Skepticism
pharyngula | April 26, 2009Or from your side of the world, if you're down there in the southern hemisphere and in a very different time zone from us Americans.
From Australia, we have news of a powerful program on vaccination. It juxtaposes the story of young Dana McCaffrey, a 4-week-old girl who died of whooping cough, with the anti-vaccination crusader Meryl Dorey, who at one point claims that no one "is going to die from [whooping cough] today", and who says that she treated her own unvaccinated children with homeopathic medicines. Guess which one looks like an uncaring idiot?
The news is less cheering from New…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2009Skepticality, one of my favourite podcasts, just put its 100th show on-line! Swoopy and Derek have been going strong now for four whole years! Always good for in-depth science-friendly interviews.
pharyngula | April 22, 2009I know how much Orac dislikes the Huffington Post — I despise it myself as the doman of airheaded woo of the type represented by Deepak Chopra, and the only time I glance at it is to remind myself that the left can also sink into sloppy stupidity as deeply as the right. But poor Orac — his head might just explode into flames when he reads this simperingly stupid piece on vaccines from Jim Carrey.
The Huffpo is a little island of pampered fluff, where celebrities are asked to 'blog' (it really isn't, though—they tend to drop these little turds of pseudo-wisdom, and then never hang around to…
pharyngula | April 20, 2009I was sent this story about genes and IQ, and right from the beginning, my alarm bells were ringing. This is crank pseudoscience.
Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?
Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.
It offended Cochran's sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?
At 3:…
cevans | April 12, 2009
Universe has a firm "No Skepticism" policy.
Don't get me wrong, I dig empirical knowledge. And I like the ancient, Pyrrhonian school of Skepticism founded by Pyrrho of Elis (365-275 B.C.); Pyrrhonian skeptics believed that nothing could be known, not even "this" (i.e the very statement that nothing could be known) and strived for a constant state of inquiry as a source of pleasure. Since absolute knowledge is unattainable, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics felt that their end was: "In opinionatives, indisturbance; in impulsives, moderation; and in disquietives, suspension," which is essentially…
pharyngula | April 12, 2009I'm sad to report that John Maddox, former editor of Nature, has died. He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world.
I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal. The one I remember most vividly, and probably the one that got the most attention in general, was his ferocious denunciation of Rupert Sheldrake's work — he went so far as to say that if ever there was a book suitable for burning, it was that one. So of…
pharyngula | April 11, 2009While Ben Goldacre was writing his book, Bad Science, he was also being sued by the crank, Matthias Rath…which meant he was under a lawyer-mandated gag order and couldn't include his debunking of Rath in the book. Now that the suit is ended (Goldacre won), he is making the chapter on mega-vitamin charlatan Matthias Rath freely available on the web. It's a disgusting story of exploitation of the sick: Rath's main contribution to the world was the undermining of efforts to treat HIV-infected people in Africa.
pharyngula | April 3, 2009Youtube has restored the JREF account.
I'm going to have to disagree with Randi, though. Responding to a violation by automatically yanking the whole account is not appropriate and civilized behavior, especially when it can be resolved by an amicable communication. How about communicating first, and then yanking if someone is intransigent? The problem is that not everyone has the resources or the clout of the JREF, and there have been far too many cases of individuals getting shut down on entirely bogus complaints.
pharyngula | April 2, 2009The James Randi Educational Foundation givew out the Pigasus awards every year, and every single winner for 2008 deserves the high dishonor. Expelled won; so did Jenny McCarthy. It was a great year for woo, I think.
Speaking of Jenny McCarthy, she has another honor: the Jenny McCarthy Body Count site, which keeps track of the statistical casualties of McCarthy's insane campaign against vaccination.
pharyngula | March 21, 2009Even here in relatively enlightened Minnesota, we have loony paranormalists. John of Ghosts of Minnesota got to bring his skepticism along on one of those silly "ghost hunter" events in St Paul. Guess what? No ghosts.
pharyngula | March 19, 2009Who knows? Maybe they're right. They're planning a program for "Nightline" (which, I seem to recall, at least used to be a pretty good news program) which will probably get them some decent ratings.
They're going to have a debate on the existence of Satan.
Yeah, you heard that right…on a so-called news program. But it gets worse! They have 4 people coming on to yell at each other.
On the "Satan exists!" side, they have Pastor Mark Driscoll, head of a megachurch in Seattle, and Annie Lobert, former prostitute and founder of a group called Hookers for Jesus. Sensationalism is already rearing…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2009
A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny.
As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an ice cream stick, dating from the '00s. Its context is unusually unclear in the on-line info, but it appears to have been donated during an outreach project where kids were invited to give the museum stuff and speculate about how people in the future will one day interpret it.
I don't think curating,…
pharyngula | March 6, 2009Does only Orac get to give you a Friday dose of woo? Because I have to show you this amazing and all-too-common bit of criminal quackery.
God's Answer To Cancer:
Just kill it by using this health machine to flood your cells with "Chi" Energy!
You should read the long, rambling testimonial on that web page — it says absolutely nothing about how this gadget is supposed to "zap disease germs", but it does go through a laundry list of quack therapies, and heaps scorn on other quacks who sell gadgets that cure cancer.
I'm rather dazzled by the quantity of nonsense all on display there: it's got…
cmooney | March 5, 2009I realize I am a little bit late to this party. But recently (here, there, and everywhere) all of ScienceBlogs was abuzz about Sen. Tom Harkin's complaint that various complementary and alternative remedies are not being validated by the NIH office supposedly designed to do so--namely, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
I haven't written about alternative medicine in many years, though I used to follow it fairly closely. But here's what I don't understand. Whatever its suspicious origins, if NCCAM is now doing rigorous studies on the efficicacy of…
pharyngula | March 2, 2009Democratic Senator Tom Harkin is the pol who pushed a major "alternative medicine" proposal through congress that led to the formation of the NCCAM, a hotbed of government-sponsored quackery. He now regrets the effort, but for all the wrong reasons. It's hard to imagine a more damning statement that reveals an utter ignorance of how science should work than this one:
Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.
"One of the…
pharyngula | February 23, 2009I guess I'm out then. Except…this is the internet! We can all pretend to be Young Australian Skeptics, and no one will know any better!
"G'day, mate, doesn't Jess Origliasso have lovely bosoms?" (← my cunning imitation of a young Australian)
pharyngula | February 21, 2009It's been a while since we had a pointless poll…so here's a light snack to nibble on. We are asked, "The best evidence for an afterlife is from…", and the answer so far is:
Mediums
3% (20 votes)
Near-death experiences
26% (147 votes)
Reincarnation memories
15% (86 votes)
Ghosts
5% (29 votes)
EVP and similar
3% (19 votes)
Crisis apparitions
2% (14 votes)
All equal
11% (64 votes)
Other
7% (41 votes)
There is no evidence
27% (156 votes)
I don't get the popularity of the NDE "evidence". I had a friend once who told me that he had the most awesome experience on 'shrooms — he'd melted into a purple…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2009On Saturday night I attended a talk by bright young philology and religion studies comet Ola Wikander. In 2003, at age 22, he published a Swedish translation of the Baal cycle and other Canaanite mythological matter for the lay reader. In the five years since then, he's done the Enuma Elish, the Chaldaean oracles, an essay collection on ancient languages, a popular introduction to Indo-europan studies and a historical mystery novel co-written with his dad. His PhD thesis on the relationship between certain themes in Ugaritic and Old Testament mythology is due in 2011. In his spare time he…