Skepticism
pharyngula | January 25, 2010Who would have thought something so trivial would generate so much amusement? I told you all to vote on Twitter for DrRachie, because there was a bunch of quacks in the lead. The kook formerly in the #1 position, the "Health Ranger", has flamed out hysterically. Now the #2 quack, some guy named Mercola, is showing similar signs of cracking.
Dr. Mercola explained the situation himself in a Facebook post, "An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
pharyngula | January 24, 2010I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie 'medicine'. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.
Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.
He is outraged at being…
pharyngula | January 18, 2010Poor Haiti. First the earthquake, and now the cult vultures are descending on them. It's not just talking bibles: now the scientologists are coming.
Seriously, people. When a region suffers a disaster and the infrastructure is falling down in ruins and people need real help now, when the pipeline is limited and access is difficult, send in the experts (doctors and engineers, for instance) and immediately useful aid (medicine, food, drinking water), and all the peddlers of frivolous non-essentials should just stay out of the way. A box of e-meters is taking up space better spent on a box of…
pharyngula | January 17, 2010I just stagger back from yet another long day of travel, and what do I discover? You've filled up the las entry in the endless thread again. Does the horde never sleep?
Anyway, we will launch this one with a mystery. Watch this video of an Oregon bigfoot:
Now the mystery. Why is it that all sightings of bigfoot are such obvious scams? They are typically badly done messes like a poor and shaky camera recording, or a pile of rotting meat in a fur suit. This one suffers from overly slick choreography — isn't it nice how the camera zooms into focus only briefly, just as Bigfoot turns to look at…
pharyngula | January 13, 2010RCA (which is not the old and reputable company I remember, but has gone out of business and its name sold to anyone with the right amount of cash) recently announced a device called the Airnergy harvester, which supposedly simply soaks up the RF energy emitted by WiFi devices in the neighborhood and uses it to charge portable batteries. Wow, what an idea…but a moment's thought makes it clear it can't work. My local wireless router simply can't be pumping out that much energy, or it would an awesomely wasteful device, and there can't be that much power floating free in every few cubic inches…
pharyngula | January 3, 2010Barbara Ehrenreich had breast cancer, and ugly and frightening as that disease is, she found something else that was almost as horrible: the 'positive thinking' approach to health care. People are stigmatized if they fail to regard their illness as anything other than an uplifting, positive life experience, an opportunity to examine their lives and identify what is most important to them…and also, most disturbingly, if they fail to appreciate that the attitude that they bring to the problem will determine whether they live or die. It's the Oprah-zation of medicine.
In the most extreme…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2009
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2009 were announced yesterday.
Professor emeritus of ecological zoology Staffan Ulfstrand receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... for his engrossing and pedagogical books about evolution [such as Savannah Lives: Animal Life and the Human Evolution of Africa] and his many pop-sci talks, particularly during the double Darwin jubilee of 2009. Staffan Ulfstrand frequently appears on nature shows, in Q&A columns and in debates about biology and behaviour. He has also frequently explained evolution in a pedagogical manner when it has…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2009The autumn-term closing ceremony in Swedish schools is traditionally held in a church. The country was solidly (if lukewarmly) Christian until quite recently, and Christmas is of course nominally a Christian holiday. But Muslim immigrants have become more numerous from the 80s on, the Swedish Church separated from the state in 2000, and so it is no longer uncontroversial to bring entire school classes to church.
My son's school, when informing us parents about the ceremony planned for last week, emphasised that though the whole thing would take place in a church, no Christian message would be…
gregladen | December 16, 2009Yesterday, James Randi put up a blog post in which he questioned the validity of anthropogenic global warming. He has subsequently made the statement that he probably has more thinking to do about global warming, and he admits that he really knows nothing about it. So Randi's blog post is, essentially, a non-starter as an issue, although there are some interesting things to think about.
James Hrynyshyn has an excellent blog post about this, in which he reports a conversation he had with Randi about Randi's post.
