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Evangelism = predation

Our spring break is almost over. I hope none of our students wasted their time fishing for souls for Jesus. Follow that link; it's a story on Salon.com of a young man who goes undercover at Liberty University and goes on a Spring Break proselytizing trip to Florida. It's depressing — mindless zealots on fire for the Lord wander the streets, asking people if they've found Jesus, and almost always getting turned down. Even the few who say "Hallelujah!" are unlikely to join the church. This is truly desperate angling. The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when…

Evolution of the Enigmatic Eclectus

tags: researchblogging.org, dichromatism, mating system, plumage color, sex allocation, eclectus parrots, Eclectus roratus, ornithology, birds, avian, parrots Elektra, my female Solomon Islands eclectus parrot, Eclectus roratus solomonensis. This is the smallest and most distinctively marked of all the subspecies of eclectus parrots. Image: GrrlScientist 4 July 2008 [larger view]. Some of you might recall the recent story about scientists learning to identify plumage coloration from fossilized feathers. This might seem a sort of esoteric pursuit meant to entertain scientists with access…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 24 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Evidence for Emulation in Chimpanzees in Social Settings Using the Floating Peanut Task: It is still unclear which observational learning mechanisms underlie the transmission of difficult problem-solving…

'An issue that affects all of us': Young workers center takes on wage theft in the Rio Grande Valley

by Kim Krisberg For six months, Jorge Rubio worked at a local chain of tortilla bakeries and taquerias in the cities of Brownsville and San Benito, both in the very southern tip of Texas. Rubio, 42, prepared the food, cleaned equipment, served customers. Eventually, he decided to quit after being overworked for months. On his last day of work this past January, his employer refused to pay him the usual $50 for an 11-hour workday. The employer told Rubio that sales were too low to pay him. A couple months later, Rubio was referred to Fuerza del Valle, a young workers center in Texas' Rio…

Moving from the "Right to Know" to the "Right to Understand": Global harmonization of OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard

by Elizabeth Grossman His job, the Metalworkers Alliance of the Philippines union leader told us, was assembling the electronics - the wire- or cable-harnesses - that go into cars. The work involved soldering, using flux, along with epoxies, and various degreasers or solvents. He and his co-workers didn't know the actual names of the substances they were working with or what was in those products. They also didn't know if it was a coincidence, but two co-workers had become seriously ill and the union leader and other co-workers had begun to worry that these diseases might have been caused by…

STACLU Reply on NSA Ruling

Glib Fortuna has written a response to my post on the NSA ruling from Judge Taylor the other day. Predictably, it's full of illogical arguments and inflated rhetoric. He begins with a false dichotomy: It would be redundant for me to provide my own analysis at this late date, so my focus is on the Left's reaction to the ruling. What I have found perfectly sums up how the different sides of the spectrum view today's world. Both sides believe they are fighting the greatest threat to civilized existence. The difference is, the Bush Administration (like the tactics or not) thinks that "Islamic…

We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period?

[Guest post by John Mashey] This is a second follow-up to the original falsification, flat-earth maps and dog astrology. Flat-earth is discussed here in More use and abuse of IPCC 1990 fig 7.1(c). This post explores the other topic: David Deming, "dog astrology journal" and then Jon Overpeck This started with quote of David Deming's comments in the Journal of Scientific Exploration(JSE), or "dog astrology journal." JSE was first brought to my attention by Eli Rabett in 2008, relevant in an Wikipedia talk page on Hockey Stick Illusion, and further in 2010. That discusses the journal issue…

Messier Monday: A double-ringed mystery galaxy, M94

"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -Robert Frost It's time again for another Messier Monday! To kick off each week, we've been taking a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Compiled in the 18th Century to help skywatchers avoid these fixed night sky wonders (so that they could better hunt comets), these represent some of the most viewed and easily visible nebulae, star clusters and galaxies visible from our home world. Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://rockpoint.dyndns.org/. An…

