Pseudoscience
oracknows | August 21, 2006Things had been quiet. Too quiet. So quiet that Orac couldn't even enjoy his usual recreational pastime of analyzing limericks and jokes linguistically in order to try to understand what made them so amusing to the humans among whom he was forced to exist. Even probing the perturbations in the electromagnetic fields caused by the nearest black hole wouldn't let him shake this sense that something was going to happen.
Sense? Orac is a computer; how could he have a "sense" of anything? Certainly, computers don't usually have intuition or a "sense," but Orac was a much higher order of computer,…
oracknows | August 15, 2006Mentioned in the comments on this post was this story:
MIAMI (Reuters) - The man who made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish may soon claim to do the same for unsightly bags and wrinkles.
Master illusionist David Copperfield says he has found the "Fountain of Youth" in the southern Bahamas, amid a cluster of four tiny islands he recently bought for $50 million (26.4 million pounds).
One of his islands in the Exuma chain, Musha Cay, is a private resort that rents for up to $300,000 a week and the other islands serve as buffers to keep prying eyes away from celebrity guests on the white…
oracknows | August 13, 2006Bora beat me to this one (which is what I get for not posting about it yesterday morning when I first saw the story), but some holy water is coming out of a tree in San Antonio, and why has not yet been solved:
SAN ANTONIO (Aug. 12) - Is it an artesian spring, a broken water pipe or an abandoned well? Lucille Pope's red oak tree has gurgled water for about three months, and experts can't seem to get to the root of the problem.
Pope, 65, has sought answers from the Texas Forest Service, the Edwards Aquifer Authority and nurseries. They have taken pictures and conducted studies, but none have…
oracknows | August 11, 2006It's time for a change of pace on Your Friday Dose of Woo.
I'm getting the feeling that you my readers may have gotten tired of the theme I've been doing the last three weeks. I can relate somewhat but I think it served a purpose (other than giving me free rein to indulge in a lot of bathroom humor, that is). First, I subjected you to a rather disgusting foray into the bowels (if you'll excuse the term) of colon cleansing, complete with links to some truly disgusting websites where people not only enthusiastically discuss their poop, but take pictures and post them on the web. Next, I moved…
oracknows | August 9, 2006I got this in my e-mail the other day that may be of interest to folks interested in countering the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism:
I would like to announce the birth of CommentsOnID, a Pile-blog and ask for support.
A Pile-blog is a blog intended to offer unmoderated comments and trackbacks space, related to blogposts from blogs where moderation/censure or even absence of comments and trackbacks is the rule.
This particular Pile-blog concerns pro-ID blogs/blogposts. It was setup to circumvent the censorship practiced at the time by Dembski and DaveScot and now by Denyse O'…
oracknows | August 3, 2006Today, the Skeptics' Circle turns 40. Well, not exactly, but it is the 40th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and this time around it's being held at Daylight Atheism. Once again, it's time for an antidote for the rampant credulity in the blogosphere, where dubious stories travel around the world far faster than skeptics can apply critical thinking skills to them, this time by entering the Daylight Atheism Museum of Superstition and Pseudoscience:
The doors of the Observatory are closed, and an eager crowd has gathered before them, milling about anxiously to await the unveiling of the newest…
oracknows | July 28, 2006I have to apologize for last week's Dose of Woo. No, I'm not apologizing for the subject matter (the obsession that reigns supreme among some alties with "cleansing" one's colon to "purge toxins" and achieve the super-regularity of several bowel movements a day). Rather, I'm sorry I didn't point out just how disgusting one of the links I included was, because among all the glowing testimonials for how great colon cleansers felt after having supposedly rid themselves of all that nasty fecal matter caked on the walls of their colons and achieved the Nirvana of many bowel movements a day (or, as…
oracknows | July 25, 2006Alright, now they've gone too far.
I thought I'd seen every specious and fallacious argument and example that creationists could throw out there to annoy scientists and be gobbled up by the credulous, but I was wrong. They're muscling in on my turf now! No, they're not making fallacious arguments about how chemotherapy resistance says nothing about evolution. Been there, done that, and I doubt I'd bother if I were to see yet another such post. No, they're not twist the fact that cancer is often due to mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressors regulating cell growth and differentiation as "…
oracknows | July 9, 2006He had been away a while. In fact, he had been away so long (since early May) that I was starting to wonder if he had given up blogging, which would have been a blow, given that he's one of my favorite skeptical bloggers.
