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Did the experimental cancer drug 3-Bromopyruvate (3-BP) cause the deaths of cancer patients at a German alternative medicine clinic?

I've frequently written about various dubious and outright quack clinics in different parts of the word with—shall we say?—somewhat less rigorous laws and regulations than the US. Most commonly, given the proximity to the US, the clinics that have drawn my attention are located in Mexico, most commonly right across the border from San Diego in Tijuana for easy access by American patients. Sometimes, in the case of dubious stem cell clinics, they are located in countries like China, Argentina, or Kazakhstan. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of quack clinics right here in the US (…

"We can know nothing about the origin of life"

Falsehood!!! Sometimes people say this because it seems reasonable to them ... what, with life originating so long ago and so much geological mushing-around happening since then. But sometimes people say this, and sound quite innocent saying it, because they want to throw the average person off track and make them think that Evolutionary Biology has this big gap -- at the beginning -- in which any-old kind of story can fit, including a supernatural or religious story, or even just a spiritual Jungian story, or anything but a story about molecules interacting. So, the purpose of this blog…

Another Week of GW News, January 13, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Global Warming News Information Overload is Pattern Recognition January 13, 2013 Chuckles, Hottest Year, Australia Burning, Holmes Family, Retrospectives Bottom Line, Subsidies, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Orca, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food…

Labor-Enviro-Community coalition wins stronger California oil refinery regulations and showcases a winning strategy for worker and community health

by Garrett Brown On February 10th, California’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) proposed revised and stronger regulations for oil refineries in the state after a 4½-year joint campaign by labor unions, environmental and community organizations to protect both refinery workers and nearby communities. The regulatory proposal now goes to the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board for consideration and final approval. This successful “blue-green” coalition held off industry pressure and reversed earlier back-door revisions to the proposal by DIR to benefit the oil…

Another Week of GW News, December 14, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) December 14, 2008 Top Stories:Poznan, EU 20/20/20 Plan, Recession Melting Arctic, Wilkins SatWebCam, Methane, CCPI, Late Comment Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration,…

Hitler, Assad, Trump, Spicer, Godwin, Sarin, Zyklon B, Chemical Weapon, Termites

Why Hitler is Different Hitler is not entirely different from Pol Pot, Stalin, and the other mass killers. He is not entirely different from other fascists. But there is a short list of people, with Hitler on that list, who have this characteristic: They were so bad that we can not and should not compare their badness to each other outside of certain limited academic contexts, and they were so bad that any comparison made between them and their works to anyone not on that list, or to their works, threatens to devalue their badness. We can not devalue the evil of Hitler or his kind.…

It's a strange world, after all: Orac vs. The Shat and fake news over...Autism Speaks?

It's a strange world after all, and I'll show you why. Last night, as I deposited myself on my couch with my laptop sitting on my lap, there to churn out yet another installment of the insolence most of you love and a few of you love to hate read, I had a Dug the Dog moment. The squirrel in this case was Twitter. Normally, although I do have a Twitter feed, my enthusiasm for it very much waxes and wanes. Although I do regularly post stuff, I can sometimes go days without contributing an original Tweet, leaving my feed fallow, with only automatic Tweets based on RSS feeds of my blogs as the…

Another week of GW News, February 20, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is notWisdomFebruary 20, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, G20, Min & Pall, Schaefer, Epstein, Dirty Trick, Sri Lanka & Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, Cook, Cablegate Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food Riot?, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Activate your DNA!

There 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…

Repeat after me: Enforcing medical and scientific standards is not "censorship"

I don't mean to beat up on Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick. I really don't. I realize I rather harshly criticized him yesterday for being so hostile to the concept of "denialism," to the point where he characterized even the use of the term as a means of "suppressing" free speech. Normally, that criticism would have been enough. If Dr. Fitzpatrick answered, that would be all well and good; if he didn't, I'd move on and forget about it. Unfortunately, I was made aware of another article he published at his usual gig at Spiked Online entitled Censorship is not the answer to health scares. Damn if it…

NCCIH: Co-opting "nonpharmacologic" treatments for pain as being "alternative" or "complementary"