Messier Monday: The Sombrero Galaxy, M104

"Yes, indeed, if humankind — from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women — if they knew what profound inner pleasure await those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace." -Camille Flammarion Welcome back to Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang, where each Monday we take a detailed look at one of the 110…

Cry for me, Willie Soon

And by "me" I mean all the children of future generations. Willie Soon is a soft-money scientist at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been producing highly questionable 'science' casting, for several years, faux light on the reality of the human caused process of global warming. It appears that most or all of Soon's funding came directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry or supporters of that industry. (See also John Mashy's comment below about tax breaks.) Recently the dung has struck the rotating blades and the nexus of denialist 'science,' fossil fuel funding…

The Inconceivably Bogus Republican Science Committee Hearings

Last week, House Representative Lamar Smith held yet another masturbatory hearing to promote climate science denial. Smith is bought and paid for by Big Oil, so that is the most obvious reason he and his Republican colleagues would put on such a dog and pony show, complete with a chorus of three science deniers (Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr, and John Cristy). I don't know why they invited actual and respected climate scientist Mike Mann, because all he did was ruin everything by stating facts, dispelling alt-facts, and making well timed Princess Bride references. The hearings were called "…

Reply to Bo Grimes on Card and ID

In that thread on the Orson Scott Card message board I just got a long reply from someone named Bo Grimes. Since it's so long and I'm not adept at the message board coding, I thought I'd just post a line by line reply here and perhaps he'll come over and defend his claims, all of which are highly inaccurate. It began with me posting the following on that board: I honestly can't think of a third option given the absolutely ridiculous claim he makes in his article about intelligent design that scientists rely solely on authority and "refuse to even try" to point out the flaws in ID arguments. I…

A Conspiracy And Dunces? Journal Frontiers Tosses Authors Under Bus.

Recently, the OpenAccess journal Frontiers retracted a paper written by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriot Hubble called “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” The paper discussed conspiracist ideation as implicated in the rejection of scientific work … A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientic propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and…

Expert! Part Three.

I have previously mentioned that the Washington International was the best run and most enjoyable tournament I have ever played in. One reason was the fact that all equipment, sets and clocks, was provided. And not just any equipment! Look at these beautiful wooden chess sets we were given to play with: They even gave us little clipboards for our scoresheets, since the table cloths were a little soft. And just look at how spacious the playing rooms were: So much space between boards and between tables! Those of us accustomed to the Amateur Team East, where hundreds of players are…

Why is it a big deal that the new LHC particle is verified as the Higgs?

"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring." -David Halberstam It was only a few months ago that both collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN -- CMS and ATLAS -- announced the discovery of a new particle at about 125-126 GeV of energy: something that looked an awful lot like what the Standard Model predicted the Higgs Boson should be. Image credit: the CMS detector at CERN, 2009. This was the result of decades of…

Local Realism, Loopholes, and the God Delusion

The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I've been trying to make about the reviews (I thought of several nasty and inflammatory analogies without much effort, but I'm trying to be a Good Person...). Unfortunately it requires me to explain a bit of physics... Please, please, don't throw me into that briar patch. Some people say that the last really significant…

Many-Worlds and Decoherence: There Are No Other Universes

I seem to have been sucked into a universe in which I'm talking about the Many-Worlds Interpretation all the time, and Neil B keeps dropping subtle hints, so let me return to the whole question of decoherence and Many-Worlds. The following explanation is a recap of the argument of Chapter 4 of the book-in-progress, which will cover the same ground, with cute dog dialogue added. The central question here is what sorts of things count as producing a "new universe" in Many-Worlds. The scare quotes are because I've come around to the opinion that the whole "parallel universe" language does more…

Agnosticism Is For Wimps

Remember that scene in A Fish Called Wanda, where Kevin Kline, talking to a British woman who has cornered him in rhetorical combat, says, with maximal sarcasm, “Oh, you British are soooooo superior.” That's pretty much how I feel when I read essays written by agnostics. By all means make whatever arguments it amuses you to make for not taking a stand on the God question. But please stop acting like you're soooooo superior. You're not the sensible middle ground between two extremes, and you're not the clear-thinking pluralist calmly sifting the evidence. You're just a wimp. The latest…

Work. Finish. Publish.

