oracknows | July 8, 2006Not surprisingly, it comes from Ann Coulter:
Throw in enough words like imagine, perhaps, and might have -- and you've got yourself a scientific theory! How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don't accept the giant raccoon flatulence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat. That's basically how the argument for evolution goes [emphasis in original].
Fortunately, Robert Savillo over at Media Matters has provided an…
oracknows | July 7, 2006When I originally conceived of doing a weekly feature entitled "Your Friday Dose of Woo," I did it almost on a whim. Now that I've reached the second week, I've realized that this is going to be harder than I thought. No, it's not that it's hard to find suitable targets. Quite the opposite, in fact. There's just too much woo out there, that it's really hard to choose a suitable subject. I had a hellacious time trying to pick one particular instance of woo that tickled my fancy enough to dedicate a blog post to it.
Of course, I did think about doing a followup to last week's Friday Dose of Woo…
oracknows | July 7, 2006On Wednesday, in response to really bad analogy attacking the NAACP and the Black and Hispanic Congressional Caucuses, I wrote a rather lengthy post that attempted to educate the rather clueless blogger by the name of LaShawn Barber who had produced the rant about how the white nationalist teen singing duo Prussian Blue (who, according to LaShawn, are only expressing "white pride") got their name from a technique of Holocaust denial.
Well, it turns out I've been trolled. LaShawn has posted an update that's basically one big gloat:
A belated "Happy Independence Day" to all the left-leaning (…
oracknows | July 6, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Janet Stemwedel, in reference to the declining NIH budget, asks: Hey, where'd that gravy train go? She makes a number of good points and the article she references discusses Case Western Reserve University, where I spent eight years doing residency and graduate school.
I may very well have more to say on this issue next week from my perspective as a physician-scientist who is already very worried about renewing his very first NIH R01 grant, even though it doesn't expire for nearly four years. However, contemplating the bleak funding situation for grants is just too…
oracknows | July 6, 2006It's that time again, time for the 38th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle.
Thirsty?
Well, LBBP over at Skeptic Rant offers parched skeptics a fine assortment of beverages including Satire Cider, Quack Quencher, Woo Brew, and Creationist Tonic, among others. It's just the cool, refreshing dose of critical thinking to quench that skeptical thirst that's been intensified by the rampant credulity of society in general and the blogosphere in particular.
Drink deep!
And come on back for the 39th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which will be hosted by Mike over at (appropriately enough) Mike's Weekly…
oracknows | July 6, 2006The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren't going to like this, not one bit.
What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link between thimerosal or MMR vaccination and autistic spectrum disorders. It's the latest in a continuous line of epidemiological studies and, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive epidemiological study to look at exposure to both MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines. (The MMR vaccine, being a live…
oracknows | July 5, 2006This week's issue of Nature features a list of the top five science blogs, based on Technorati rankings for number of incoming links, narrowly defining its science blogs as blogs written by working scientists.
Not surprisingly, a ScienceBlogs blog Pharyngula came out on top at number one, followed by that stalwart resource for information about evolution and the debunking of creationism, The Panda's Thumb. Coming in at number five is new ScienceBlog The Scientific Activist. Not a bad showing at all, with seven of the top ten science blogs belonging to the ScienceBlogs collective, particularly…
oracknows | July 5, 2006Almost as if by design, after my post earlier today about LaShawn Barber's really bad analogy comparing the white nationalist teenage singing duo Prussian Blue's invocation of "white pride" to minority groups like the NAACP, I came across this post over on David Neiwert's blog showing what real white nationalists look like.
Almost as if by design...
oracknows | July 5, 2006PZ may have wasted his life preparing students for medical school, and Skeptico may have wished that he had thought of this first, but what about me, a real physician, who, if EoR is correct, has utterly wasted his life actually going to medical school?
Read this excerpt from EoR's Words to a Potential Medical Student and see what I mean:
Before you enroll for that medical course, consider carefully whether it's the best path for your life. Perhaps complementary medicine is actually a better way to go, with many clear advantages...
The course is shorter. Never mind years of study and…
oracknows | July 5, 2006Hoo boy.
