oracknows | March 29, 2006Another great edition of Tangled Bank has been posted at The Island of Doubt. (It's hard to believe that Tangled Bank has been around now for nearly two years. Time flies.)
What are you waiting for?
oracknows | March 29, 2006Leave it to The Onion:
Alternative-Medicine Practitioner Refuses Alternative Method Of Payment.
oracknows | March 29, 2006I don't normally read the Financial Times. "What?" you say. "I thought that all doctors read the FT."
Ah, but you forget that I'm an academic physician. Don't get me wrong; I make a comfortable living, more money than I've made in my entire life, but I could almost certainly increase my earnings by 50-100% by going into private practice. I'd probably work roughly the same hours with the exception that I'd be called in more often for emergencies and that I'd spend all of my time either in the clinic or in the O.R., in contrast to the situation now where I spend half my time begging for money…
oracknows | March 28, 2006A week ago, I wrote about my wife and my visiting Body Worlds at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Well, it looks as though another physician Dr. Charles has visited it as well and has some ideas comments about the exhibit.
oracknows | March 28, 2006It looks like everyone at ScienceBlogs is trying this quiz. Now that I have been completely assimilated into the collective, I cannot resist. So...
You Are 22% Evil
A bit of evil lurks in your heart, but you hide it well.
In some ways, you are the most dangerous kind of evil.
How Evil Are You?
oracknows | March 28, 2006Duck, everyone!
Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger) has found a PDF file containing a brand new FAQ about Kansas's new science standards, the ones that purport to "teach the controversy" about evolution. While I'm on a roll about evolution (and, yes, the next installment of my Medicine and Evolution series should come by the end of the week, Monday at the latest), I thought I'd mention this. Naturally, seeing what a target-rich environment the FAQ is, the Pooflinger can't resist proceeding to do what The Pooflinger does best: Flinging poo at the FAQ, giving it a great fisking.
A brief excerpt:
From…
oracknows | March 28, 2006Via Red State Rabble, I've become aware of an incredibly depressing story about science teachers in Arkansas explicitly censoring themselves when it comes to teaching evolution (the "e-word," as they call it) or in geology class teaching that the earth is 4.5 billion years old:
Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the "e-word" (evolution) with the kids. They are permitted to use the word "adaptation" but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term "natural selection." Bob…
oracknows | March 27, 2006Heh. More people should do this to Jack Chick tracts.
Click the image to see Jack's own tricks turned against him.
Here is the original cartoon by Jack Chick.
oracknows | March 27, 2006It's that time again. In less than three days, the latest Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be posted at Terra Sigillata (who, by the way, wrote an excellent post while I was away at my meeting on why we should continue to study rare cancers). You have until Wednesday evening to submit to him your best skeptical blogging.
It's his first attempt as a new blogger at hosting a blog carnival; so do me a solid and help him out by giving him some great raw material to work with.
oracknows | March 27, 2006Last week, I inaugurated a new series on this blog entitled Medicine and Evolution. I even wrote what was to be the second post in the series, a post that (I hoped) would illustrate the utility of applying approaches used to study evolution to human disease. That post is essentially complete, other than requiring the addition of some links. That's what I was going to do last night, until Stranger Fruit turned me on to this study:
In a study published online today in Nature Genetics, Carlo Maley, Ph.D., a researcher at The Wistar Institute, and his colleagues report that precancerous tumors…
oracknows | March 26, 2006My wife would say yes.
But, because all the other ScienceBloggers appear to be doing it, I had to take this test to find out:
18.75 %
My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.Does your weblog own you?
It's actually not as bad as I had feared. It would actually only be 12.5% if I hadn't been forced to answer "yes" to "Do you get paid for blogging?" Given that the pay is pretty nominal and given for something that I would be doing anyway, maybe I should consider myself 12.5% owned...
oracknows | March 26, 2006How depressing.
Right there on the front page of the New York Times this morning:
SACRAMENTO -- Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.
Schools from Vermont to California are increasing -- in some cases tripling -- the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams…
oracknows | March 26, 2006A few days ago, I wrote about Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man who converted to Christianity and was being prosecuted under Islamic Sharia law as an apostate, the penalty for which can be death. Indeed, the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty.
It looks like someone finally came to their senses:
KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan court on Sunday dismissed a case against a man who converted from Islam to Christianity because of a lack of evidence and he will be released soon, officials said.
The announcement came as U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai faced mounting foreign pressure to free Abdul…
oracknows | March 26, 2006I don't know how I missed this one yesterday, but a new blogger, Dr. Flea, sarcastically thanks RFK, Jr. for making his practice more difficult
The Thimerosal-Autism story will not die. When I say that a patient asks me about thimerosal every day, I am not exaggerating. Here is today's installment, in the form of an email from a mom:
Part of Dr. Flea's response:
I want to be as clear about this as I can. There is no controversy surrounding Thimerosal. There is scientific evidence and there is hysteria. The scientific evidence suggests that there is no link between thimerosal in vaccines and…
oracknows | March 25, 2006If I were one of the cops facing this guy, I'd be seriously tempted to put my gun aside and say, "You win. Go ahead and leave."
At least no one other than the perpetrator was hurt.
oracknows | March 25, 2006While I work on winging my way back to the East Coast, I thought I'd leave you with a couple of links that I became aware of but didn't get the chance to post.
First up is the older piece by that tireless debunker of dubious medicine and quackery and fellow skeptic, Prometheus. In a piece entitled Mercurial Laboratories, he dissects in detail why the laboratories that purport to show parents that their autistic children have elevated mercury levels almost certainly do not do any such thing. Indeed, what he has written can apply to almost any set of lab tests, particularly this part:
One of…
oracknows | March 24, 2006Why am I not surprised to learn this? From an AP article:
HARRISBURG -- Following recent accounts of threats against other judges, the federal judge in the Dover intelligent design case revealed he, too, was a target of threatening e-mails.
U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said a spate of e-mails came on the heels of his ruling that teaching what he said was a creationism-based concept in the science curriculum violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
The tone was threatening enough so that U.S. Marshals kept watch over Jones and his family in the week before Christmas…
oracknows | March 24, 2006Speaking of Holocaust denial, opening sentence of a review of a new CD by Be Your Own Pet:
Aside from the deaf or those in a level of denial up there with David Irving's idiot pronouncements on the Holocaust, everyone's aware that we live in great times for music.
Heh.
I'm not sure this sort of reference in the popular media is a good thing or not. On the one hand, it suggests a widespead knowledge that David Irving is a Holocaust denier, otherwise most readers wouldn't understand the reviewer's reference to David Irving. On the other hand, it implies that David Irving is far more well known…
oracknows | March 24, 2006One of the most annoying thing about Holocaust "revisionists" is that they really aren't revisionists at all. Revisionism is a legitimate academic pursuit in history. Indeed, nearly all history is to some extent revisionist, because new historians find new sources that previously may have been lost or otherwise not available and reinterpret history in light of new information, or they bring a different perspective to the existing evidence and try to get closer to the "truth" of history. What Holocaust deniers have done is to appropriate the term "revisionist" in a deceptive manner meant to…
oracknows | March 24, 2006Here's more proof that there's "one born every minute" and that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" (yes, I know I'm mixing quote sources):
A man named Monte Bowman is selling a product called Photoblocker that is designed to be sprayed on auto license plates in order to confound cameras at intersections designed to photograph the license plates of cars running red lights. Given that these devices have proliferated like weeds across the U.S. over the last few years, allowing towns to supplement their income in addition to the usual speed traps, you…