Skepticism
pharyngula | November 25, 2009Yet more skeptics have spoken out: Randi, Orac, and Novella, on the case of the Belgian man who is claimed to have awakened from a persistent vegetative state, and is even, supposedly, writing a book about his 23 years trapped in an unresponsive body.
It's possible that he has recovered to some degree, but the evidence hasn't been shown. Supposedly, he was diagnosed to have some functionality with a poorly described brain mapping technique (one summary I read in Nature suggests that it was looking for areas of the brain that lit up in response to external stimuli, but there's more to…
pharyngula | November 25, 2009Don't miss it next year: Rebecca Watson reviews Skepticon II, both the talks and the social scene.
And if that's not enough, Carl Sagan's Dance Party recorded a podcast with several of us while we were there.
People are asking if the talks at Skepticon were recorded. Yes!
The whole two days are being edited and uploaded to youtube right now. Have patience, it will take a little while.
pharyngula | November 24, 2009You may have heard the recent news about a Belgian man who was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after an accident, but who now has been miraculously discovered to have actually been conscious for the last 23 years, trapped in a partially paralyzed body. How horrific, and how frightening that the doctors could have made such a ghastly error.
Until you watch this video. How did they figure out that the poor man was actually alert and mentally competent beneath his deeply damaged exterior? They're using facilitated communication: somebody holds his hand and moves it around to…
pharyngula | November 24, 2009This excellent article in the Chicago Tribune documents the abuses of science by quacks. Legitimate researchers identify certain properties of autism — markers for inflammation in the brain, for instance, or correlations with testosterone — and write up papers that even go out of their way to explain how their observations are interesting, but do not necessarily lead to therapies, and what do you think the medical frauds do? They use them to justify useless or dangerous treatments like injections of testosterone inhibitors or anti-inflammatory agents or loading up patients with intravenous…
pharyngula | November 22, 2009It's strange…I was offline all day yesterday. I've been at Skepticon II down here in Springfield, Missouri, and unfortunately, I had no internet access while I was in the meeting, which went on all day Saturday late into the evening, and then, once the talks were over, the socializing began. The party went on at a bar until 1:30am, then moved to a hotel room until sometime around 4am, and then DJ Grothe, Rebecca Watson, and I kept it going until 6am, at which time the lesser two beings conked out, and I was the last one left standing (Rebecca will seethe at that)…when I had to take off to the…
pharyngula | November 17, 2009Bill Maher struck precisely the wrong tone in his recent plea for 'forgiveness' for his anti-vax stand — it wasn't an admission that he had been wrong, it was a rather smarmy, self-righteous claim that he has been the open-minded one who just wants to ask the hard questions . It reminded me of nothing other than the sniffy, sanctimonious tone creationists take when they try to claim they're just interested in the free exchange of information on both sides of their issue. It's just another attempt to put crank pseudoscience on a par with real science.
Orac is scathing in his assessment. Maher…
gregladen | November 14, 2009Recent discussion of Canadian Naturopathy caused this old memory of mine to surface, regarding a friend who nearly died because he had a treatable illness but was attended to only by a Naturopath. A stupid, badly dressed Naturopath who couldn't drive for shit.
I won't say his real name, because he's reasonably well known, and I'm not sure how much he knows I know about this story. He was pretty private about it at the time, but when he was in the hospital still unconscious after the emergency surgery, his wife told me everything, much of which I already knew by observation, some I already…
pharyngula | November 14, 2009John Wesley, the Methodist theologian, also advocated 'natural' cures for illness, so he was kind of a quack. However, this account of Wesley's recommendations for treating the sick has one prescription I really like. No, not the one about holding a warm puppy against your tummy for stomach-ache (although that one is pretty good)…it's a couple of paragraphs below that one.
I'll let you figure it out.