A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they'd gotten on the craft of writing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing-- stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for "said," how to keep track of who's speaking, etc. As someone who's very much an outsider to that side of the writing business, it's interesting to read, but not that directly useful (I do have long stretches of dialogue in the How-to-Teach books, and occasionally needed to worry about the "said" thing there, but that…

Reviewing Unscientific America, Part Two

In Part One of this review I focused on the broad themes of Mooney and Kirshenbaum's book. My general feeling is that their presentation of the state of play is simplistic in crucial ways and that their proposed solutions are impractical at best. Now I would like to zoom in specifically on the eighth chapter of the book. It is called, “Bruising Their Religion” and focuses especially on what M and K see as the doleful influence of the New Atheists. Regrettably, I think they get a lot of important things wrong. Let us have a look. They begin with a whitewashed version of the Webster…

A Post of Pure Self-Indulgence

I have not been blogging much lately, a state of affairs likely to persist until the end of the semester at the start of May. This is partly a consequence of blogger burn-out; I just flat haven't felt like blogging. Mainly, though, it is because this semester has been an unusually busy and stressful one. The reason I have not felt like blogging is that I have been inundated with other work, some self-inflicted, some inflicted from without. EvolutionBlog will make a triumphant return, but until then I thought I would unburden myself by telling you what I have been up to this term. What,…

Judgment Day liveblogging

The new PBS documentary on the Dover trial, Judgment Day (optimistically reviewed by NCSE! The Discovery Institute in frantic denial!) starts here in the midwest in about a half hour. I've got my diet coke, I think I'll pop some popcorn, and maybe I'll take a stab at liveblogging the show. Let's hope it's lively! Feel free to chime in with comments as we go. 7:10: The premise is clear: the creationists are trying to claim it's about science, while the scientists like Scott and Miller and Padian are pointing out that it's about religion. This is the "civil war" that's going to tear up the…

Do autistic people have a deficit in reading faces?

Earlier this week in the post Neurological "Personhood," I made a comment about individuals with autism. My comment was as follows: 1) Some individuals do not show normal development in the system of identifying personhood described. For example, individuals with autism sometimes show deficits in this area. What does the fact that this system is not universal say about ethical behavior? Clearly, many autistic people are still getting there, but they must be getting to ethical behavior by some other route. I realized later on that I was not being particularly clear about where I was going…

"I Support Gender Equity In Principle..."

UPDATE: I have appended some text to this post at the end. I have closed the comments on this post because they have become so unpleasant all around and I don't think further dialogue here is serving any positive purpose. If you disagree with me, I'm sorry. I'm also sorry I didn't do this a lot sooner. I was browsing around Absinthe's blog looking for something in an old post when I happened across an entry I had missed. It seems Absinthe has taken down an older post discussing the differential treatment of two physicists - husband and wife - at Fermilab. The post commented on an…

Is information essential for life? No.

A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic... OK, I know that we live in the "information age" and far be it from me to denigrate the work of Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, but it's gotten out of hand. Information has become the new magical substance of the age, the philosopher's stone. And, well, it just isn't. In the article linked, physicist William Bialek at Princeton University argues that there is a minimum amount of information that organisms need to store in order to be alive."…

Reflections on my first year as a faculty member

ScienceWoman mused about the completion of her first year here, and I had hoped I would develop similar observations and reflections while on Isle Royale. Truth be told, rather than taking the hiking time to think, uninterrupted, about the last year, I did anything but. Think, that is. Instead, I turned the intellectual brain off, and instead looked for orchids and wolf tracks and birds, and engaged in random brain static conversation with my husband about our house and his developing job. It was like a brain vacation. However, on the 600 mile drive back, I did have chance to think a bit…

