Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | May 6, 2009A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…
oracknows | May 1, 2009Ever since I started this little vanity bit known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, lo, these nearly three years ago, when I introduced the waiting blogosphere to the woo-tastic quantum homeopathic stylings of Lionel Milgrom, I've occasionally wondered if I had started out with too much woo. I mean, Milgrom is a really hard act to follow, so densely does he blend together the most amazing hard core homeopathic woo combined with quantum pseudoscientific posturings that put Deepak Chopra to shame, all tied together with the most awesomely dense, yet ultimately meaningless, equations that look like…
oracknows | April 29, 2009
Well, the weird news just keeps coming in from my hometown. This time around, consider the case of Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell is a tiny Chihuahua weighing all of five pounds. This poor little creature met nature in a most unfortunate way on Saturday, when some rather heavy storms swept through southeast Michigan. It turns out that storms and Chihuahuas don't mix very well (as you might expect), and poor Tinker Bell discovered that in a most harsh way:
Tinkerbelle was with her owners, Lavern and Dorothy Utley of Rochester, when a powerful storm swept into the Dixie Land Flea Market in…
oracknows | April 28, 2009Because of the confusion over last week's Skeptics' Circle, I've been totally remiss in doing what I normally do, namely plugging the next host and urging all skeptical bloggers to start getting ready their best skeptical stuff for the Circle, which is next scheduled for May 7.
So next week the host is Ferret's Cage, whose contact information is here. So get cracking! You have only a little more than a week!
Also help him out because he's dealing with an infiltration of woo in his sister's school.
oracknows | April 26, 2009The short answer is: "Heck if I know." I heard from the host on the 19th, and he said it might be a day or two late. However, we're now out beyond three days, and still no Skeptics' Circle. True, there's a minimalist post with some of the links, but no Circle.
I have an e-mail in, but no response yet. I'm sorry for the delay and the confusion. I'll let you know what's going on when I know.
oracknows | April 24, 2009I'm tired of blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense again. Don't get me wrong, I had an enormous amount of fun writing my commentary on Fire Marshal Bill's attempt to explain vaccine/autism pseudoscience. It was a hoot, if I do say so myself, but it depresses me that writing such posts is so necessary so often. Fortunately, it's Friday, and you know what that means (well, at least some of the time, anyway). That's right, it's time for some woo.
This time around, it's not just any woo. In fact, it's woo that relates to my area of expertise. As you may recall, I do a lot of breast cancer surgery…
oracknows | April 16, 2009For skeptics, TV news in my hometown sucks.
Actually, it sucks for just about anyone with two brain cells to rub together, but it's especially painful for skeptics and scientists to watch. On one station last year, there was the most credulous report I've ever seen about--of all things--orbs! It was presented as though these "orbs" in photos were actually ghosts or spirit presences, rather than the reflections from bits of dust in the air or on the camera lens that we know them to be. As I pointed out at the time, not even die-hard ghostbusters take orbs seriously anymore. They're so...1970s…
oracknows | April 12, 2009Better late than never, I guess. Martin of Lay Scientist had some technical difficulties and was a bit late in delivering his Skeptics' Circle, the 109th Meeting of the Skeptics Circle. Suffice it to say that it features some...unexpected characters.
Next up two weeks hence is Waffle. Contact information is here. Bloggers, get your best skeptical work ready!