I’ve been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), which was until relatively recently known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) ever since I first discovered that it existed, lo, these many years ago. When I first discovered NCCIH, what struck me is how much pseudoscience it funded, including fellowships and educational programs in “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which has rapidly morphed into “integrative medicine” (i.e., “integrating” quackery into real medicine). There were many NCCAM-funded…

Another week of GW News, August 8, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Another Week of Global Warming News Information overload is pattern recognitionAugust 8, 2010 Chuckles, Bonn, COP16+, Chutzpah, BASIC, Pacific Island Forum, Phytoplankton, ESA, The Question, Russia, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, Ecuador's Oil, Free Access, Grumbine, Curious, Terminology, Post CRU, Late Comments Melting Arctic, Petermann…

World Open, Part One

Hello. I'm still here. Let me get you caught up on some things. In graduate school I was required to take a battery of four qualifying exams before I could be “advanced to candidacy.” These exams were conducted orally, meaning you had to stand in a room with two faculty members and answer questions for as long as they cared to fire them at you. The exams were in Algebra, Analysis, Topology and a fourth area of the student's choosing, which in my case was Number Theory. These were very stressful, high-stakes exams that entailed many weeks of intense studying. I saved topology for last,…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 380 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 370 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): 10 days of science: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth 2020 Science: Hooked on science - ten things that inspired me to become a scientist A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Woo for credit, or the woo dreams are made of

One of the banes of a physician's existence is not so much keeping up with changes in how medicine is practiced, studying new treatments, and following the medical literature. After all, that comes with the territory; it's part of the job. Failure to keep up is to become increasingly ineffective and even to risk malpractice lawsuits. No, what's a major bane is to document that you've kept up. In other words, it's to get enough continuing medical education (CME) credits to be able to renew your medical license. In my state, I have to get 100 CME credits in two years in order to renew my…

More Gardasil fear mongering: A "critical review" of HPV vaccination that lacks critical thinking

Here we go again. Antivaxers don't like vaccines. This, we know. They blame them for everything from autism to autoimmune diseases to diabetes to sudden infant death syndrome. They even sometimes claim that shaken baby syndrome is a "misdiagnosis" for vaccine injury. However, there are two vaccines that stand out above all as the objects of antivaccine scorn. the first, of course, is the MMR vaccine. That's on Andrew Wakefield., of course, who almost singlehandedly popularized the fear that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The second most hated vaccine (by antivaxers) is Gardasil or Cervarix,…

Response to Bobby Maddex's Whining

Bobby Maddex, senior editor of Crux magazine, has posted a response to my article (posted here and at Panda's Thumb) pointing out several false claims in a couple of blog entries associated with Crux, one by him and one by John Coleman. John Coleman responded both rationally and graciously in a comment on the post in question, saying: Of course, you are correct that my intial statement that Sternberg lost his job is false. I assure you this was unintentional--a misreading on my part. I corrected this in a discussion with a reader on my blog, but have not yet done so at Crux. Thanks for…

A chat with Uncle Fishy about beekeeping.

Frequent commenter, sibling, and bon vivant Uncle Fishy recently set up a backyard beehive, but lately he's been worried about the bees. This came up in a recent online chat: Dr. Free-Ride: So, what's worrisome about your bees? Uncle Fishy: i dont know if they'll make it Dr. Free-Ride: :-( Uncle Fishy: there were fewer coming out to sting me last night Uncle Fishy: maybe it was just past their bedtime Dr. Free-Ride: Maybe they had better things to do than sting you again Uncle Fishy: well, I may be attriting more of them that I need Uncle Fishy: I may not yet have a queen Dr. Free-Ride: Uh…

Consumer Reports and credulity towards alternative medicine

Et tu, Consumer Reports? Since I was a teenager, I've intermittently read Consumer Reports, relying on it for guidance in all manner of purchase decisions. CR has been known for rigorous testing of all manner of consumer products and the rating of various services, arriving at its rankings through a systematic testing method that, while not necessarily bulletproof, has been far more organized and consistent than most other ranking systems. True, I haven't always agreed with CR's rankings of products and services about which I know a lot, but at the very least CR has often made me think about…

