Search Content

Displaying results 10001 - 10050 of 87947

Tiptoeing into Type Theory

When Cantor's set theory - what we now call naive set theory - was shown to have problems in the form of Russell's paradox, there were many different attempts to salvage the theory. In addition to the axiomatic approaches that we've looked at (ZFC and NBG), there were attempts by changing the basis of set theory - discarding sets in favor of something similar, but with restrictions that avoid the problems of naive set theory. Today, I'm going to talk about an example of the latter approach, called type theory. Type theory is a very different approach from what we've seen before, and…

The Future of Cities

Liz Borkowski of The Pump Handle and I are doing a series this week on the future of urbanization. Given that just about half the world's population now lives in cities, and that almost all projected demographic growth (we will come back to whether the UN's projections on this subject are realistic in a post later this week) will occur in cities, the realities - and future - of urban life are important discussions. Like Liz, I love cities. That may seem strange to people who know that I live out in a rural area, since many rural-dwellers don't enjoy the bustle and noise of urban life, but…

Women in science--and ramblings thereof

So, Chad posted a link to this post last week. As a woman in science myself, I have to say I don't 100% buy this argument: Most people go to work primarily in order to earn a paycheck. Workers prefer a higher salary to a lower salary. Jobs in science pay far less than jobs in the professions and business held by women of similar ability. A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the…

On the Seventh Day God Rocked: Do not miss this.

I just watched a movie that made me ROFLMAOOL about fifty times. Maybe a hundred times. You'll not want to miss this... ~-~-~-~-~-~ There are a lot of reasons that I love my friend Ana, and I fully admit that one of them is that she give me things now and then that make me happy. Like cookies. And hysterically funny movies on DVD. And more cookies. But enough with the cookies. Lets talk about the DVD. On a recent religious holiday, Ana gave me a copy of "... and on the 7th day, God Rocked." Yesterday, I finally got around to watching it. It turns out that this film is a…

Just the facts, ma'am.

Mythbusters, factcheck.org, and Snopes have become sources of a special kind of truth for people around the world. Dedicated to undoing legend and independently analyzing political or other rhetoric, these and other sites, as well as various news segments and print media spots, are to be commended for their efforts to turn down the BS meter, which all agree has been running on high ever since the old days, when there was no BS at all. (Which, of course, is an urban myth.) However, what you may not know is that these sites are not necessarily politically neutral, can be quite biased (in non-…

7 Questions with... Andrew Thaler

Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. Andrew Thaler (twitter, blog) is pursuing a doctorate in the marine biology at the Duke University Marine Lab. He is especially interested in population genetics in hydrothermal vent communities. He is…

Reframing framing

Jason objects to the claim that science is badly framed. He offers several examples in which he feels that: it is the pleasantness of the message, not the slickness of the marketing, that is relevant. That's the fatal flaw in the argument [by Nisbet, Mooney, etc.]. The problem isn't ineffective framing, it's having a message most people find unappealing. But there are other problems as well. Which is to say, the problem is ineffective framing. Framing isn't about slickness. That's a misframing of framing. (Yes, I've now made myself sick of the term.) Framing is about finding a message…

The root of all anti-evolutionism

The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well established attitudes on evolution from on high (which is why Mitt Romney expressed anti-Creationist sentiments without any blowback during the 2007-2008 campaign), and, their religious tradition actually seems to have been influenced by American Universalism, and so an exclusive attitude toward salvation…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Tara Richerson

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Tara Richerson to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background…

Get ready for 2008: Year Of The Frog

It's hardly a secret that I've had a bit of a thing going for frogs and toads - anurans - during the latter part of 2007 (the anuran series has so far consisted of part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, and part VII). While the whole exercise was a good excuse to learn a lot about one of the most fascinating, charismatic and bizarre tetrapod groups, the main reason for going down this road in the first place is the major conservation effort that's going to get underway next year.. or, tomorrow, if you're reading this on New Year's Eve. 2008 is, you see, the YEAR OF THE FROG: it…

Respectful Insolence rebooted

The day has finally arrived. The big changes hinted at and then announced have finally come to pass. Orac has finally rebooted and plugged his (its?) essence into ScienceBlogs.com. It almost didn't come to pass, thanks to a certain overreaction by my medical school. It also didn't help that, after an unbelievably mild January in the New York area, the one time that winter would finally reassert itself would, by sheer bad luck, fall on the very day that I was scheduled to fly home from a surgical meeting in San Diego. One plane cancellation and dire speculation about the weather did produce a…