Taking Darwin's name in vain

Yesterday I prepared to write my Darwin Day post by attending a panel discussion at the Center For American Progress here in DC. The discussion was ostensibly about "evolution, transcendence, and the nature of faith," which led my friend Colin and I to hope for a spirited debate - perhaps even a die-hard creationist who would speak for the three-quarters of frequent churchgoers who don't accept evolutionary theory! But what we got was a predictable, rather boring discussion - at least until David Sloan Wilson arrived and threw me for a loop. The first two panelists were Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks…

Participation Explains Gender Differences in the Proportion of Chess Grandmasters

We have had an ongoing discussion on this blog about whether the disparity between women and men in the sciences is the result of a innate difference in cognitive ability or the result of some social phenomena such as selective participation or discrimination. Unfortunately, one of the complexities of this debate is that there is really no good objective standard for how good a scientist is. You can look at publication rates and journal impact, but comparing these numbers across fields is difficult. We lack objective measures. It would be interesting to look at an analogous system to…

ENCODE gets a public reaming

I rarely laugh out loud when reading science papers, but sometimes one comes along that triggers the response automatically. Although, in this case, it wasn't so much a belly laugh as an evil chortle, and an occasional grim snicker. Dan Graur and his colleagues have written a rebuttal to the claims of the ENCODE research consortium — the group that claimed to have identified function in 80% of the genome, but actually discovered that a formula of 80% hype gets you the attention of the world press. It was a sad event: a huge amount of work on analyzing the genome by hundreds of labs got…

Ask Dr. Free-Ride: My college wants me to inflate grades.

A reader sends the following query: I've only recently begun teaching in a big state university, maybe tier C in the field I'm in. I'm in a quandary as to how to manage pressure to pass students who are under performing. The first semester, I had to lower the passing to a basically ridiculous level and the college still inquired why so many failed (10 %). Now, I'm again feeling pressure to pass students who do not deserve to pass. I'm getting very disillusioned by this type of practice. Grade inflation seems to be so common that I even have students who think that a 60 is a B. I'm…

Jenny McCarthy: ABC hires antivaccine "View"

Sometimes, as I sit down to write a blog post, I have no idea what I'm going to write about at first. Fortunately, it's rare that I truly have zero idea what I'm going to write about. Usually, there are options, and I don't know which one I'm going to pick. Sometimes, however, something happens that demands that I write about it. Either that, or it's something that I know my readers will want me to write about and will be disappointed if I do not. Unfortunately, in this case, the timing is such that there's been nearly a full day since the announcement of this particularly stupid decision (…

Andrew Wakefield's libel suit against Brian Deer: Dismissed!

I tell ya, sometimes I think you guys think I'm a journalist or a 24 hour news source. I'm not, of course. I'm just a humble blogger, and I do what I can within the constraints of my every day "real life." What? I have a real life? You mean I'm not really a supercomputer who can link with any other computer in the galaxy to mine all known data, all contained within a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights? I'm not saying, but I am saying that I do need some down time. Unfortunately, sometimes big things happen during those down times, stuff I really like to blog about. In the past, I…

CEASE and desist subjecting autistic children to homeopathy

Periodically, I like to make fun of homeopathy and homeopaths. I realize that to some that might seem like the proverbial shooting of fish in a barrel, but it is amusing and educational. However, it's not always amusing. For instance, I am not amused when I see The One Quackery To Rule Them All (my favored term for homeopathy these days) being used either in areas where a lack of treatment can result in great harm (and, given that homeopathy is nothing more than water shaken up a bit with a magic spell, that's what homeopathy is, a lack of treatment) or when I see homeopaths promising what…

Special pleading for "integrative oncology"

I don't recall how many times I've said lately that I detest the term "integrative medicine." As I've pointed out time and time again, it's the preferred "successor," if you will, to the term "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) (at least among the woo-friendly). After all, as I've pointed out before, it just won't do to have the fashionable quackery du jour be considered as only being "complementary" or "alternative" to real medicine. That implies at best that it has a subsidiary role to real medicine and at worst that it is not real medicine, being "alternative" and all. The whole…

