Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | August 7, 2007The third season of Doctor Who is over. There's nothing on the horizon for many months (such as the return of Doctor Who or Torchwood) that's interesting enough to me coming out of the U.K. that I'd go to the trouble of firing up BitTorrent to check it out, rather than wait until it somehow finds its way to these shores.
Until now.
Yes, it's Richard Dawkins' long-promised investigation of alternative medicine and New Age practitioners, entitled The Enemies of Reason:
Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
oracknows | August 4, 2007In case you haven't seen it yet...
Sad.
I can't believe Behe is still using the mousetrap analogy for "irreducible complexity" when the very concept has been so thoroughly debunked over the last several years.
oracknows | August 4, 2007I really, really wish the Discovery Institute would stop putting out idiocy like this:
We have blogged in the past about the growing numbers of doctors who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution to explain the complexity of life.
Those numbers are continuing to grow, and conesquently doctors are beginning to organize themselves and reach out to others who hold similar positions. Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI) has for sometime had a website at www.doctorsdoubtingdarwin.com. Recently they have begun using the site to organize and promote conferences about Darwinian…
oracknows | August 3, 2007Michael Behe, that Don Quixote of "intelligent design" who never tires of tilting at windmills of "fatal flaws" in evolutionary theory that he think he's identified, did quite a bit of tilting at HIV in his book.
Watch his blathering taken down by a pre-graduate student named Abbie. It's so good it's been republished at Panda's Thumb.
Enjoy.
oracknows | August 2, 2007This week, the 66th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle just so happens to coincide with the 66th Meeting of the International Society of Skeptics; so they decided to hold a joint meeting. This week's host, Mark Hoofnagle, has the abstract book all lined up for you to peruse. Excellent stuff. If only real scientific meetings could be like this.
Next time around, the Skeptics' Circle will land at The Bronze Blog, whose Doggerel series is a fantastic repository of rebuttals to common--well--doggerel that the credulous like to repeat in defense of their woo.
And, as always, if you're interested in…
oracknows | August 2, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines again (and that topic seems to me less and less rancorous these days, not because antivaccination "activists" have gotten any less loony but because the smoking cranks, at least the ones showing up on my blog these days, threaten to make antivaccinationists seem low key by comparison), it turns out that one of the premiere journals of medical research, Nature Medicine, has weighed in on the topic. If you want any more evidence that the antivaccination movement is becoming more and more like the radical animal rights movement in its willingness to try to…
oracknows | July 30, 2007I've been a bit remiss about reporting an update on the Tripoli Six, six foreign health care workers who were falsely accused of intentionally infecting children at a hospital in Libya with HIV, leading to their being convicted and sentenced to death. The evidence against them was crap, and scientific analyses showed that the strain of HIV in question had been in the hospital before the arrival of the Tripoli Six. After a lot of international wrangling between Bulgaria, the EU, and Libya involving diplomacy and more than a bit of money, the Tripoli Six are free. The arrangement involved the…
oracknows | July 29, 2007
(LOL Oscar from Lauren.)
While I expressed skepticism the other day regarding the media reports that a cat named Oscar could predict which patients at the nursing home in which he resides were within hours of death, some of you believed it, some even going so far as to speculate that not only could Oscar detect impending death but that he hangs out by the dying because he wants a snack.
But none have gone so far as Mighty Ponygirl in speculating about Oscar's true motivation.
Personally, I like my explanation that it's just confirmation bias better. It's less--shall we say?--disturbing. I…
oracknows | July 27, 2007After all this annoyance I've had lately about homeopaths doing surgery in Arizona (not to mention the licensing of quackery there), I can't forget that the blog carnival bequeathed to me, The Skeptics' Circle, is fast approaching. This week, the host will be none other than fellow ScienceBlogger Dr. denialism blog. Since the Circle is in the family this time around, so to speak, don't forget to send MarkH your best skeptical blogging and then join him (and me) for the carnival next Thursday, August 2.
And, as always, if you're a skeptical blogger aspiring to be the next James Randi and think…
oracknows | July 27, 2007
This sort of thing makes one wonder if the personification of Death should in fact be a cat, although, oddly enough, not a black cat:
Oscar the rescue cat is not simply a welcome feline companion at the Steere nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a new report in a medical journal he has a remarkable, though morbid talent - predicting when patients will die.
When the two-year-old grey and white cat curls up next to an elderly resident, staff now realise, this means they are likely to die in the next few hours.