Three reasons the Supreme Court should uphold ACA

With the Supreme Court hearing arguments for the next three days on the Affordable Care Act, many commentators, including Dahlia Lithwick appear to have so much contempt for the Roberts court that they believe the issue will likely be settled on politics rather than law. The first proposition is that the health care law is constitutional. The second is that the court could strike it down anyway. ... The law is a completely valid exercise of Congress' Commerce Clause power, and all the conservative longing for the good old days of the pre-New Deal courts won't put us back in those days as if…

Counting work-related injuries, disease and death among US workers: Part 1

While we're on vacation, we're re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on March 9, 2011. By Celeste Monforton "Death takes no holidays in industry and commerce," is how Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz described the toll of on-the-job death and disability for U.S. workers. The Secretary's remarks in 1968 were part of congressional hearings on legislation that ultimately established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He suggested that because most work-related fatalities and injuries happen one or two at a time, day in and day out…

Unfinished Business

The problem with scheduling something like last week's Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I'm out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can't hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the fold) to a couple of points that were raised in the comments, though, mostly having to do with my skepticism about the Singularity. (Side note on literary matters: When I wrote dismissively that the Singularity is a silly idea, I didn't realize that I was going to spend the flight down to…

Where does the Trump Presidency stand a fortnight and a half in?

The most recent polling indicates that Donald Trump has a 43% approval and 53% disapproval rating. So he is not exactly loved by the American people, which is odd because he seems so lovable. And, he has told us that the American people love him. And his victory in the November election was unbelievably big league. But, that's how it is, according the scientific polling. Approval and favorability are apparently slightly different, but the pattern holds. The same polling tells us that the American people have a 45% favorable attitude about the president, which would be tremendous for any…

The Minnesota Recount

As a very hectic week settles down a bit, I can give you a little more information and perspective on the Minnesota US Senate Race recount. There are a number of misconceptions circulating about this process that I can dispel, and I have a pair of predictions for you: Taking the same exact data, we have the Democratic Party Line and the republican Party Line, wherein "line" means trend line on a graph. [Update: See this new analysis suggesting that the Republicans cheated] Let's start with the prediction. Given all the available data, we can now estimate what is going to happen as a…

Will vs. Grace - are people honest because they resist temptation or because they don't feel it?

In a world where the temptation to lie, deceive and cheat is both strong and profitable, what compels some people to choose the straight and narrow path? According to a new brain-scanning study, honest moral decisions depend more on the absence of temptation in the first place than on people wilfully resisting these lures. Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton and Harvard University came to this conclusion by using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of people who were given a chance to lie. The volunteers were trying to predict the outcomes…

Some Thanksgiving recipes (part 1).

Having posted what I'm making for Thanksgiving, I am happy to accede to your requests for the recipes. Of course, I encourage you to violate the recipes at well (since that's how I was taught to cook). I'm posting these in two batches, so if you don't see the recipe you were looking for here, it will be posted in the next recipe post, which should be up by tonight. LINDA'S PICKLED PEARS 12 pears, pared, cored, and cut into quarters (d'anjou work well) 1.5 cups honey 4 cups cranberry juice 1 cup red or white wine vinegar 6 cinnamon sticks 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 tablespoon ground cloves…

Candidate #1 for stupidest attack from a mercury maven ever

Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else's rebuttal of the whole "hypothesis." This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-laden "defenses" of the thimerosal gravy train--I mean, hypothesis--that two of them are worth a brief mention. Beware, though: The stupid, it burns. First up is a guy named Mike Wagnitz, who bills himself as having "over 20 years experience evaluating materials for toxic metals" and currently…

Sometimes good things happen: The antivaccine fringe suffers a setback in Congress

Well, it's done. The server migration should be finished. I was out and about last night giving a talk; so I'll only have time for a relatively brief post (for me, at least). Once again, things happen while I'm otherwise...indisposed. This time around, it's something that warms the cockles of what antivaccinationists perceive to be my pharma shill heart. Normally, it's considered bad form to openly express schadenfreude, but I do make at least one exception, and that's when bad things happen to antivaccinationist plans, particularly after they've been crowing about them for weeks. You might…

Science, Free Market and, Is Lakoff Scientific?

