a lot of hanging out for hours at O'Hare airport waiting for the delay to be lifted, I never managed to write anything for today. (I was tempted to spend the $6.95 for wireless while waiting around. Unfortunately, the wireless in the part of O'Hare where I was stranded had a really weak and fluctuating signal. I couldn't even manage to get it to accept my credit card information, and thus decided to bail on that idea.) By the time I got back, it was late, and I was way too exhausted to write…
oracknows | October 17, 2006...check out Ed Brayton's masterful fisking of some truly awful anti-evolution "arguments."
Note especially the way that the two bloggers who run the site, when faced with criticisms of their mangling of facts and attributing "holes" in evolutionary theory that really aren't, simply repeat the same fallacious arguments again and again in the comments and keep calling evolution a "conjecture" that is not supported by facts, even though it is arguably the best-supported theory in the history of science.
It's truly depressing to see such astonishing ignorance coupled with such overweening…
oracknows | October 17, 2006It seems like only yesterday that I was fisking yet another piece of seriously irritating woo from that expert purveyor of woo, Deepak Chopra. In fact, it was only yesterday that I was fisking part two of Chopra's woo-filled The Trouble With Genes series. As I mentioned in my previous fisking, I had thought that Dr. Chopra might lay low for a while, and was surprised that he popped up again so soon.
So color me even more surprised that Chopra wasted no time in wading back in again with yet more of his tradmark brand of woo (which I like to call Choprawoo) in a post entitled The Trouble With…
oracknows | October 16, 2006Last night, Patti Smith performed the final concert (see here as well) at punk rock Mecca CBGB. Today, they are planning on beginning to dismantle the club. The club's demise was the result of a prolonged landlord-tenant dispute, and the landlord declined to renew the lease.
Many bands that I grew up to love, like Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, and the Patti Smith Group got exposure there and grew into national acts.
It is truly a sad day in music history, and owner Hilly Krystal's solution just won't be the same:
Kristal plans to move the club far from its roots with a new CBGB's in…
oracknows | October 16, 2006Alright, I'll come right out and admit it up front. There was no part one to this piece. Well, there was, but it wasn't on this blog, and I didn't write it. PZ did in response to some really idiotic arguments from ignorance that Deepak Chopra (or, less pleasing to Dr. C, here) displayed as part of an "argument" (and I use the term loosely) that there is some mystical other quality that explains life other than genes. He paraded a litany of arguments that so conclusively demonstrated that he had no clue about even the basics of molecular biology that I as a physician cringed and hid my head in…
oracknows | October 15, 2006While I'm on the topic of tacky design in a Christian website, what about tacky religious art? Everyone knows that He comes in many guises. One in particular that interests me as a surgeon is this one:
As a surgeon, I'd have to hope that Jesus is somehow completely sterile, because he's contaminating the surgical field in the photo above.
But the following is one of my all-time favorites:
I didn't realize that Jesus was such a bad-ass.
(Via Hokum-Balderdash Assay.)
oracknows | October 15, 2006Accept Jesus, Forever Forgiven?
Maybe, but I suspect that even the most devout Christian would doubt whethere even Jesus Himself would see fit to forgive the headache- and seizure-inducing design of the front page of this particular Christian site.
Don't come complaining to me if you need to lie down and take some aspirin after viewing the rather--uh--colorful site at the link above. You have been warned.
Maybe you would find this more soothing instead.
oracknows | October 14, 2006...Because the Tigers are actually going to the World Series! And they did it in fine style, too, with a come-from-behind victory in which Magglio Ordonez hit a three run homer with two out in the bottom of the ninth inning. I have to confess, I never quite believed they could get this far, particularly after they had a horrendous August and September, plummeting from being way in front to actually losing the division to the Minnesota Twins and having to settle for the Wild Card berth by being swept by the worst team in baseball, the Kansas City Royals, in the last series of the season.
Even…
oracknows | October 14, 2006Admit it.
We're probably all guilty of this at one time or another. Come on, 'fess up. You've done it too. I bet at some point in your life you've used one of The 7 Worst Fonts.
Especially Comic Sans MS. Even I've used that font a couple of times.
Does anyone else have suggestions for fonts that should be added to the list?
oracknows | October 14, 2006Here we go again.
The "scientists" at the Discovery Institute seldom miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot by making specious arguments that anyone with a reasonable understanding of evolution can shoot down. It doesn't take an evolutionary biologist to thoroughly dismantle most of the "scholarship" that flows from the DI (which is indeed fortunate for me, given that I am not an evolutionary biologist). Leave it to the North Koreans, with their recent apparently successful test of a nuclear explosive device, to give the intrepid Don Quixotes over in Seattle the excuse to tilt at…
oracknows | October 13, 2006Yes!
The Tigers just won their third game in a row against Oakland! They now have a commanding lead in the series of 3 games to none. One more win, and they're in the World Series for the first time since 1984!
You know, although I expressed skepticism about the Tigers' chances earlier in the season, I'm starting to believe. In fact, Mitch Albom's take on the situation is sounding better and better, particularly this part:
You can say whatever you want. You can call the talk shows, fly your flag on your minivan, sing that hokey "Go Get 'Em Tigers" song, call your friends in New York and say…
oracknows | October 13, 2006I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't want Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) to become to repetitive. Of course, a certain amount of repetitiveness is unavoidable, given that there are only a few major themes running through medical woo. First, there's the belief that "toxins" (rarely specified and almost never with any hard evidence linking them to any specific diseases) are causing disease and that you--yes, you!--need to be "detoxified," whether this "detoxification" is supposedly accomplished through enemas…