A disturbing post on an anti-vaccine blog

I'm on my way to The Amaz!ng Meeting today; so I'm not sure I have time for the usual bit of Orac-ian logorrheic blogging that I somehow manage to churn out almost every day. In fact, I had thought of just running another rerun so that I don't have to worry about it. But worry I did, at least a little bit, particularly after I saw something that really worried me a bit, and I'm not kidding. Remember Kent Heckenlively? He's a regular blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism whom I've taken to task from time to time for subjecting of his autistic daughter to what I consider to be…

An anonymous Canadian foundation grants $3 million to study naturopathic oncology

It's no secret that I don't have a high opinion of naturopathy. Just enter the word "naturopathy" into the search box of this blog, and you'll quickly see what I mean. Indeed, when last I mentioned the topic a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the revelations of Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who realized what a load of pseudoscientific quackery she had bought into, unfortunately, after having finished naturopathy school with a quarter million dollars of debt and having practiced for a while. Her account confirmed my impression of naturopathy as a veritable cornucopia of quackery…

Myers-Dawkins-Expelled-gate: Mooney and Nisbet, Framers of the Absurd, Have Stepped Over a Line and Owe an Apology

Myers? Myers? .... Myers? ..... Myers? (He's not here, Ben ... Your producer threw him out.)You know about the incredibly ironic dust up, whereby Expelled! producers kicked PZ myers out of line at a pre-release showing, but failed to notice that Richard Dawkins was standing right next to him. The evidence suggests that this major bit of bad publicity for Expelled! may have led to the movie being pulled from some pre-release showings. It it too early to be sure of this, and there may be several factors other than the utter embarrassment of this incident at play here. For instance, it is…

A surgeon visits Body Worlds

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…

Media reporting on pseudoscience: When should a newspaper abandon the "report both sides" mantra?

In response to my post yesterday castigating J. B. Handley of Generation Rescue for hypocritically accusing the American Academy of Pediatrics of "manipulating the media" when manipulating the media is Generation Rescue's raison d'être, Mike the Mad Biologist turned me on to a rather fascinating article in the New York Times by its Public Editor Clark Hoyt entitled The Doctors Are In. The Jury Is Out. It discusses a topic very near and dear to my heart, namely how newspapers report scientific or medical controversies, specifically, how the NYT covers controversies in which one side is the…

Another Lancet Roundup

Mark Kleiman: Yes, the survey projected 600,000 excess deaths based on 547 actually reported deaths. That's what "sampling" means, doofus. Every four years, pollsters in the U.S. project the results of voting by 100,000,000 people based on samples of 1000 or so, and get within a few percentage points. The interviewers asked for death certificates, and mostly saw them. But the estimated number of fatalities is much larger than the total mortality figures compiled by Moqtada al-Sadr's Ministry of Health. Either the sampling is off, or the interviewers were lying, or the families were showing…

An anti-Semite demands: Why a Holocaust museum but no slavery museum?

The other day, in the midst of a discussion about one of my posts about Holocaust denial, an anti-Semite posting as "bernarda" demanded: Then I read books like Norman Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry and understood that it [the Holocaust] has just become a propaganda tool to create a permanent guilt complex, even on Americans who had nothing to do with it. Why are there several holocaust museums in the U.S. but no slavery museum? The answer is pretty simple: Because the U.S. did not perpetrate the Holocaust. It helped to end the Holocaust. In contrast, the U.S. did perpetrate slavery. That's…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Time

Time - He's waiting in the wings He speaks of senseless things His script is you and me, boys Time - He flexes like a whore Falls wanking to the floor His trick is you and me, boy Time - In Quaaludes and red wine Demanding Billy Dolls And other friends of mine Take your time Excerpted from Time by David Bowie(one of my favorite Bowie songs) Uh-oh. This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question strikes a bit close to home. This week, our Seed overlords demand of us: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary…

Is a medical Wikipedia a good idea?