This is so old (December 03, 2004) and so long that I did not even bother to re-read it or check the the links. I am sure the commenters will draw attention to everything that is wrong in this post... First, here is some science, or really problems with science policy, or better still, some top-down nonsense: Two Must Reads http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1425 What women are supposed to want http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/what_women_are_supposed_to_want/ On the other hand, for some nice science, the new Tangled Bank is now online: http://penn.typepad.com/penn/2004/11/…

The Cleveland Clinic doubles down on its support for quackademic medicine disguised as "wellness"

I've been pretty hard on The Cleveland Clinic over the years, but justifiably so. After all, The Cleveland Clinic is one of the leading centers of quackademic medicine in the US; i.e., an academic medical center that studies and uses quackery as though it were legitimate medicine. Of course, this is a problem that is not in any way limited to The Cleveland Clinic. A decade ago, I tried to keep track of which academic medical centers had "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" programs that integrated quackery like acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, reiki…

Who Will Grow Your Food? Part I: The Coming Demographic Crisis in Agriculture

Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time. A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street. Who will grow your food in the coming decades? A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Breathe, breathe in the woo

As regular readers may have noticed, I was on vacation the last two Fridays in a row. To keep Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) going, I decided to resurrect a couple of posts from the old blog that would have made good installments of YFDoW installments, had YFDoW existed at the time when they were originally written. One thing I noticed upon coming back and approaching this first new YFDoW since getting back to work was that it seemed even harder than usual to settle on a specific topic this week. I looked back over some links that I had saved, but none of them fired me up enough to wade into…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XV: a few words about model assumptions

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We have now gone through the entire paper on modeling the impact of antiviral resistance in an influenza control program, by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. Since a number of assumptions were made, we take some time to consider what effects they have on the model's results. In the…

Question for the academic types--interview requests

As y'all know, a frequent topic of conversation here is communicating science to the public. While many of us do it directly via sites such as this one, the bulk of science writing that the public will read is done by the pros--people writing for the magazines and newspapers, among other outlets. Often, their stories include interviews with research scientists. However, we're not always so easy to get in touch with, and we blow reporters off altogether--apparently, pretty frequently. On a listserv I subscribe to, there recently was a discussion amongst writers regarding how to get…

Black Lung: Dust Hasn't Settled on Deadly Disease

Louisville-Courier Journal reporters Laura Unger and Ralph Dunlop offer us the voices and faces of miners who are suffering from coal workers' pneumoconiosis.  Their special report, Black Lung: Dust Hasn't Settled on Deadly Disease, includes an on-line version which features five compelling videos featuring 40- and 50-year old coal miners who are now suffering with the disabling lung disease.  Mr. Danny Hall, 56, for example, who is still severely impaired despite receiving a lung transplant says "if I had to do over, I wouldn't ever go into coal mining." The reporters begin the series…

Green Sahara Cemeteries

I've been saving this picture for more than a year, not showing it to anyone or posting it anywhere online, not wanting to break the embargo: This was a picture I took of one of the fossils brought to SciFoo'07 by Paul Sereno and Gabrielle Lyon, together with the skull of Nigersaurus. Apparently, while digging for dinosaurs in Niger, Paul and the crew discovered an enormous and fascinating archaeological site - Gobero. They teamed up with anthropologists and archaeologists and spent two digging seasons analysing the site. The first results of this study are now finally published in my…

An unexpected challenge with teaching on-line

Three (or more) operating systems times three (or more) versions of software with bugs unique to one or systems (that I don't have) means too many systems for me to manage teaching. Thank the FSM they're not using Linux, too. (Let me see that would be Ubuntu Linux, RedHat Linux, Debian Linux, Yellow Dog Linux, Vine, Turbo, Slackware, etc.. It quickly gets to be too exponential.) Nope, sorry, three versions of Microsoft Office on three different operating systems are bad enough. This semester, I'm teaching an on-line for the first time ever. The subject isn't new to me. I've taught…

From the Archives: My theory of conferences

I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far. In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original commentary on the topic. Fortunately, I have an post from way back in June 2008 expressing many of the same sentiments, though probably neither as well nor as succinctly as Bonnie has. I'll also not that the post was excerpted in The Library Leadership Network. ============================== I saw…

Obesity, sexual orientation, and getting to a "healthy weight"

