Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | July 12, 2007Apparently comic Tim Slagle thinks that my discussion of his comedy routine was horribly, horribly humorless and unfair to him and that I "set him up." I just happen to be at work right now (it's lunchtime, and I have a brief break between cases) and consequently don't have time to address it until much later today, but I will link to Tim and let you see what you think until I get around to dealing with it. Stop by Tim's blog and tell him hi for me. While you're there, you might want to take a gander at this piece by him. The discussion of chemistry and thermodynamics there has to be read to…
oracknows | July 12, 2007It looks as though I've been tagged by Drug Monkey, who apparently thinks that I might have something worth saying about the state of the NIH and its peer review system, about which the NIH is presently soliciting comments, as pointed out to me by Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship. Why Drugmonkey might think this to be the case, I have no idea, but presumably it has something to do with some previous posts that I've made about the NIH, how biomedical research is funded in this country, and the disconnect between vision and reality at the highest level of the NIH. Although I used…
oracknows | July 11, 2007I thought I'd take a bit of a break for a change of pace. At the risk of falling flat on my face, I'm going to wander far afield from the usual medical and biological topics of this blog into an area that I rarely say much about. The reason is an incident that happened nearly two weeks ago when I was in Chicago. Lately, I've been becoming increasingly interested in how bad scientific arguments make it into the collective consciousness and stay there. While it's true that there are such things as astroturf campaigns and paid flaks whose job it is to get such messages in the medium and keep…
oracknows | July 10, 2007I'm devastated.
Truly and totally devastated emotionally and intellectually. Indeed, I don't know how I'll ever be able to recover, how I'll ever be able to live down the shame and go on with my career.
What could bring me to this point, you ask? I'll tell you. Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon and dualist Dr.Michael Egnor thinks I'm "unprofessional."
Worse, he does it while agreeing with Pat Sullivan's article in which Pat asserts that "Darwinism" has what he calls a "marketing problem," in essence seemingly saying that, because he can't understand "Darwinism" but can understand…
oracknows | July 9, 2007Last week, I wrote about the latest attempt to defy the laws of thermodynamics and make a free energy machine and how it went down in flames. Specifically, I wrote about Steorn, the Irish tech company that announced last August that it had developed technology to produce a free energy machine and more recently announced that it was going to demonstrate its amazing technology at the Kinetica Museum in London on July 4. Not surprisingly, Steorn ended up postponing the demonstration, first for a day, and then indefinitely.
Here's the President of Steorn Sean McCarthy trying to explain what went…
oracknows | July 6, 2007Thanks to a commenter going by the 'nym of djm, I found in a comment yet another hilarious example of how credulity towards pseudoscience of one form often goes hand-in-hand with other forms of pseudoscience. It looks as though the "intelligent design" creationists are down with Steorn's claimed free energy machine as "evidence" against materialism:
Steorn's findings totally undermine the basic premise of materialism, simply by demonstrating a confirmed physical effect that materialists predict cannot happen. These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated that the principles of…
oracknows | July 6, 2007It was a rough day yesterday. I spent a long time in the O.R. It was one of those days that I couldn't figure out what happened. The number of operations that I had to do should have allowed me to finish operating by around 2 PM, leaving me time to do other things that needed to get done. But between delays in getting a patient back from nuclear medicine, long turnover times between cases, and a case that took me nearly two hours longer than it should have, it was well after 5 PM by the time I was done--and I still had a bunch of work to do. I'm not complaining; these things happen and there…
oracknows | July 5, 2007Here we go again.
After falling for such claims enough times, you'd think that journalists would go back to the physics textbooks and read up on the basics, you know, like the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. You'd especially think that a techy website like Engadget would know better than to hype this stuff without a bit more of the appropriate level of skepticism.
You'd be wrong.
Here we go, after months of doubt over claims of a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy," Steorn will be putting their wares on display for public scrutiny in London. A physics defying perpetual machine,…
oracknows | July 3, 2007One thing that's become obvious to me over the last few years that I've been engaged in dealing with various forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories is that people who are prone to credulity to one form of pseudoscience, the paranormal, or other crankery tend to be prone to credulity towards multiple forms of crankery. For example, Phillip Johnson, one of the "luminaries" of the "intelligent design" creationism movement is also a full-blown HIV denialist who doesn't accept the science that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDS. Another example is Dr. Lorraine Day,…
oracknows | July 2, 2007About a month ago, I did a facetious throwaway piece about "homeopathic enchantments" being used by one of my favorite comic characters (who, alas, no longer has his own comic series), namely Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. Given that it was not intended as anything other than a lark, I was rather surprised when it generated a long discussion thread fueled by a homeopath named Dana Ullman, who showed up in the comments and argued with me and several of my best regular commenters. He kept the discussion thread going far longer than the average thread on this blog, provoking annoyance on…
oracknows | July 1, 2007Speaking of skepticism and critical thinking, recall that I mentioned earlier today that I had been interviewed for The Skeptics' Guide for the Universe. Despite branching out into a different medium, rest assured that I haven't forgotten about my primary responsibility, blogging. Nor have I forgotten that the latest edition of the blog carnival that's been entrusted to me, The Skeptics' Circle, is fast approaching. In fact, it's less than four days away and due to land on Thursday, July 5!