oracknows | April 10, 2009
If there's one concept that seems to cross many "disciplines" of woo (a.k.a. "alternative medicine," a.k.a. "complementary and alternative medicine," a.k.a. CAM) is the concept of some sort of "life force" or "life energy." It is true that life does depend upon the utilization of energy, specifically chemical energy. That's what biologists and biochemists mean when they talk about life energy, but that's not what woo-meisters mean by "life energy." Rather, what woo-meisters mean by "life energy" can best be described as some sort of magical mystery energy field that means the difference…
oracknows | April 9, 2009Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I pointed out that, in addition to its usual stable of antivaccine pseudoscience and the quantum woo of Deepak Chopra, that The Huffington Post had now delved even beyond what I thought it would by publishing the nonsensical, credulous blather about distant healing? In the post Srinivasan Pillay, self-billed certified master coach, psychiatrist, brain imaging researcher and speaker, demonstrating a profound inability to spot some very glaring shortcomings in a scientific study, actually cited Dean Radin's research as "evidence" for distant healing. Truly,…
oracknows | April 4, 2009One of the most common refrains from advocates of pseudoscientific and paranormal ideas is that critics are "close-minded," that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is not "close-mindedness" that (usually) leads to the rejection of dubious claims. Rather, it is the knowledge that, for many of such claims to be true, huge swaths of our current scientific understanding would have to be in error to such an extent that a major paradigm shift in various…
oracknows | April 3, 2009Let me say right up front that I'm not entirely sure that the victim--I mean target; no, I mean subject--of this week's little excursion into the deepest darkest depths of woo is not a parody. That's the beauty of it. I've never heard of it before, but a little Googling brought me evidence that it may not be a parody, that the guy purveying it may actually believe it. I'll leave you to judge for yourself, or, if you've heard of this guy before, to chime in and let me know the deal. I'll also point out that parts of this website are not entirely safe for work. Actually, a couple of the pages…
oracknows | March 25, 2009I've at times been asked where I come up with my blogging material. Since I've become fairly popular, one major source has been readers sending me stories. I often don't have time to respond, and most of them don't interest me enough to be motivated to write, but there are enough that do that I consider my readers to be a major source of material. Then there are medical and surgical journals, as well as sources like EurekaAlert! Then there are my numerous RSS feeds that I peruse on a daily or every-other-day basis in the evening or early in the morning. Then, of course, there are the various…
oracknows | March 21, 2009Normally, I'm not much into LOLCats, but this one is so spot-on for this blog:
All too true, alas.
oracknows | March 20, 2009Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play.
You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…
oracknows | March 15, 2009I have to admit that I've always had a soft spot for pareidolia, that phenomenon wherein people see things that aren't there because human brains are wired for pattern recognition. As a child (and even as an adult), I loved lazily looking up at the clouds and envisioning animals, objects, and people in the clouds. That's why very early on in the history of this blog I started posting about pareidolia, starting with an appearance of the Virgin Mary in Chicago under a freeway underpass for the Kennedy Expressway near where I used to live in the late 1990s, with my most recent installment having…
oracknows | March 12, 2009Well, here's a new way of hosting a Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. What we have this time is the combination of a minimalist presentation of the relevant links with a maximalist bit of podcast blather from Theo Clark of The Skeptics' Field Guide. Go check it out!
Next up is PodBlack Cat on March 26. Start firing up your skeptical keyboards and be sure to give her the material she needs for yet another awesome carnival!
In the meantime, we're always--and I do mean always--on the lookout for hosts, both those who've hosted before and newbie skeptical bloggers who want their chance to make a…
oracknows | March 6, 2009I have two brief observations to make before I launch into my latest bit of insolence. First off, it figures that, whenever I go away to a meeting, there's simply an embarrassment of blogging riches. People have been sending me stuff to which, even if I were at home and having a slow week, I could probably never get. Good stuff. Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I'm now forced either to try to blog about them when I finally get home, which might as well be months later in blog-time, or let them go by uncommented upon, which hurts Orac's mighty ego. Oh, well. My next observation is that I feel…
oracknows | February 27, 2009It's a little late, but better late than never! Skeptics Circle #106 finally landed last night over at Disillusioned Words. Jeff Stingerstein lays it all out in a "just the facts, m'am" manner that demonstrates that, for all the fantastically creative and wild formats that prior hosts have used to present the last fortnight's skepticism, sometimes the straightforward is just as satisfying--especially given the quality of this edition's entries.
Next up in two weeks will be Skeptics' Field Guide. Start revving up your skeptical keyboards and supply Jeff and Theo with the material they need to…
oracknows | February 27, 2009Let's try this again.
Two days ago, I tried to get away from blogging about antivaccinationists. I even succeeded for one day. Unfortunately, that was all, because J.B. Handley and his crew of antivaccine loons cooked up a really big, really deceptive, and really desperate gambit that just couldn't go unremarked upon. Thus was I sucked back in again. Even worse, this all came hot on the heels of a very sad time in the lives of my wife and myself. I needed something to lift my spirits.
And nothing lifts one's spirits quite like fine, grade-A woo.
Or perhaps I need my bio-photons analyzed with…