When a group of researchers supported by the HHS Office on Women's Health set about designing a weight-loss intervention for lesbian and bisexual (LB) women, they ran into a challenge: Many lesbian and bisexual women are averse to the idea of weight loss. Although LB women are more likely to be overweight or obese than their heterosexual counterparts, they are less likely to consider themselves overweight. The researchers conducted focus groups with LB women (some involving only overweight participants), and learned that participants often didn't prioritize weight loss, but did want to be…

Around the Blogosphere

One of the hallmarks of my business is that I spend an enormous amount of time waiting. As I sit in my office all day long, I don't really do all that much work, but the work I do is in five minute increments here and there. I print up docs and fax them off, then I have to wait for someone to fill them out and fax them back. I fax off a client's loan application and credit report to a lender, then I have to wait for them to send back a pre-approval. I go online and submit a loan, get it approved, call the client to let them know, then I have to wait for them to send me income documents. I…

Science Majors Follow-Up

I meant to follow up on some of the comments to my post calling for more science majors last week, but we had some Issues Thursday night, and I didn't get to it on Friday. There were a number of people making negative comments about things that weren't quite what I was saying, though, and I do still want to respond. Happily, Johan Larson gets it: [I]t seems to me that for a large portion of undergrads what they study doesn't seem very important, for several reasons: they don't know what they want to do with their lives, their preferred employers require a college degree but don't much care…

What the science cited by the Cato Institute really says about global warming

I was going to ignore the open letter-to-the-president advertisement placed in major papers recently by the Cato Institute. You've probably heard of it -- the one that says Obama should ignore global warming alarmism because the science says it isn't happening. The one signed by "over 100 scientists." But the response elsewhere has been interesting. It focuses almost exclusively on the expertise of those who signed the letter, not the merits of the argument it makes. I find myself agreeing -- ever so slightly, with the Cato Institutes' Jerry Taylor, who defended the letter last week in the…

Open Access and Costs

An interesting comment about open access has been left over at Bora's place. The commenter is clearly not in favor of open access, and provides a number of reasons for her opposition. I'm going to break the comment into a couple of parts, and address all of the objections separately. OPEN ACCESS isn't FREE. That's what any first year econ student will tell you. I don't know why scientists can't get that. Open access is free to the reader. It still costs money to publish. Open access shifts that cost to the author. That means the author has to: a) pull money out of his grant to pay…

Minnesota AGW Denialist Jungbauer Disembowled by Respected News Anchor Don Shelby

I woke up this morning and the world was slightly different than it was the night before. Well, it probably always is a little different each day, but there are certain times when you notice this. I'm not talking about the bits of siding, roofing, and trees scattered about the landscape because of the very severe thunderstorm we had last night, although I suppose this is indirectly related. If you are not a Minnesotan this will take some explanation: Don Shelby newscaster, was the Walter Cronkite of the Twin Cities. Stately in appearance, white-haired (since birth, presumably), deep…

"John Smith" responds to Orac's post on his Lava Lamp pareidolia

This was so good that I just couldn't resist. Yesterday, I did a quick post about an amusing bit of pareidolia, in which the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus were seen in a Lava Lamp. Apparently, an Australian man going by the pseudonym of John Smith noticed the shape in the wax as he fired up a brand spanking new Lava Lamp, recognized it for the Holy Miracle that it was, and shut off the lamp before Satan's heat could melt the apparition. He then stayed quiet for over a year and then announced his discovery to all the world. Naturally, I and other skeptics, particularly you, my readers, were not…

The promise and challenges of Big Genetics

Olivia Judson's blog has a guest post by Aaron Hirsh that got me thinking about a topic that will be familiar to most scientists: the transition of research towards Big Science. Big Science basically includes any project involving a large consortium of research groups working together on a tightly-defined problem, usually with a very specific goal in mind (e.g. sequence and analyse a genome, or build a big machine to smash particles together at high speed). Hirsh only mentions genetics in passing, but this field - and particularly human genetics - is an area where the trend towards Big…

On Mimicking Phosphotyrosine

When doing science, there's generally one totally optimal way of performing an experiment. But, there may also be several other less optimal means of gathering similar data, and one of those may be much more feasible than the totally optimal method. As a scientist, you have to determine whether this other method is sufficient, or whether it's necessary to expend the extra effort and/or resources on the more difficult method. Sometimes it's totally fine to take the simpler approach (and this will spare some of your precious time and your lab's precious funding), but this post is about a case…

Varmus Screws the Pooch

Harold Varmus is one of the most high profile advocates of open access to biomedical research. As one of the cofounders of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), he has played an important role in making published results freely available to all. And he's a Nobel Laureate, which ain't too shaby either. Varmus was interviewed by Ira Flatow for NPR's Science Friday program about the NIH's new policy requiring that research publications presenting results funded by the NIH be deposited in PubMed Central (the NIH's free online archive of biomedical journal articles) within a year of publication.…

America's quack Dr. Oz asks people to ask him questions on Twitter. Hilariously, the results aren't quite what he expected.

Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight long enough to drag my sorry posterior upstairs to my bed. It happens. It’s just that it seems to be happening more often these days. So it was that I missed one of the most amusing Twitter happenings that I’ve seen in a long time; that is; until I woke up again early this AM. Dr. Oz just got pwned on Twitter…

Another Week of GW News, October 30, 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 in the Ecological Crisis Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsOctober 30, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Rogelj, Maplecroft, BEST, OWS, WCRP, Monnett The Cree Prophecy, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Planet 3.0, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon…

Day 3 of flu virus sharing summit: participant account

The critical summit on sharing influenza viruses entered its third day (previous coverage here and links therein). The big media outlets covered the opening but not since. Fortunately, you can read about developments here (Day 2, here). Ed Hammond is there and is keeping us abreast of developments. A participant's view at the start of Day 3 (5:30 am, Thursday, Geneva time): Halfway Through and No New Ideas from the US and EU To be sure, Indonesia has not been the most effective leader for its cause. Its multiple failures at this meeting (if not previous ones) to put forward clear language…

Belated March Meeting Wrap-Up

I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting: Tuesday In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…

SciBlogs caves to hysterics

All I ask from people... All I fucking ask from people, is intellectual consistency. And this seemingly simple request is apparently, impossible. I dont believe a fucking word, of anyone, who has FREAKED THE FUCK OUT over the fucking Pepsi Blog. And heres why. JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY/CONFLICTS OF INTEREST/POLITICAL BIAS OBSTRUCTING SCIENCE In 2008-2009, we had a sponsored blog here by Invitrogen. As far as I know, Invitrogen had no apparent editorial control over what got posted there. As a result, the blog turned into an EPIC TRAIN WRECK, when several SciBloggers took it upon themselves to…

Teaching the Holocaust: The "right" not to be offended interferes

One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…

Down the toilet with Miranda Devine

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine likes to import the ideas for her anti-environmentalist screeds from America. (For example, DDT ban kills millions, and hockey stick is broken.) Her latest import is the claim that low-flush toilets don't work. Here it is in a 1998 column from a Competitive Enterprise Instituter: Included in the numerous provisions of the massive 1992 Energy Policy Act was a requirement that, by 1994, all new toilets sold in the United States must use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf in Washingtonspeak), well below the 3.5 gpf models most Americans are…

If private firms fund research at universities, who do you think will control access to the knowledge?

Just one more follow up on the matter of how research universities will make do as federal funds for research dry up. Some have suggested that the answer will come from more collaboration between university labs and researchers in private industry. Perhaps it will. But, a recent article in the Boston Globe about conflicts within the Broad Institute is suggestive of the kinds of clashes of philosophy that might make university-industry collaborations challenging. From the article: Just over a year ago, Cambridge's prestigious Broad Institute started an idealistic medical-research project,…

Is the Holocaust "revisionism" movement no more?

This blog is primarily about medicine, the scientific basis of medicine, and general skepticism and critical thinking. As part of my interest in skepticism, a particular form of pseudoscience and pseudohistory that I first took an interest in about a decade ago, namely Holocaust "revisionism," which is, of course, in reality Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is the denial or minimization of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime, in particular the industrialized genocide of European Jewry. The reasons, as I've discussed time and time again, virtually always boil down to a combination of…

Stanislaw Burzynski’s counteroffensive against the FDA and Texas Medical Board continues, part 2

Believe it or not, I'm about to say the one and only good thing I will say about Stanislaw Burzynski in this post. After all, I was always taught to find the good in my opponents, no matter how vile I find them. Burzynski, for instance, has been peddling a cure for brain cancer (and other cancers) that he claims to have discovered in the blood and urine in the 1970s. Despite there being no convincing evidence of antitumor activity due to these peptides, which he dubbed antineoplastons, he has managed to win battle after battle with the FDA and the Texas Medical Board and to continue to prey…