Better late than never: Conspiracy theories about the CDC and Ebola

Medical conspiracy theories tend to involve “someone” hiding something from the public. I like to refer to this as the fallacy of “secret knowledge.” That “someone” hiding the “secret knowledge” is usually the government, big pharma, or other ill-defined nefarious forces. The “secret knowledge” being hidden comes invariably in one of two flavors. Either “they” are hiding cures for all sorts of diseases that conventional medicine can’t cure, or “they” are hiding evidence of harm due to something in medicine. Although examples of the former are common, such as the “hidden cure for cancer,” it…

Documenting the Donald Trump War on Science: Pre-Inauguration Edition

Update 2017.01.31: First post-inauguration chronology post is done, covering the first week of the Trump administration. From the point of view of someone sitting North of the Canadian/US border, the results of this week's US Federal election are somewhat terrifying. And honestly and truly as a Canadian and a Torontonian, I say this without a bit of smugness. Been there, done that, if not quite on the same scale. And by done that, I mean that I've often seen my mission to document important stories in the world. In the past, mostly Canadian or mostly in the library world and all basically…

Another Week in the Ecological Crisis, January 19, 2014

Featured image is one of 19 illustrated haiku laying out the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, see them all here. This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Sipping from the Internet Firehose... January 19, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, WG3 Leak, BP EO, Matthews, Risky Biz, Vortices Warnings, Energiewende, Bottom Line, EcoCrime, Cook, Shrinkology Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, GMOs,…

Dichloroacetate (DCA) and cancer: Déjà vu all over again

Late last week, a crank I hadn't heard from in a while showed up in my comments. I'm referring to DaveScot, who normally was known for promoting anti-evolution rhetoric in the service of the pseudoscience known as "intelligent design" creationism. This is what he said: Hi Orac, terrasig suggested you do a followup article on dichloroacetate (DCA) given the paper just published on the phase 1 trial in Edmonton. Three years have passed and countless cancer patients were denied this drug. Now at the end of its first phase one trial we know exactly what we did from the reports of people self-…

Coturnix on Sex, part I - Blogging in the nude

My first post guest-blogging on Echidne Of The Snakes, cross-posted under the fold. I did not know that Dr.B is just a little bit younger than me. Her wisdom makes me feel like a child. Usually when I see that a post already has 170 comments I don't even start reading them, but the comments on this recent post of hers are worth your while (as well as people who commented on their own blogs and spawned their own comment threads, e.g., . Aunt B, Brooklynite and Steinn). While the post is primarily about bringing a young son into the female locker-room to change, it is really about several…

Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

This is one of four related posts: Should You Install Ubuntu Linux? Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS How to use Ubuntu Unity Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Some Linux/Ubuntu related books: Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and Administration The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction Linux isn't for everyone, so I'm not going to try to talk you into using this superior operating system if you have some reason to not do so. But if you have a computer that runs Windows, it isn't that hard to install…

The deadly false hope of German cancer clinics, part 2: Metastasizing to Australia and beyond

Yesterday, I wrote about alternative medicine clinics in Germany that offer a combination of alternative cancer cures plus experimental therapeutics administered improperly outside the auspices of a clinical trial. In particular, I discussed two cases. The first was British actress Leah Bracknell, who is raising money to go to one of these alternative cancer clinics to treat her stage IV lung cancer. the second was a British woman named Pauline Gahan, who was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer and has thus far spent £300,000 for a combination of vitamin infusions, “detox,” and Keytruda…

Should vaccines be compulsory?

As long as there have been vaccinations, there has been an antivaccine movement, and as long as there has been an antivaccine movement, there have been parents who refuse to vaccinate. In a past that encompasses the childhood of my parents, polio was paralyzing and killing children in large numbers in yearly epidemics, the fear of which led to the closure of public pools every summer. In such an environment, the new polio vaccine introduced by Jonas Salk in the mid-1950s wasn’t a hard sell. In fact, satisfying the initial demand for it was the problem, not parents refusing to vaccinate their…

Another Week of GW News, May 12, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of in the Ecological Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomMay 13, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, AOSIS, FAO, Occupy, Dino Farts, WAIS, Correction, Conspiracy, Save the Planet Club of Rome, Peru, Elgin, GCF, Subsidies, Banks, Natural Capital, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane,…