I had wanted to proceed to part 5 of my Medicine and Evolution series, but, frankly, I wasn't much in the mood for anything serious over the weekend, and, let's face it, that case of the blog blahs continued even into yesterday. Otherwise I would have done my blog buds Abel Pharmboy and Bora more of a solid and tackled this a bit earlier, rather than posting about Jack Chick parodies and fluff about a possible new Star Trek movie. Spurred on by Bora over at Science and Politics, Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata has been discussing scienceblogging, whether it would be a good idea for science…

HIV/AIDS denialism, the Ministry of Truth, and the failure of memory holes in the Internet Age

One of my favorite novels of all time is George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. When it came to imagining the end to which totalitarianism could take us, no one before or since has written a more compelling book about living under such a regime. One aspect of Oceania, the fictional totalitarian state ruled by Big Brother, that still stands out when I think about the book is how Big Brother dealt with inconvenient news and history. In the book, Winston Smith, the protagonist, works at a government agency called the Ministry of Truth (also called Minitrue), one of the…

#SMWUSC

Below the fold, you'll find a complete listing of all tweets from #SMWUSC, in reverse chronological order. @jgold85 Thus concludes "Biomimicry" @USCedu #smwuscThu, 23 Sep 2010 23:32:58 +0000 - tweet id 25352854351 - #1tweet details @JessikaWalsten Wrapping up the biomimicry event at #smwusc. It's been fun!Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:30:34 +0000 - tweet id 25352672665 - #2tweet details @LisaRau Rar! RT @laura_nelson: Meet TRAKTAR, a mole-worm-kangaroo/tractor. Alan Alda wants one! #smwLA #smwUSC http://twitpic.com/2rayftThu, 23 Sep 2010 23:28:10 +0000 - tweet id 25352486577 - #3tweet…

Why hard core antivaccinationists will never be convinced that vaccines don't cause autism

People who have read my review of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War may have noticed that the comments have featured someone who may or may not be a concern troll but is definitely at the very least very naive about the anti-vaccine movement. This commenter thinks that being harsh in my assessment of anti-vaccinationists will never reach anyone and only turn off the undecided. This commenter wrote: Anti-vacciners' view is in many cases just as strongly held as yours, and their data is just as compelling to them as yours is to you. Tell me, how many idiots yelling at you that you are stupid for…

The danger of science denialism

Although this blog is not the Denialism Blog, there is no doubt that one of the overarching themes of Respectful Insolence has been, since its very beginning, combatting science denial. Go back to the very beginning and read a couple of my earliest posts, dating way back to 2004. In one of them I discussed cancer cure testimonials and why they are almost never evidence of efficacy of a given alt-med therapy, a post that, in my ever-insolent opinion, holds up with anything I write today. In another one, I wondered how intelligent people could use alt-med, and in another one I discussed "…

Quackademic medicine tightens its hold on the Cleveland Clinic

It's no secret to my regular readers that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever be getting a job at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) any time soon. After all, I've written posts about the CCF in which I've criticized its promotion of reiki, its establishment of a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbal medicine clinic, complete with a naturopath running it, and its recent embrace of the founder of "functional medicine" (not to mention collaborator with antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) Dr. Mark Hyman. A quick Google would reveal me as the author of such criticisms. Such is…

It's official! Brian Hooker's "reanalysis" of MMR data is retracted.

These things always seem to happen on Friday. Well, not really. It’s probably just confirmation bias, but it seems that a lot of things I’d like to blog about happen on a Friday. That leaves me the choice of either breaking my unofficial rule not to blog on the weekend or waiting until Monday, when the news tidbit might not be quite so...timely anymore. This time around, I decided to wait because, well, we’re getting into grant season again, and I could use the time to work on grants. It is, however, good news. Very good news indeed. Remember Brian Hooker’s absolutely incompetent “…

Subjecting children to enema "detoxification"

Even though I've been at this skeptical blogging thing, particularly about "alternative" medicine, so long (eight years now) that I think I've seen it all, that nothing the quacks do can shock me any more. It's a foolish hubris, I admit, but, I hope, an understandable one after over eight years of blogging multiple times a week about science, skepticism, and quackery that can and has made my head spin. It is true that encountering something that gets my attention and truly knocks me on my posterior is getting rarer and rarer. It's not so rare that it doesn't still happen every now and then:…