Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | May 11, 2012It's been a while since I've done a bit of Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I actually kind of miss it. It's not that there hasn't been anything that hasn't been worthy of this "honor" for a while. On the other hand, there hasn't been anything in a while that combines just the right proportions of pure woo, utter ridiculousness, and pure pseudoscience to provide the perfect "inspiration" to start me on a roll. Oh, it's out there, but for some reason I've let myself become bogged down by topics that are just too serious. It's time to lighten up, at least for a little while.
So it was when I came…
oracknows | May 7, 2012It's no secret that over the years I've been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we've pointed out time and time again, the DSHEA is not about health, and it's certainly not about education. Indeed, perhaps my favorite description of this law comes from blog bud and all around awesome internist Dr. Peter Lipson, who refers to it as a "travesty of a mockery of a sham." Rather, it's about…
oracknows | May 6, 2012One of the most inaptly named groups I've ever seen is called Thinking Moms' Revolution (henceforth abbreviated as TMR). Given the reality of what TMR really is, the word "thinking" applied to TMR is, as they say, so wrong it's not even wrong. As for a "revolution," what TMR really represents is nothing revolutionary at all, unless you consider antivaccinationism, run-of-the-mill antiscience paranoia, and big pharma conspiracy theories to be "revolutionary." I don't know about you, but I do not. I've followed such activities for well over a decade now, and in light of that experience,…
sa smith | April 25, 2012Skeptics of Oz was great--
Sean Gillespie asked me if I had any requirements/requests to speak, I gave him my usual rider:
Sean didnt just fill a brandy glass with brown M&Ms... He filled huge Richard Dawkins Foundation coffee mug with brown M&Ms!
AWESOME!
Sean was just a fantastic organizer, overall. On several occasions things were not going *exactly* according to plan, and without missing a beat, Sean smoothly resolved the situation. Hes obviously a doer, not a talker, and I was impressed.
The speaker line-up obviously reflected his personality, as each and every speaker was…
sa smith | April 17, 2012As many of you know, I am a graduate student. Luckily, I am a graduate student in the biological sciences, which means that while I am going to school, I get a monthly stipend. Also luckily, I go to school in a place like Oklahoma, a state with a relatively low cost of living.
Its also lucky that I grew up relatively poor, with a mom who was REALLY GOOD at being poor. Thus I am REALLY GOOD at being poor too. I clip coupons, I shop sale flyers for groceries, I send in rebates, I get pretty much all of my toiletries and make-up at CVS for free/nearly free using their monopoly money store…
sa smith | April 6, 2012Skeptics of Oz:
FREE EVENT
April 21 - 22
Forum Theater
147 South Hillside Street, Wichita, KS 67211
Speaker lineup
Im going to be speaking at 2 pm on "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Viruses" - Sure some viruses are 'scary', but modern domesticated viruses are what make our vaccines work, treat our cancers, and are curing our genetic defects. Dont be so scared of viruses.
FreeOK2
$10 EVENT
June 23
Tulsa Convention Center - Assembly Hall
100 Civic Center, Tulsa, OK 74103
Speaker lineup
Im going to be speaking at 2.30 about something. Probably involving viruses. :P
The ever awesome…
oracknows | April 6, 2012Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, and it doesn't help that it's a holiday week plus a week I was traveling. So I dug way back into the archives, back to five years ago, for a little gem that reminds me that I really should write about evolution more. As the AACR meeting showed me this year, it's actually highly relevant to cancer research. Besides, if you haven't been reading at least five years, it's almost certainly new to you!
Well, well, well…
oracknows | April 5, 2012I have a soft spot for pareidolia, as regular readers know. It amuses me to no end to see Jesus and Mary popping up on freeway underpasses, tacos, toast, pieces of sheet metal, Lava Lamps, and the like. I thought that I had seen it all--until now:
His image has been seen on rocks, windows - even a tortilla as recently as Ash Wednesday.
Now, in the days leading up to Easter Sunday, it appears yet another strange image of Jesus has emerged.
Erika Scheldt, 24, claims she photographed a stingray with a glistening depiction of Christ on its back after it washed ashore a South Carolina beach on…
oracknows | March 15, 2012If there's one quack who both amuses and appalls me at the same time, it's Robert O. Young. You remember Robert O. Young, don't you? He's the guy who thinks that all disease is caused by excess acid. I've written about him quite a few times over the last several years. For instance, he amused me when he declared that cancers are all liquids, and this liquid is the "toxic acidic waste product of metabolism or energy consumption." In fact, he goes beyond that by saying that the tumor making up the cancer is the body's protective mechanism to encapsulate "spoiled" or "poisonous" cells. And what…
oracknows | March 1, 2012I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…
sa smith | February 22, 2012I am not a 'fan' of dietary sensationalism.