NO! It's not drinking beer for tuberculosis, either!
pharyngula | November 13, 2009Clearly modeling his strategy after the anti-vaccination campaigns, Stephen explains how to cobble up your own homemade controversy on just about any subject. All you have to do is ignore all the evidence and invent a non-existent danger, and people will believe anything you say.
clock | November 8, 2009You can listen to the Friday episode of Skeptically Speaking here. I am at the beginning, first 10 minutes or so, explaining what ScienceOnline2010 is all about. But the rest of the show with Paul Ingraham is very interesting as well.
pharyngula | November 7, 2009Today is Carl Sagan Day — I think that means you are officially expected to be filled with awe of the cosmos all day long, while also being thoroughly skeptical of the supernatural. Hang on…I think that means I celebrate Carl Sagan Day every day.
If I want to do something different, maybe I should make an apple pie from scratch.
Another thing you can do is consider the importance of science on social policy. It could be a very busy day!
gregladen | November 6, 2009Divining sticks that consist essentially of an antenna not even attached to a radio (which might make it slihgtly useful for listening to music and stuff), and costing between 16 and 60 THOUSAND DOLLARS each, are being used as the main technology for detecting bombs at check points staffed by the Iraqi army.
The US Army has told the Iraqi army that this does not work, but they don't care.
"I don't believe there's a magic wand that can detect explosives," said Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., who oversees Iraqi police training for the American military. "If there was, we would all be using…
gregladen | November 6, 2009First off, Major Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter is not dead. He's in custody, wounded. Interesting how he was dead for much of the day yesterday. You'd think they'd get that straight.
Second, Hasan is not os "Muslim Descent." There is no such thing. Islam is a religion. He is a Palestinian American.
Third, even though it is true that Fort Hood is the largest military base in the world, it is not (necessarily) true that it has "suffered a disproportionate share of losses" in the Iraq and Afghani wars. It is bigger. It has more. Proportionate means you adjust for size, stupid newsman.…
gregladen | October 26, 2009Calling all skeptics ... So, what's the story with this thing?
They seem to be saying it uses Beta Waves. Remember Beta Waves? I wonder if these are a new kind of Beta Waves, or are they the Beta Waves that run my Ouija board?
Here's another video:
pharyngula | October 23, 2009This is Ali, a six month old baby in Southern Russia.
It's a miracle! Every Monday and Thursday, fresh quotations from the Quran 'magically' appear on his legs, belly, or arms when he's home alone with his mommy and daddy, and then the pilgrims show up in the thousands to give the happy family lots and lots of attention. I simply can't imagine how red marks might appear on the delicate skin of a young baby while under the care of doting, attentive parents, or why anyone might cheat and fake a miracle…can you? The only possible explanation is that the omnipotent, omniscient master of the…
tsmith | October 21, 2009I realize that, despite the scientific evidence to the contrary, there is still a lot of fear and misunderstanding about vaccine safety. Two recent articles discuss this "epidemic of fear" and why it affects us all, the first here at Wired magazine, and the second here at the Gotham Skeptic. I especially like the second, which has some excellent points:
My pediatric practice is situated at the nexus of three Manhattan neighborhoods (the West Village, Chelsea, and the Meat Packing District) that seem to comprise just the right balance of wealth, edginess, and socio-cultural awareness that…
gregladen | October 19, 2009In case you are interested, the conversation with Desiree Schell, Omar Mouallem, and me talking about "Getting Noticed" on Skeptically Speaking is in podcast form. Here.
pharyngula | October 19, 2009The authors of Freakonomics have a new book out, called Superfreakonomics. It doesn't look promising: a couple of reports have it promoting climate change denialism, which is unfortunate. There are risks in having skepticism with the status quo (which is a good thing all around) when people lurch too far into simply finding excuses to reject everything.
pharyngula | October 17, 2009Sorry, there's another piece there that really irritated me. Maher reads the data selectively: he quotes the CDC's list of possible contaminants of vaccines, like aluminum, insect repellant, formaldehyde, etc. But that is simple honesty in advertising! Everything you put in your body contains at least some trace amounts of environmental contaminants; if you freak out over the fact that insects have crawled over the organic and chemical components of food and drug manufacture, don't look at the FDA description of what you might find in a jar of peanut butter. And especially don't look at the…