Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | September 20, 2008We've had Jesus, Mary, and a variety of others make their holy presence known on blessed pieces of toast. Now it looks as though we have a new sacred image:
That's right, Sarah Palin has proven her most sacred presence by appearing on a piece of toast! What more evidence do you need that her being elected Vice President is ordained by God Himself and that God Himself will smite John McCain shortly after he takes office in order to usher in a Palin administration that will lead straight to The Rapture? And what did the owner of this most holy miracle do?
He's auctioning it on E-bay, of…
oracknows | September 14, 2008Heh.
"Please, ask this one about dinosaurs."
"I invite the media to grow a pair. And if you can't, I will lend you mine."
oracknows | August 18, 2008As the guy who sort of fell into being the keeper of the original Skeptics' Circle after its creator decided to give up blogging three years ago, I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention that I've been made aware of an initiative to set up a local version of the Circle based around trying to foster better communication among South African Science Bloggers being spearheaded by a recent host of the Skeptics Circle, Michael Meadon at Ionian Enchantment. Of course, it's an effort of which I heartily approve, and I hope my readers will check it out.
I would also hope, however, that some of…
oracknows | August 18, 2008Back in the spring, when gas prices shot up to well over $4 a gallon in many markets, a level from which they've fallen back somewhat over the last month or so, there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Never before in U.S. history had gasoline cost so much, and we were starting to get a taste of what our European friends have had to put up with for a very long time. But just a taste. After all, I remember from my trip to the U.K. last August that gas was around £1 per liter, which at the time translated to over $7.50 a gallon. For those who lived in isolated areas or had low incomes…
oracknows | August 17, 2008It's Sunday, which makes it a perfect time for a little blog housekeeping, especially about a feature that used to appear regularly on Fridays.
As you may recall, after the death of Echo I put Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus for a while because I just couldn't get myself into the appropriately light-hearted and silly frame of mind. Time has passed, and, although things will never be the same, a semblance of normalcy has (somewhat) returned. The loss still hurts--a lot--but my wife and I are slowly and reluctantly adapting. (We did finally share that third ear of corn, by the way; I don't…
oracknows | August 15, 2008I was called upon once before, and now I'm called upon again. Jenny McCarthy needs me:
From: "Jenny McCarthy" volunteer@generationrescue.org
Reply-to: volunteer@generationrescue.org
To: orac@scienceblogs.com
Date: Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:26 AM
Subject: News From Jenny McCarthy
Become a Rescue Angel Today!
Dear Orac,
It's Jenny!
Please join my team and help other families!
I'm about to go on tour to promote my new book, Mother Warriors, which hits the bookstores everywhere, September 23rd (38 days from now!). I will also be on all the major talk shows showing the world that autism is…
oracknows | August 14, 2008It's that time again. Once again, the best that the skeptical blogosphere has had to offer over the last couple of weeks is on display, this time over at City of Skeptics, where you can now find The 93rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. The dude fooled me though. With the time difference between here and Australia, this Circle appeared yesterday here in the States, before I remembered to do my usual last minute submission of a post to the Circle. Damn. I'll have to be more careful next time.
Go forth, read, and enjoy, nonetheless. That I have become superfluous to most meetings of the…
sa smith | August 8, 2008LOL! I have no idea what possessed them to do this-- But Skeptic Friends Network set up a fine poll:
Who would win in a free-for-all, anything-goes cage match?
oracknows | August 1, 2008For those out there who think it was "beneath" me to have responded to PhysioProf's rants about doctors and medical students last week, I present to you Steve Novella's take on the matter. Leave it to Steve to generalize the issue beyond my relatively narrow take on the matter. I also point out that Steve is nowhere near as--shall we say?--insolent as I am. If he's bugged enough to post a rant, it reassures me that I wasn't as off the mark as I feared I might have been.
One thing that came out in my post was an observation that skeptics, including those attending TAM 6, share in these…
oracknows | July 30, 2008
Sadly, I haven't seen any good pareidolia stories lately, you know, stories in which someone, usually Jesus, Mary, or the Pope (or sometimes Elvis, who, let's face it, is basically the same thing as Jesus, Mary, or the Pope), shows up as a seeming image on some sort of object or other. It can be a piece of sheet metal, a tree, under an expressway underpass, and even on a dog on his--well, best not to say.