Fortunately, my fears were premature, and he's back, with part 2 of his Seven Most Common Thinking Errors of Highly Amusing Quacks and Pseudoscientists.
oracknows | July 8, 2006Not surprisingly, it comes from Ann Coulter:
Throw in enough words like imagine, perhaps, and might have -- and you've got yourself a scientific theory! How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don't accept the giant raccoon flatulence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat. That's basically how the argument for evolution goes [emphasis in original].
Fortunately, Robert Savillo over at Media Matters has provided an…
oracknows | July 6, 2006It's that time again, time for the 38th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle.
Thirsty?
Well, LBBP over at Skeptic Rant offers parched skeptics a fine assortment of beverages including Satire Cider, Quack Quencher, Woo Brew, and Creationist Tonic, among others. It's just the cool, refreshing dose of critical thinking to quench that skeptical thirst that's been intensified by the rampant credulity of society in general and the blogosphere in particular.
Drink deep!
And come on back for the 39th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which will be hosted by Mike over at (appropriately enough) Mike's Weekly…
oracknows | June 30, 2006While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of what I post, on the weekends, too), it seemed like a good idea. But I couldn't think of something that ties together the common themes of this blog, yet maintains a suitably Friday-blogging light-hearted feel to it. And then I came across this article:
L. R. Milgrom (2006). Towards a New…
oracknows | June 21, 2006It's been a very interesting week for those of us who try to keep an eye on antivaccination warriors who scare mothers with claims based on either no science or bad science of dire consequences that will come from vaccinating their children.
A very interesting week indeed, kind of like that old curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Last week, eight years after his study that set off scare whose repercussions continue even now, Andrew Wakefield was finally called to account for professional misconduct for unreported conflicts of interest and highly unethical and unprofessional behavior.…
oracknows | June 19, 2006Time flies when you're having fun.
Hard as it is to believe, it's been a year since RFK, Jr. first posted his ridiculous conspiracy-mongering piece on Salon.com. Ever since moving to ScienceBlogs back in February, I had planned on reposting this article on the anniversary of its original appearance. Unfortunately, for some reason I misremembered the date as being later last June than it really was, leading me to forget completely about reposting on the day it should have been reposted, namely last Saturday. Oh, well, better late than never. If you're curious about how I plunged head first…
oracknows | June 12, 2006Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I've written a substantive post on the fear mongering and bad science that are used by activists to support the claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as preservatives in vaccines is the cause of an "autism epidemic." The closest I've come is using Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s credulous reporting and conspiracy-mongering, in which he uncritically parroted the claims of the worst of the mercury militia and arguing that his recent article in Rolling Stone uses the same sort of dubious and fallacious techniques, showing…
oracknows | June 5, 2006Via The Onion (where else):
TALLAHASSEE, FL--Only months after abandoning a tenured position at Lehigh University, maverick chemist Theodore Hapner managed to disprove two of the three laws of thermodynamics and show that gold is a noxious gas, turning the world of science--defined for centuries by exhaustive research, painstaking observation, and hard-won theories--completely on its head.
The brash chemist, who conducts independent research from his houseboat, has infuriated peers by refusing to "play by the rules of Socrates, Bacon, and Galileo," calling test results as he sees them,…
oracknows | May 18, 2006Enough, already!
Over the last couple of days, we've had Signs You Might Be an Intelligent Design Critic.
Next, we had You May Be an Intelligent Design Supporter If...
Just remember who got the ball rolling with these silly Jeff Foxworthy-inspired lists way back in January 2005 and updated it shortly after landing here at ScienceBlogs.
Alright, I'm a little envious. I wish I had thought of this list. I guess, though, I'll console myself with the fact that I do have one "You might be an X if..." sort of list to my credit.
And, I have to confess, I found a couple of these amusing, such as, "…
oracknows | May 3, 2006Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, "long-winded") post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical wikipedia could and could not do, I still can't help but worry that activists and alties would hijack the wiki for their own purposes.
Now I've found an actual example to consider, although it's not quite what I warned about.
It turns out that there is an AIDS…
oracknows | March 14, 2006I'm beginning to fear for Kathleen Seidel.
No, I don't fear for her safety, but I do fear for her sanity. You see, she's spent way too much time delving into the house organ of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), namely The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (with the unfortunate abbreviation JAPS, which is why they probably insist on using JPANDS), formerly known as Medical Sentinel. I've written about JPANDS before, pointing out that its claim of peer review is a sham and that it has an explicitly antivaccine agenda, not to mention its far right wing…
oracknows | March 10, 2006It's good to see the Pooflinger back in action. It really is. I don't even mind that he's starting to muscle in on my territory, because, as he points out, alties need poo-love too. In the process He's unearthed a "gem" of altie wackiness that even I had never encountered before.
Better still, he's returned to deconstructing that tome of creationist nuttiness, The Evolution Cruncher.