Another Week of GW News, July 29, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Global Warming News Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionJuly 29, 2012 Chuckles, Rio+20, First Stewards, C&CAI, Anderson, BEST Bottom Line, Subsidies, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Greenland, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes…

The Misunderstood Meanings of Science Literacy

As part of their conversation series with scientists, the NY Times this week runs an interview with Harvard's Eric Mazur featuring the headline "Using the 'Beauties of Physics' to Conquer Science Illiteracy." Mazur discusses his teaching approach in his physics course, stating that his goal is to end "science illiteracy" among college students. "It's important to mentally engage students in what you're teaching," he explains. "We're way too focused on facts and rote memorization and not on learning the process of doing science." But what does science literacy exactly mean? When science…

Marc Stephens issues more threats on behalf of the Burzynski Clinic

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I was simultaneously alarmed and amused at how someone named Marc Stephens, who claims (although presents no evidence for his claim) that he represents the rogue physician and "researcher" Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, had taken to threatening skeptical bloggers who criticize Dr. Burzynski's highly dubious cancer therapy, a therapy Burzynski dubbed "antineoplastons." In particular, Mr. Stephens threatened a blogger by the name of Andy Lewis, whose nom de blog is Le Canard Noir and whose blog and website, The Quackometer, I've followed for years now. As a…

Dr. Michael Egnor: The gift that keeps on giving

Agh! I say: Agh! Again. Remember how it was just a mere three days ago that I administered some Respectful Insolence⢠to Dr. Michael Egnor, the Energizer Bunny of jaw-droppingly, appallingly ignorant anti-evolution posturing based on his apparently nonexistent understanding of what the theory of evolution actually says? Remember how I said how much I sincerely hoped that I could ignore him for a while? I really did mean it at the time. Really, I did. And then Afarensis and Mike Dunford had to and let me know that Dr. Egnor's at it yet again. Dr. Egnor just won't stop, and as a fellow surgeon…

Another Week of GW News, January 8, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Information Overloadis Pattern RecognitionJanuary 8, 2012 Chuckles, Durban, Horn of Africa, Australian Climate, Retrospectives, Epsilon Bottom Line, Subsidies, GCF, Thermodynamics, Ecocide, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, unFisherman, Food Prices,…

I prefer my food dead, thank you very much

Most of the woo I write about, fortunately, I don't have to deal with directly close to home. This is a good thing indeed, because it means that where I practice is blissfully free (for the most part) of pseudoscience. Unfortunately, earlier this year, I was in for an unpleasant surprise when I found out that there was going to be a showing of a rather annoying movie. It also occurred to me that I had never, to my memory, discussed the topic of this movie, namely the health claims of raw ("living") food veganism. The vitalism at the heart of this movie and its accompanying "educational" DVD…

Another week of GW News, May 23, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMay 23, 2010 Chuckles, IPCC-5, COP16+, Figueres, Cochabamba, NAS-ACC, Lyman, Ocean Volume Lake Tanganyika, Anthropocene, Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, TEEB, Malaria, Hartwell, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures…

Atheists against the Ohio Holocaust memorial: How not to fight for separation of church and state

I don't read atheist blogs much, if at all. The reason is that they just don't interest me anymore. Sure, like so many, I went through a phase where I was quite enamored of Richard Dawkins' brand of atheism. Then I read The God Delusion (well, most of it, anyway; I didn't bother to read the last couple of chapters because I had lost interest and couldn't force myself to finish them). These days I tend to think of myself as following the church of dontcareism. I just don't care that much one way or the other about religion, and endless arguments about atheism, "atheism-plus," and the like bore…

The martyrdom of St. Andy, part 2: David Kirby rides to the rescue (sort of)

If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre. Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998. Interview in The Independent. The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear. As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or,…

The Giant's Shoulders #1

Welcome to the Firstest, Biggestest, Inaugural Edition of The Giant's Shoulders, the carnival of History Of Science! The carnival grew out of the Classic Papers Challenge by gg of Skulls in the Stars. That was so much fun, several of us thought this is something that should be done regularly, perhaps every month. So, gg and I got together and got this thing started. I know some of the future hosts will do this very creatively (and yes, you can volunteer to host, though you will have to wait six months for your turn!), and I envisioned doing this in a form of, perhaps, a vigorous debate at…

