oracknows | July 16, 2006Although Capitalist Pig vs. Socialist Swine found it to be possibly the funniest video on the Internet, I found it very disturbing that people (in this case, the infamously homophobic and hate-filled Westboro Baptist Church) can actually think this way and seriously believe the statements in this video.
Check out the smirk on the narrator's face at the end of the video.
These are probably the same sort of people who are openly rejoicing over the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza because they believe it's a sign of the end times and that their impending rapture is near. (The original link is no…
oracknows | July 16, 2006Pediatric Grand Rounds, vol. 1, no. 7 has been posted at Pediatricsinfo.com. Check it out.
oracknows | July 16, 2006Four words: David Hasselhoff music video.
Oh, the pain, the pain.
Of course, even Hassel the Hoff may not be able to "top" this YouTube video from hell:
oracknows | July 15, 2006After last week's reemergence of the Hitler Zombie from his underground crypt to snack on the brains of a couple of political consultants in my home city of Detroit, my sister kindly sent me this link, which explains a bit more of the background.
It turns out that the HItler Zombie may be cleverer than even I thought. The use of Hitler imagery, besides being inspired by a chomp on the brain by the Hitler Zombie, appears to have a definite purpose beyond simply being over the top and offensive:
What is really going on here?
Here's a pretty well-informed guess. Everyone in Detroit politics…
oracknows | July 15, 2006Last weekend, I posted a YouTube video of William Shatner singing Elton John's Rocket Man in his--shall we say?--unique fashion. A fellow ScienceBlogger commented and asked if there was a video of Shatner singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I'm not sure that this quite qualifies as what he had in mind, but it's the best (if you could call it that) I could come up with...
LIke, wow, man.
oracknows | July 14, 2006From The Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers are putting their lives at risk by relying on homeopathy to protect them against malaria, doctors have warned.
The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous quackery' and 'dangerous nonsense'.
Their warning follows an undercover investigation which found that alternative medicine clinics readily sell travellers homeopathic protection against malaria, despite clear Government advice that there is no evidence such treatments work.
It also comes after a…
oracknows | July 14, 2006As hard as it is to believe, we're up to the third week of Your Friday Dose of Woo. And, at week 3, I'm still having the same problem: too many targets of woo, so many so that they overwhelmed my tired brain not unlike Lionel Milgrom's quantum homeopathy becoming quantumly entangled with my neurons. (Never mind that quantum entanglement and other quantum effects cease to be a major factor for anything bigger than the atomic scale.) I thought of revisiting Milgrom's most excellent woo, but, because I've been on call, I just haven't had the time (or the will) to plow through his paper.…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Sid Schwab has started blogging at Surgeonsblog.
One of his early posts is about a particularly difficult breast cancer patient that he had to deal with. He even shares my pet peeve about mammographers:
The radiologist who read my patient's current xray reported that there was a cluster of indeterminant calcifications in the previously treated breast which, in comparison to a prior xray, had increased in number. Biopsy, according to the radiologist, was recommended.
There are about a dozen difficulties here, not counting the verbal assault I'd received. First of all, I hate it when a…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie comment deluge hit the blog. Or maybe it's not such a coincidence, coming as it does in the wake of a court hearing relevant to the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. Recent commenters have castigated me, claiming that the Hoxsey treatment is not quackery; asserting that cancer is "not due to a…
oracknows | July 12, 2006The latest edition of Change of Shift, a blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at Emergiblog.
Check it out.
oracknows | July 12, 2006You've probably heard of them, those concierge programs credit card companies offer that claim to be able to get you reservations at popular restaurants. You've probably wondered if they were any good or could do what is claimed. The Waiter gives the real story about how useful those cards are for this purpose.
oracknows | July 12, 2006Like most bloggers, I suspect, I like to know who's linking to me. Unfortunately, the majority of bloggers appear not to use TrackBacks, and even when they do for some reason the TrackBacks often don't register. Couple that with a level of comment spam that sometimes outnumbered my legitimate TrackBacks by at least 200:1, and you see that TrackBacks aren't a great way of knowing who's linking to you. Consequently, a couple of times a week, I do quick Technorati and Google Blog Searches on the URL of Respectful Insolence to see who happens to be linking to me.
That's how I found this brief…
oracknows | July 11, 2006Sitting in a corner office, Adolph Mongo perused daily reports. It was early evening and nearly everyone in the office had gone home, leaving only a few die-hards left to finish up. A crack political operative who runs a political and media consulting firm active in Michigan and Detroit politics, Mongo never hesitated to play the race card when he thought it might help his client.
He heard a crash outside his door.
"Jonella?" he said. "Is that you?"
No answer.
Mongo went back to his reading, but he was tired. That's enough attacking Governor Grahnolm and defending Detroit Mayor Kwame…
oracknows | July 10, 2006Ever wonder how certain fundamentalists can believe without question every word in an ancient text as being absolutely literal, even to the point of accepting a myth of a seven day creation over all the scientific evidence that has accumulated over the decades that the earth is really billions of years old and that all life has evolved?
Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger) has discovered the answer: a new protein known as Credulin!
oracknows | July 10, 2006As others have complained, a new and overzealous spam filter caused a number of us ScienceBloggers headaches while trying to post over the weekend and has caused problems in commenting as well. I've been informed that a fix has been done. We've been asked to do a post; so I figured I'd really test whether the overzealousness of the filter has been eliminated by posting a link to a hilarious online game that I've encountered: Nudist Trampolining.
If you see the post, the fix must have worked...
Oh, and the site is worksafe (well, borderline worksafe, depending on your specific work environment…
oracknows | July 10, 2006I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines causes autism. They concoct dubious IRBs riddled with conflicts of interest to "approve" their research. When the evidence that this is not the case becomes more and more compelling, they add a twist of a claim that many autistic children suffer from "precocious" puberty," which requires treatment…
oracknows | July 9, 2006It's come to my attention that new spam filters placed on Friday have caused problems on some blogs with commenting. They apparently have also caused problems posting, because the post I was working on last night kept producing errors when I tried to save it. The process of trial and error led me to figure out that certain ordinary, non-profane words or certain links would trigger the error, which leads me to suspect the new spam filter. (I can't mention the specific words here, because then this post would get eaten too.) In any case, it caused me a great deal of frustration last night,…
oracknows | July 9, 2006He had been away a while. In fact, he had been away so long (since early May) that I was starting to wonder if he had given up blogging, which would have been a blow, given that he's one of my favorite skeptical bloggers.
Fortunately, my fears were premature, and he's back, with part 2 of his Seven Most Common Thinking Errors of Highly Amusing Quacks and Pseudoscientists.
oracknows | July 9, 2006Well here's an interesting tidbit. Check out this campaign ad for John F. Kennedy from 1960:
It kind of puts the whole English-only issue into new perspective, doesn't it? Here's a video of Jackie Kennedy, "pandering" to the Hispanic vote" for her husband 46 years ago! Did the Kennedy campaign's outreach to Hispanic voters cause an uproar then?
The fact is, the U.S. has always been a polyglot nation, particularly beginning in the late 1800's and early 1900's, when a huge wave of immigrants arrived. English is the official language, but many other languages were commonly spoken. In many…
oracknows | July 8, 2006No further explanation needed about this clip from 1978. Bow down and worship at the feet of the Shat! He even forms his own trinity!