Skepticism
pharyngula | June 7, 2010Deepak Chopra visited Vancouver, BC…and CFI was prepared with flyers and volunteers handing them out to people going to the talk. It's an excellent example of how to effectively and informatively deal with pseudoscientific nonsense. Oh, and they actually had Chopra come out and talk with them, although it sounds like he didn't say much of substance. But then, he never does.
One thing I'd like to see, though, is that they make copies of their flyers available on the web. Chopra isn't going to vanish, and having more material that other groups can use when engaging wacky quantum woo artists…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010It almost makes one feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield.
Retraction: Enterocolitis in Children With Developmental Disorders
A J Wakefield, A Anthony, S H Murch, M Thomson, S M Montgomery, S Davies, J J O'Leary, M Berelowitz and J A Walker-Smith
Am J Gastroenterol 2000; 95:2285-2295
On 28 January 2010, the UK General Medical Council's Fitness to Practice Panel raised concerns about a paper published in the Lancet by Dr Wakefield et al. (1). The main issues were that the patient sample collected was likely to be biased and that the statement in the paper, that the study had local ethics…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010We're always hearing about these amazing profilers who work to describe the culprits, sight unseen, in serial killer cases. They get highlighted in books and movies and television, and the media just slurps it up with gullible glee. I've always found them unbelievable. The noise they're making is pure cold-reading, and there's nothing different between them and psychic detectives — it's an embarrassment that our law enforcement agencies still use them, along with lie detector tests and handwriting analysis.
So I was glad to see this critical article from Malcolm Gladwell, written several…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010A curious phenomenon has struck me a few times: in response to my criticisms of religion, someone will bring up the Jains. It's a peaceful religion, they'll say, that promotes kindness to all living beings, therefore my arguments are all invalid. Even more strangely, every time this happens, my interlocutor is not a Jain, which always leaves me wondering why, if this faith is so wonderful, they haven't converted. Besides, my main gripe with religion isn't that it makes people evil (the overwhelming majority of believers, whether Christian, Muslim, or whatever, are peaceable, cooperative,…
pharyngula | June 1, 2010A pediatrics resident wrote an excellent op-ed on vaccination in the LA Times. LA has seen its first outbreak of measles in four years there, and it's something to worry about.
A study published in the April issue of Pediatrics examined a 2008 measles outbreak in San Diego. The index case was a 7-year-old unvaccinated child who was exposed to the virus while abroad. This case resulted in 839 exposed persons, 11 actual cases (all in unvaccinated children) and the hospitalization of an infant too young to be vaccinated. In total, the outbreak cost the public more than $175,000, which would have…
pharyngula | May 31, 2010That'll send a chill down Antipodean spines. They've got creationists just like us (please stop sending them here, we're full up), and they've also got crazy anti-vaxers promoting dangerous public health practices in public libraries. Fortunately, they also have skeptics opposing the people who want to make babies vulnerable to disease — maybe we should put a positive, friendly spin on it and call the anti-vaxers pro infant mortality — and they're busy gearing up with information to combat ignorance.
If you're living near Perth, it might be a good idea to make some contacts, and maybe show up…
pharyngula | May 29, 2010He called himself Dr Woo. He was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, and even those quacks couldn't stand him, and disbarred him. He was bringing in female patients, asking them to get naked, and then poking and prodding in places totally unrelated to their complaints. Here's one remarkably resonant sentence from the article:
Expert witnesses told the hearing there were no acupuncture points in the vagina.
Well, yeah, we can get a flavor of what Woo was doing from that, but I'm left marveling: there are no acupuncture points anywhere, it's all a load of hokum, so where do they…
gregladen | May 28, 2010Today is the big day!
And not merely because it is TGIF* day.
The theme "everything you know is sort of wrong" is familiar to readers on this blog. It is an underlying theme for much of what happens here. Every now and then that theme is manifest overtly, as in the Falsehoods posts, which are, as we speak, being revised, expanded, and reissued.
Well, starting this evening and running for an indeterminate amount of time (but probably a few weeks or so) "Everything you know is sort of wrong" is not just a phrase to keep in your head all the time as you are walking around doing stuff. It's…
pharyngula | May 27, 2010There was an anti-vaccination rally yesterday in Chicago — boring and silly! What's more interesting is that Women Thinking Free (a fabulous new organization) had a counter-demonstration. You can read an account or two or three of the event from the rational perspective; it sounds like the anti-vaxers are also anti-science. The rally and anti-rally also made the news, and that's actually a good account, which plainly states that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccination, that Wakefield's study was flawed, and that Wakefield has had his license to practice medicine revoked…
pharyngula | May 21, 2010I'd mentioned before that the Royal Ontario Museum was sponsoring a talk by that pseudoscientific goober, Deepak Chopra — perhaps Ken Ham had been unavailable — and as you might guess, quite a few people are dumbfounded that a respected museum was bringing in a quack. You can help protest: Larry Moran has a letter to the Director of the ROM, and you can add a signature to it.