A can of Mountain Dew made with high fructose corn syrup once a week is not going to kill you.
Megadoses of various vitamins and minerals is not going to 'cure' you.
People who demonize or canonize food annoy me.
Funny enough, we have examples of both today, from 'pop'-news (har har) sources!
Raw milk is not a panacea. Its full of bacteria that make you sick, stupid!
Raw milk causes most illnesses from dairy, study finds
CDC: Raw milk to blame for most dairy-related disease outbreaks
Yes, those are actually anti-food-woo articles in USA TODAY and…
oracknows | February 13, 2012As I survey the lack of reason that infests--nay, permeates every fiber of--my country, sometimes I despair. Whether it's because of the freak fest that the race for the Republican nomination has become, with each candidate seemingly battling to prove he can bring home the crazier crazy than any of the others, or antiscience running rampant in the form of evolution rejectionism, antivaccine lunacy, and anthropogenic global warming (AGW( denialism, it's hard for skeptics and rationalists not to be depressed. Personally, however, I always looked to the north, to Canada, for a little more sense…
oracknows | February 7, 2012I was going to write about that article about massage therapy and the gene expression changes it causes, but when I went to look up the actual paper and found out, to my great disappointment, that our institution still doesn't have a subscription to the journal in which it was published. So, while I'm waiting for a friend to send me a copy, I can't help but do a quick and uncharacteristically short posts (for me) discussing a tidbits of information that I found quite heartening. Unfortunately, it involves a person every bit as vile as the antivaccine activists who so hate vaccines that they'…
oracknows | February 5, 2012It's amazing how fast six months can pass, isn't it? Well, almost six months, anyway, as it was five and a half months ago that I wrote about a particularly execrable example of quackademic medicine in the form of a study that actually looked at an "energy healing" modality known as "energy chelation" as a treatment for cancer chemotherapy-induced fatigue. Actually, the study design itself wasn't so bad, leaving aside the utter ludicrousness of the concept of "energy chelation." Rather, it was how the authors spun interpreted their results that set my head spinning. Surprisingly, a letter to…
oracknows | February 3, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a--shall we say?--realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) make. Back in the day (say, a few years ago), such CAM practitioners and apologists used to try very, very hard to argue that their modalities had actual efficacy, that they had actual, measurable effects that made them medicine rather than woo. Never mind that even back then they had been trying for at least a couple of decades to come up with preclinical and…
oracknows | January 29, 2012It's rare that I have much in the way of reluctance to leap into writing about a topic. Any regular reader of this blog should know this to be true, given the topics I regularly take on and how often my writing draws flak my way from various proponents of quackery and pseudoscience, in particular the antivaccine crowd. Still, sometimes a topic gives me pause, although, I must admit, the reason is that blogging about it will bring embarrassment to me. Usually, I can overcome this reluctance, as I have done in discussing, for example, how my alma mater, the university from which I obtained both…
oracknows | January 27, 2012In the more than a decade since I first discovered, to my shock, that there are actual people out there who not only don't believe that vaccines are safe despite overwhelming evidence that they are but in fact believe that they don't work and are dangerous, I thought I had seen every antivaccine argument out there. After all, I just wrote about the tactics and the tropes of the antivaccine movement in which I reviewed, well, the tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement. One of the favorite (and therefore most commonly used) tropes of the anti-vaccine movement is that vaccines are…
oracknows | January 25, 2012It's been nearly a year since I last discussed a most unusual malady. Part of the reason is that the opportunity to discuss it hasn't occurred recently; usually I need some spark or incident to "inspire" me to write about something, and there just hasn't been any Morgellons news that's caught my eye since then. However, another part of the reason, I must admit, is that writing about this particular condition almost always brings sufferers out of the woodwork, castigating me the way antivaccinationists like to castigate me for challenging the scientific basis of their preferred pseudoscience.…
oracknows | January 25, 2012Ha! I must admit, I've said probably about 50% of these things at one time or another, maybe more:
Hmmmm. Maybe I need to come up with new "shit."
Oh, and, by the way, I've been mentioned on PZ's blog more times than I can remember over the last seven years. So there! (Oh, wait. Does that mean PZ won't ever mention me again. Never mind. I take it back.)
oracknows | January 24, 2012If there's one thing about homeopaths, it's that they're indefatigable in their dedication to their unique brand of pseudoscience. They're also endlessly protean in their ability to induce their explanations for how homeopathy is supposed to "work" to evolve into endless forms not so beautiful. If it's not the claim that "like cures like" is some sort of immutable law of nature or that diluting a remedy somehow makes it stronger, it's pivoting to the claim that water has "memory." If it's not that, then homeopaths and homeopathy apologists invoke quantum entanglement that somehow works at the…