That means that you--yes, you! (if you're a blogger, that is)--have only three days to submit your best…
oracknows | July 1, 2007I often joke that Orac is my alter-ego, regardless of how effective or ineffective the pseudonym is at protecting my "true" identity. I also, with some justification, joke that I'm a lot less interesting in person than I am on the blog as a means of inoculating people that I meet who know me only through my blog from serious disappointment at the man behind the curtain. This has led to a reluctance on my part to accept requests to be interviewed--until now.
When Steve Novella, President of the New England Skeptics' Society and the driving force behind my favorite skeptical podcast The…
oracknows | June 29, 2007Here's something I've wanted to try for a while now. It'll either be wildly successful and popular, along the lines of You Might Be an Altie If..., or it'll be an utter failure, sinking into oblivion. Which one it ends up being will be up to you, O faithful readers of Your Friday Dose of Woo. The beauty of blogging, of course, is that if it fails next week I can pretend that it never happened and move on to (hopefully) greener pastures, my utter humiliation at publishing crap quickly forgotten, except, of course, living forever on the web.There are two other reasons that today is the perfect…
oracknows | June 28, 2007Pity poor Deepak Chopra.
I've abused him on this blog many times, even coining a word ("Choprawoo") for the silliness that emanates from his keyboard every time he posts his inanity to the Huffington Post or his own IntentBlog. I even wrote the only response ever needed to Choprawoo. Of course, he richly deserves the abuse heaped upon him, given his idiotic meanderings in which he misrepresents evolution and neuroscience willy-nilly in his attempt to argue that we are infused by the "consciousness of the universe." It also doesn't help that he's a credulous woo-meister who sells non-evidence-…
oracknows | June 27, 2007You may have noticed that I haven't commented much on Michael Behe's recent book, The Edge of Evolution, other than to bemoan its presence in the Evolution section of the University of Chicago Barnes & Noble. I have, however, read with some amusement some of the reviews. The most recent is one by--who else?--Richard Dawkins in the New York Times. Because it's behind the Times Select pay wall, I'll just give you a couple of the best quotes. First, he dismisses Behe's most famous book, Darwin's Black Box:
In "Darwin's Black Box," Behe simply asserted without justification that particular…
oracknows | June 27, 2007J. B. Handley never ceases to amaze me how much he is willing to torture me with his abuses of science, never mind his childish attempts to annoy me by cybersquatting domain names that he thinks I want. So there I was, all set to blog about a rather amusing homeopath that I've come across, when what comes to my attention, whether I want it to or not?
Yes, hot on the heels of its reinvention of itself from being all about mercury all the time to a kinder, gentler entity making an intentionally much more difficult to test and falsify hypothesis that, oh, by the way, lots of other "environmental…
oracknows | June 25, 2007Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…
oracknows | June 23, 2007After attending the ASCO Meeting in Chicago over two weeks ago, I can't believe I forgot to post about this. More than two years ago, back in my favorite city (Chicago), a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared. It appeared, oddly enough, as such visions are wont to do, in a rather mundane spot. Specifically, it appeared under a freeway overpass where W. Fullerton Avenue passes under the Kennedy Expressway.
As I was heading to the airport on my way out of the city, traffic happened to be better than I had expected, leaving me with some time. I decided, therefore, to head back to the area and see…
oracknows | June 22, 2007In my rigid, Western, scientific way of thinking, things generally have a beginning, a middle, and and end, the arrow of time marching relentlessly onward. However, it occurs to me that this is the very last edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo of its first year. Last June, when I started this, almost on a whim, I had no way of knowing how it would take on such a life of its own. Indeed, I fear that all the woo to which I subject myself on a weekly basis may be having an effect. I'm ceasing to see life as a straight line any more; such rigid thinking no longer suits me.
Instead, like the more…
oracknows | June 21, 2007Has it really been two years?
Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. Along with David Kirby's Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, which had been published a couple of months earlier, RFK, Jr. arguably did more than almost anyone else besides the aforementioned David Kirby to…