Cats, of course, felt left out in this pareidolia arms race. Consequently, one cat decided it was time to take action, as CNN reports. That's right! It's the Jesus Cat (not to be confused…
oracknows | July 30, 2008With all the negativity around this blog lately, thanks to the continued moronic antics of the anti-vaccine contingent, which have irritated me more than they do usually, so much so that I can't recall a time since Jenny McCarthy's "Green Our Vaccine" anti-vaccination-fest nearly two months ago that they've been so flagrant in their lies, I thought it was time for some good news for a change. Fortunately, by way of the latest issue of The Lancet, some good news showed up in the form of a study. This study, reported late last week by the Antiretroviral Therapy Cohort Collaboration, a…
oracknows | July 19, 2008I suppose I had better get ready for another e-mail with a wounded, puppy-dog, plaintive complaint of "I'm not really anti-vaccine" in it. You see, that's what has happened in the past a couple of times after I wrote about that pediatrician to the children of the stars (in particular Jenny McCarthy's child) and ubiquitous go-to pediatrician whenever the media wants to hear some "skepticism" about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Jay Gordon. Clearly, it really, really bothers him when someone refers to him as being "anti-vaccine," but what other term fits him so well these days? After all, Dr.…
oracknows | July 16, 2008One of the great "myths" of the mercury militia, that movement that insists no matter what the actual scientific evidence shows that it absolutely, positively has to be mercury from vaccines that cause autism is the Myth of the Poor Excretor. In other words, the claim is that autistic children are somehow "poor excretors" of mercury, thus making the mercury that used to be in vaccines more toxic to them so that it gave them autism. One of the key pieces of evidence cited to counter this myth is a study by Ip et al (2004) that failed to find any correlation between hair and blood mercury…
oracknows | July 10, 2008It's been a week now since my wife and I learned that our beloved dog, whom we've had for eight years, had terminal cancer. At the time I was so sad and down that I just couldn't even imagine getting myself into the appropriately light-hearted frame of mind that I try to maintain. In the week since the shock of learning the diagnosis, I still can't achieve that frame of mind, although, as you may have noticed, I've been able to achieve the level of sarcastic snarkiness directed against pseudoscientists and antivaccinationists that my readers have come to expect. It's easy when you're angry…
sa smith | June 30, 2008While those of us here in the US can have a grand 'ol time loling over wackaloon HIV-Deniers, not everyone on this planet shares that luxury.
There are places on this planet where woo is in control. The person with the political power to give or withhold life saving anti-retrovirals, doesnt believe they work.
She believes in magic.
The health minister in South Africa, where 1 in 5 adults is infected with HIV-1, believes that garlic, beet root, and glittery pixie dust, will 'cure' HIV-1 infections.
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has been allowing (and potentially having a hand in actively covering…
oracknows | June 27, 2008I realize that I've been mighty hard on Jenny McCarthy these last several months. I've made fun of her for her idiocy, her arrogance of ignorance, and her antivaccination lunacy, not to mention her utter ignorance of science, and, yes, I've been rather vicious at times. However, she richly deserved it. Indeed, I argue that in fact my reaction was actually mild in comparison to the sheer lunacy that she regularly spews and the threat to public health her ignorant antivaccinationist activism represents.
But it's Friday, and that means it's fun day. That means it's time for an excursion into…
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
oracknows | June 25, 2008...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures.
Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…
oracknows | June 24, 2008If there's one thing I've learned in my years of delving into pseudoscience, quackery, and alternative medicine is that conspiracy theories are just like Lays potato chips; cranks can't eat just one. No, they have to stick their hand in the bag and pull out a huge, heaping handful and snarf it all down. Believers in "alternative medicine" quackery often also believe in New Age woo or other bizarre unscientific beliefs. Scratch a "9/11 Truther" and you'll often also find a Holocaust denier. One of my fellow ScienceBloggers, Mark Hoofnagle, has a great term for how cranks seem unable to be…
oracknows | June 19, 2008I just shook my head as I perused this item on Pharyngula earlier this morning. What else can you do? The irrationality and lunacy is beyond belief as I read a story about a mother named Colleen Leduc called into school because a report of sexual abuse was made about her autistic daughter Victoria:
The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter's teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they'd received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been…