More horrible antivaccine "science" from Theresa Deisher

As hard as it is to believe after over ten years of existence and over 5,000 posts on SBM, every so often, something reminds me that I've missed paper that cries out for some not-so-Respectful Insolence. So it was a couple of weeks ago, when I saw a familiar name in a news story that wasn't about vaccines. You might recall a news story last month when a shadowy group with ties to radical antiabortion groups, the Center for Medical Progress, led by a man named David Daleiden, ran a highly questionable "sting" operation (complete with fake IDs) to "prove" that Planned Parenthood was selling…

Another week of GW News, November 14, 2010

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...November 14, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16+, G20, APEC, IEA, Kiribati, Cities, Fighting Back, Montreal Protocol, Pakistan Bottom Line, Subsidies, UNCFG, IP Issues, IEC, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro Corps, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…

Fire Marshal Bill discusses vaccines and autism on The Huffington Post

After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped--really hoped--that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there's only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that pseudoscience turds dropped onto her blog by…

The Homeland Security Report on Right Wing Extremism

You will find the report below the fold. Please note that according to this document, you are not supposed to be reading it on the internet. I assume that is old and out of date information. But just in case, don't mention to anyone that you have seen this or where you saw it. K? You asked, I answer. (Don't grow accustom to that, by the way.) - - - - - the fold - - - - - UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment IA-0257-09 UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY Rightwing Extremism:…

Dr. Oz promotes quackery...again

Note: Today's a travel day. I'm driving home from the AACR. As a result, I decided to post something that appeared elsewhere, doing a quick edit to make it a bit more "insolent." I realize that since the show I discuss aired an episode during which he featured a psychic medium in a segment called Medium Vs. Medicine: Char Margolis Shares Afterlife Secrets. I meant to blog it, but somehow I missed my window of opportunity. Oh, well, maybe I still will. Or maybe not. It's too painful, and the window has passed. In the meantime, there's this blast from the recent past. It's not a secret that I…

Another Week in the Ecological Crisis, June 8, 2014

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom June 8, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, Globe, Singapore, EPA Rule, EPA Reaction, Abnormal Autumn Energiewende Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Crap Detector, EcoCrime, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable…

Another Week of GW News, March 18, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week in the Planetary Crisis Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMarch 18, 2012 Chuckles, Frowns, COP18+, Rio+20, UN WWDR, Future Heartland, Koch - Cato, Bottom Line, Subsidies, GFIs, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food Prices, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, ENSO…

Evolution of vertebrate eyes

A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn't matter whether we're looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we've mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye. Now there's a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution…

Suppression of speech through legal intimidation, anti-vaccine edition: Barbara Loe Fisher sues Dr. Paul Offit, Amy Wallace, and Condé Nast for libel

In general, one of the biggest differences between those defending science-based medicine and those defending pseudoscience, quackery, and anti-science is that science inculcates in its adherents a culture of free and open debate. In marked contrast, those advocating pseudoscience tend to cultivate cultures of the echo chamber. Examples abound and include discussion forums devoted to "alternative" medicine like CureZone, where never is heard a discouraging word--because anyone expressing too much skepticism about the prevailing view on such forums invariably finds himself first shunned and…

Another Week of Climate Instability News, September 1, 2013

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years September 1, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, G20, ICW, PIF, DMS, Hiatus, Potash, Salted, Overshoot Bottom Line, Big Banks, Cook, Meteorologists Fukushima: Note, News, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Mega-Canyon, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Microbial Revolution, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Weather Machine, Notable Weather GHGs, Carbon Cycle,…

Dirty Rotten Infinite Sets and the Foundations of Math

Today we've got a bit of a treat. I've been holding off on this for a while, because I wanted to do it justice. This isn't the typical wankish crackpottery, but rather a deep and interesting bit of crackpottery. A reader sent me a link to a website of a mathematics professor, N. J. Wildberger, at the University of New South Wales, which contains a long, elegant screed against the evils of set theory, titled "Set Theory: Should You Believe?" It's an interesting article - and I don't mean that sarcastically. It's over the top, to the point of extreme silliness in places, but the basic idea…