I've been to the ROM, and it's excellent — there is no pandering to quacks there. I have to wonder who made this awful decision…and I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't some non-scientist in marketing.
pharyngula | May 13, 2010Look who's coming to the Royal Ontario Museum: Deepak Chopra. What were they thinking when they invited that pompous fraud to speak?
World renowned teacher, author and philosopher Deepak Chopra presents his latest concepts in the field of mind-body medicine bridging the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East. He will show you how your highest vision of yourself can be turned into physical reality and discuss how you can become a living cell within the body of a living universe. You don't join the cosmic dance - you become the dance. Deepak will address the deeper…
pharyngula | May 13, 2010That Indian yogi who claims to never eat has a page on EsoWatch, the wiki of irrational belief systems, and it has some interesting content. Some of the actual medical data from observations of crazy yogi have been published — nothing as blatant as catching him in the act of eating, but the signs are all there. Sonograms showed urine in the bladder and feces in the colon that later disappeared, somehow. And the blood work taken by the credulous MD, Sudhir Shah, show changes symptomatic of starvation.
Some (if not all ?) blood parameter of the november 2003 examination are shown on the…
pharyngula | May 12, 2010If any one person is responsible for the current anti-vaccination hysteria, it's Andrew Wakefield, the surgeon who cobbled up a very bad study of vaccination and autism. For a good overview, read this summary of a talk by Brian Deer, a reporter who also has a very thorough summary of the Wakefield affair. It's amazing how sloppy the work was, and how lavishly Wakefield was paid for perpetrating it. I guess it's easy and lucrative to carry out medical fraud, as long as your conscience will let you overlook the little matter of dead children.
gregladen | May 3, 2010"Dick Shake"
I want to start out by restating (or stating more plainly) that the Tokenskeptic podcast should be on your listening list, and that it influenced my own thinking about Boob Quake.
Previously, I had been mainly interacting with people with a positive or neutral view of the Boob Quake, and in observing their relationship to the broader community of skeptics, feminists and atheists, noted that they were getting increasingly crapped upon for their involvement in it by subsets of those communities. The cleavage between pro and anti Boob Quake grew as quakes often do, along pre-…
gregladen | May 2, 2010This is a somewhat stream of consciousness response to an interview of Michael McRae by Tokenskeptic followed by an interview with Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking.
Please go listen to the podcast, it is quite good.
How much change has happened in the way the world views crazy religious beliefs because of boobquake? How much change in the way we cause change has happened because of the critique of boobquake? I'd say a little of each, but not much of either.
I think that the critique of boobquake is somewhat disproportionate to the event. Boobquake was clearly never meant to be that…
pharyngula | April 29, 2010Some yogi in India claims that he hasn't eaten, drunk, or used a bathroom in 70 years.
Yeah, right.
Now the Indian military is studying him because, obviously, soldiers who don't need to be provisioned would be rather useful…which assumes that this nonsense is even worth studying.
Two cameras have been set up in his room, while a mobile camera films him when he goes outside, guaranteeing round-the-clock observation.
His body will be scanned and his brain and heart activity measured with electrodes.
"The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water…
pharyngula | April 28, 2010A vitamin D overdose is nothing to laugh about — it's painful and debilitating, can cause kidney damage, and can kill. This is a case where consuming excessive amounts of a vitamin supplement can do more than help you make expensive urine, and can lead to crippling illness and death. Gary Null is a thorough quack who has been raking in the dough with — you guessed it — nearly worthless vitamin supplements. Now this would simply be a tragic story of one of his poor deluded suckers clients had come to harm from his magic crap food, but it's almost funny that Null nearly killed himself by eating…
pharyngula | April 28, 2010Jen has put up the numbers — this was clearly an effective PR move, doing a good job of bringing an absurdity to the public's attention. I think it's important that we use more humor and make more noise to wake people up, because this problem of religious 'prophets' using natural events to bolster their superstition has been around for a long time. I was sent this little essay which seems appropriate. Note the date: it's 9 years old.
NATURAL DISASTERS - UNNATURAL ACTS
Are Natural Disasters Caused by Unnatural Acts?
June 27, 2001
Janis Walworth
Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition…
gregladen | April 28, 2010Well, OK, technically if a man is wearing chains he's not really naked. Whatever. The question at hand is, was sex in skepticism before women showed up? And, when they showed up with their bobbies and all, did they ruin it for everyone?
Read more.
gregladen | April 24, 2010Notice that I didn't say that the medium IS the message. Just that some of the message is in there. In the medium.
I am forever amazed at how easily compelled my fellow skeptics, and/or my fellow atheists, and/or my fellow feminists, and/or my fellow anti-racists are to tell each other that they are doing it wrong. It was once said (by a straight white male Christian, probably), that "If half the people who make speeches would make concrete floors, they would be doing more good."
Well, in an effort to promote sanity in this discussion, I'd like to point you to yet another voice in…