Via The Poorman Institute and an anti-Holocaust denial mailing list that I belong to, I've learned of an analogy so breathtakingly bad that I have a hard time not blogging about it, mainly because it relates to a topic that I'm very interested in (Holocaust denial) and a related topic that I've written about before, namely the white supremacist, Hitler-admiring, Holocaust-denying pop tarts that make up the white nationalist singing duo Prussian Blue. Oddly enough, it comes in the form of a complaint about "racialist double standards" from conservative blogger LaShawn Barber, in which…
oracknows | July 4, 2006I've said it before and I'll say it again: The war in Iraq has to be the worst foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in my lifetime. Certainly it's the worst foreign policy mistake that I can remember (I wasn't old enough to remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that got the U.S. more deeply involved in the fighting in Vietnam.)
That being said, though, this has to be the stupidest idea for a protest against the war that I have heard of in a very long time:
Hollywood stars Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon are to join a fast protesting against the Iraq war.
Protestors will each give up food…
oracknows | July 4, 2006A special Fourth of July edition of Grand Rounds has been posted at RangelMD. This time around, given the holiday, Dr. Rangel has arranged the posts as a theme, namely a focus on the problems in the U.S. health care system and suggestions of ways to fix them. There's a lot of good analysis to ponder on this Fourth of July.
Tags: Grand Rounds, medicine
oracknows | July 4, 2006Besides our current President, the other factor that has done perhaps the most to drive me from the Republican Party over the last decade has been its falling under the sway of Christian fundamentalists who want to impose their view of morality, religion, and Christianity on the nation as law. Of course, our current President is simply the culmination of nearly three decades of the party's courting them and using them to attain power, and now moderate Republicans are shocked--shocked, I say--to find out that these folks mean what they say when they assert that God claimed the U.S. over 200…
oracknows | July 4, 2006This article originally appeared on July 4, 2005.
Back in May, I was in Bethesda at a meeting. Because of my interest in World War II history and because I hadn't been to Washington since its completion, I was very interested in seeing the World War II Memorial; so one afternoon I hopped on the Metro and headed down to the Mall to check it out. It provided the material for some photoblogging on Memorial Day. On my way back, I thought it might be fun to wander by the White House before heading back to the Metro. So I did.
I had been in front of the White House at least two or three times…
oracknows | July 3, 2006Hard as it is to believe, that time is almost upon us again. This Thursday, July 6, the latest Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will appear yet again, as it does every two weeks. This time around, the host is LBBP at The Skeptic Rant. You still have a couple of days before the deadline Wednesday evening to get your best skeptical blogging to him for inclusion.
It's your patriotic duty on this Fourth of July weekend...
oracknows | July 3, 2006I used to like The Cancer Blog. I really did. It was one of the first medical blogs I discovered many months ago when I first dipped my toe into the blogosphere. Indeed, less than two months after I started blogging, one of The Cancer Blog's bloggers then, Dr. Leonardo Faoro, even invited me to join him as one of its bloggers. Although as a new blogger I was very flattered by the attention and offer, I nonetheless reluctantly turned the offer down because at the time I didn't know whether this whole blogging thing would work out and was afraid of being tied down and obligated to provide a…
oracknows | July 2, 2006On the weekend, fellow ScienceBloggers seem prone to mass hysteria, taking various silly Internet tests. Even I, Orac, have succumbed to such temptations. I wasn't going to succumb to this one, as Grrlscientist, PZ, Afarensis, Chris, and Bora have, but then I saw the result.
Using the same Advertising Slogan Generator, I think I have the best advertising slogan of them all:
It Needn't Be Hell With Orac.
Indeed.
I think I'll go with that one.
oracknows | July 2, 2006The latest Pediatric Grand Rounds has been posted at Breath Spa for Kids. There are a lot of great links for your Sunday reading pleasure.
Enjoy!
oracknows | July 2, 2006The guys over at Medgaget are guys after my own heart. After commenting on a dubious-sounding device called the emWave Personal Stress Reliever, which, as its makers claim, is Scientifically Validated:
Stress creates incoherence in our heart rhythms. However, when we are in a state of high heart rhythm coherence the nervous system, heart, hormonal and immune systems are working efficiently and we feel good emotionally. emWave Personal Stress Reliever helps you reduce your emotional stress by displaying your level of heart rhythm coherence in real time. But emWave does more than just display…