Such is Oscar's apparent accuracy - 25 consecutive cases so far…
oracknows | July 27, 2007Time is important. Our life is measured in it, and there's no way to reverse it. How we use our allotted time on this planet is, of course, the most important question that anyone ever faces. But how to measure time? It all seems so obvious, doesn't it? You have years, which are divided into 365 days with a leap year every four years to make up for the fact that a year isn't exactly 365 days. You're good to go, at least for as long a period of time as anyone could expect. That's all you could expect from any calendar, right?
Wrong.
If you're a woo-meister, you know that a calendar could do so…
oracknows | July 20, 2007After over a year of delving into the world of woo, I had been starting to think that my ability to be surprised had disappeared. I mean, just think about it. After dealing with things like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, the Healing Broom, Healing Sounds, and, of course, colon cleansing and liver flushing, I thought I had seen it all. However, another thing I've learned is that the most amusing woo is not necessarily the battiest. Sure the DNA activation guy and Lionel Milgrom can put out some woo that is so unbelievably out there, so bizarre, so amazing over the top that rational,…
oracknows | July 19, 2007The 65th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been posted by Steve Novella over at his Neurologica Blog:
The room was filled with that odd combination of excitement, interest and restlessness that accompanies children forced to walk through a museum.
"Quiet down," said Ms. Trueblood for the hundredth time. As experienced as she was a gaggle of nine-year-olds was always a challenge. "Raise your hand if you have a question, otherwise I want quiet, and pay attention to Mr. Lucious."
Join Steve and the rest for a healthy sampling of the best skeptical blogging of the last fortnight.
Next up is…
oracknows | July 19, 2007Little did I know when I posted my first article on the evidence supporting health hazards due to secondhand smoke that it would end up dominating the comments of this blog for three full days and lead me to a site that's so full of pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and just plain B.S. that it is worthy of the title of the Whale.to of the tobacco nuts. Even less did I expect that the crankfest would spread to fellow SBer Mark's denialism blog as well. The sheer vitriol that some of these "smoking rights" advocates direct at any suggestion that SHS might be harmful, quite frankly, took me…
oracknows | July 17, 2007
This time, it's from Colorado, and it's the King:
Rock collector LaDell Alexander, 60, has found a stone she swears has the face of the rock king Elvis Presley on it and has taken it home and plans to sell it on eBay in August, near the 30th anniversary of his death.
Alexander said "people are calling me the Elvis Rock Lady. Seven out of 10 people see Elvis (on the rock)."
Hmmm. I wonder what the other 3 out of 10 people see on the rock.
So is this a hunka hunka burnin' rock?
In all seriousness, though, if Ms. Alexander can use the Elvis Rock to separate some credulous fool from their money…
oracknows | July 17, 2007Not surprisingly, in response to my article on the health risks of secondhand smoke yesterday, the "skeptics' came out in force, although I must admit that even I hadn't expected quite as large an influx as what appeared. Perhaps I'll prepare a general response in the near future (and, no, I didn't take the Surgeon General's report as the be-all and end-all, but it did make a compelling case for SHS causing increasing the risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at least, and it also served as a convenient aggregator of the many, many studies out there). In the meantime one commenter…
oracknows | July 14, 2007The last couple of days have been a bit surreal, haven't they?
After all, how often does this box of blinking lights get into a blog altercation with a Libertarian comic over global warming? Actually, it was a commentary on bad reasoning, but global warming happened to be the topic. In the aftermath of my referring you, my readers, to comic Tim Slagle's blog piece "rebutting" me and to another piece by him in which he used some--shall we say?--creative chemistry and thermodynamics to support a political argument, I'm not sure if I should feel guilty or not. This guilt exists mainly because I…
oracknows | July 13, 2007After all this hot air contributing to global warming over, well, global warming, I can't forget that the blog carnival bequeathed to me, The Skeptics' Circle, is fast approaching. This week, the host will be none other than neurologist and skeptic Dr. Steve Novella, who also happens to be the host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and President of the New England Skeptical Society. Don't forget to send him your best skeptical blogging by Wednesday, July 18 at whatever time he sets as the deadline. (Hint, hint, Steve: I don't see a call for submissions with a deadline yet.)
And,…
oracknows | July 13, 2007Cool cool water.
Yes, that's what I really needed earlier this week, as the temperature almost hit 100° F in my neck of the woods. There's nothing like it after walking through the sauna-like conditions and losing my precious bodily fluids in the form of sweat. After all, I wouldn't want to get dehydrated, would I? And, heck, it's quite possible to die of dehydration. If you believe those nasty "conventional" medical authorities, it takes a healthy person with healthy kidneys a few days, give or take, to become sufficiently dehydrated to endanger his life, and medical science tells us that…