Randi's original post displays a rather embarrassing ignorance of earth…
pharyngula | December 15, 2009Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra (just the fact that he is associated with it should discredit it right there) have been peddling this bizarre notion of Biocentrism, the idea that the universe is the product of human awareness — it's a kind of upscale version of The Secret, gussied up with more science vocabulary. The gang at Nirmukta have put together a long dissection of Lanza's bad physics, well worth a read.
pharyngula | December 14, 2009A fondness for quacks.
Fox News brought on a naturopath to peddle a random bit of nonsense, that coffee makes you fat. Any drug that tinkers with your metabolism can have some unexpected effects, but to claim that a cup of black coffee is "worse than five hot fudge sundaes" is irresponsible insanity.
In other woo news: Fox News invited Ann de Wees Allen to tell its viewers that black coffee will make you "fatter than a pig." This segment is a textbook example of how not to do science journalism. The voice over identifies de Wees Allen as "Doctor"--without mentioning that she claims neither a…
gregladen | December 14, 2009Imagine the following scenario. Two guys are walking down the street, in different cities. Guy A has two PhDs, one in quantum physics with a focus on dimensionality dynamics, the other in astrophysics with a focus on relativistic aspects of gravity and black holes. She has published dozens of peer reviewed papers on both topics and is a brilliant mathematician. Guy B never took a physics class but yesterday he finished reading large parts of The Elegant Universe. Suddenly, at the same moment, they each have an idea (they do not have the same idea ... they have different ideas) about how…
pharyngula | December 11, 2009Kooks are like stray cats: give them a little bit of attention, and they end up following you everywhere, making annoying squalling noises and clawing at your door. A perfect example is David Mabus aka Dennis Markuze aka That Insane Prat, who, now that registration is a barrier to posting his little kook-droppings here, has taken to trying to flood my mailbox. Ha ha, the laugh is on him, my mailbox is already flooded! Also, I've got filters up the wazoo there, anyway.
There a whole lot of skeptics (and the entire faculty of the University of Minnesota Morris, too, who have marveled and…
aardvarchaeology | December 11, 2009In mid-2008, UK science writer Simon Singh fell afoul of the weird and archaic English libel law. After he wrote in The Guardian that chiropractic lacks scientific support and that such treatments are bogus, the British Chiropractic Association sued him for libel. And in England, a libel case is always a major pain for the defendant regardless of whether he wins or not. He has to prove that he's innocent (!), the damages are 140 times as high as in other European countries, and even if you win it costs you huge sums of money, loads of time and loads of stress. (Also, the law promotes…
gregladen | December 10, 2009I mean, you might be, but I'm certainly not going to take your word for it....
I have an email from a blogeague (that's a colleague in the blogosphere) asking for clarification on the use of the word Skeptic in relation to climate change. This is a person very much involved in ocean conservation who had understood the word "skeptic" to mean a person who "does not believe in" anthropogenic global warming, but I had used the term in a blog post to describe a person who is not an AGW denialist. We have a commenter on this site who seems to have been pretending to have just woken up one recent…
pharyngula | December 7, 2009Hey, this is a surprise: Phil Plait is stepping down from the presidency of the JREF to pursue a career in television. Phil, I've seen your picture in the skepchick calendar — television isn't ready for that kind of exposure yet! Well, maybe on Skinemax.
All hail the new president of the JREF, DJ Grothe. He'll be a good match for the organization, and I look forward to future amazing meetings.
pharyngula | December 3, 2009He takes on our country's curious attitude towards patent inanity.
We are edging into an Election Season where strange beliefs will get an unusual airing. Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee are up front in their disdain for Darwinism and their embrace of one degree or another of Creationism. Obama and most Democrats, and many Republicans have no problem at all with Darwinism, but will be wise to keep that out of their basic stump speech. Palin can draw applause by affirming she doesn't believe mankind shared a common ancestor with oran utans, but Obama will prudently refrain from revealing his belief…