Skepticism/Critical Thinking
oracknows | August 25, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 25, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 21, 2006Things had been quiet. Too quiet. So quiet that Orac couldn't even enjoy his usual recreational pastime of analyzing limericks and jokes linguistically in order to try to understand what made them so amusing to the humans among whom he was forced to exist. Even probing the perturbations in the electromagnetic fields caused by the nearest black hole wouldn't let him shake this sense that something was going to happen.
Sense? Orac is a computer; how could he have a "sense" of anything? Certainly, computers don't usually have intuition or a "sense," but Orac was a much higher order of computer,…
oracknows | August 20, 2006Wallace Sampson tells us the real history of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Much of TCM, it turns out, isn't as "traditional" as it is sold as being.
oracknows | August 18, 2006Glutton for punishment that I am, all in the name of skepticism, critical thinking, and evidence-based medicine, I am sometimes wont to surf through the stranger parts of the Internet in search of truly amazing material for Your Friday Dose of Woo. Sometimes, I hit the jackpot, as I did a few weeks ago. Sometimes I don't. Regardless, I'm always amazed at the strangeness that I encounter. This week, I was pondering what topic to cover. Once again, there were so many possibilities that I was having a hard time making up my mind, even more so than usual. While contemplating this dilemma, I felt…
oracknows | August 17, 2006Yes, it's that time again, time for the biweekly carnival dedicated to highlighting actual critical thinking and skepticism directed against the general credulity that we usually find in the blogosphere: The Skeptics' Circle. This time around, our host is Interverbal, who is hosting Awards Night at the Circle:
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to the 41st Skeptic's Circle which is of course, Awards Night! We certainly have had many fine nominees in the last few weeks and I know that the excitement is mounting! But before we begin I would like to take a minute and…
oracknows | August 16, 2006Sadly, Starchild Abraham Cherrix is almost certainly doomed:
ACCOMAC, Virginia (AP) -- A 16-year-old cancer patient's legal fight ended in victory Wednesday when his family's attorneys and social services officials reached an agreement that would allow him to forgo chemotherapy.
At the start of what was scheduled to be a two-day hearing, Circuit Judge Glen A. Tyler announced that both sides had reached a consent decree, which Tyler approved.
Under the decree, Starchild Abraham Cherrix, who is battling Hodgkin's disease, will be treated by an oncologist of his choice who is board-certified in…
oracknows | August 15, 2006Mentioned in the comments on this post was this story:
MIAMI (Reuters) - The man who made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish may soon claim to do the same for unsightly bags and wrinkles.
Master illusionist David Copperfield says he has found the "Fountain of Youth" in the southern Bahamas, amid a cluster of four tiny islands he recently bought for $50 million (26.4 million pounds).
One of his islands in the Exuma chain, Musha Cay, is a private resort that rents for up to $300,000 a week and the other islands serve as buffers to keep prying eyes away from celebrity guests on the white…
oracknows | August 15, 2006Damn you PZ!
(Heh, I haven't gotten to say that since he shamed my profession by showing us an example of a certifiably loony young earth creationist physician running for Lt. Governor of South Carolina.)
This time around, I'm annoyed at PZ for pointing me in the direction of an article so absurd, so ridiculous, so full of postmodernistic appeals to other ways of knowing with respect to science that at first I thought that it had to be a parody of postmodernism in the form of, as PZ put it, suggesting that Foucault or Derrida should have as much value treating your cancer as evidence-based…
oracknows | August 14, 2006Skeptics! (And those who value critical thinking and science.)
Don't forget, the next edition of the Skeptics' Circle is scheduled to be posted this Thursday, August 17 at Interverbal. If you're a blogger interested in critical thinking and rationality and have written a post that would do The Amazing Randi proud that you'd like to expose to a wider audience, send it to Interverbal before Wednesday night. Instructions are here.
Then join us on Thursday for the usual assortment of the best skeptical blogging out there.
oracknows | August 13, 2006From an actual personal ad:
Gorgeous blonde model, tired of being patronized. Looking for sincere, understanding man. Must be willing to listen to stories of alien abduction.
(Source: The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said Calendar 2004)
Would anyone out there answer this ad?
oracknows | August 13, 2006Bora beat me to this one (which is what I get for not posting about it yesterday morning when I first saw the story), but some holy water is coming out of a tree in San Antonio, and why has not yet been solved:
SAN ANTONIO (Aug. 12) - Is it an artesian spring, a broken water pipe or an abandoned well? Lucille Pope's red oak tree has gurgled water for about three months, and experts can't seem to get to the root of the problem.
Pope, 65, has sought answers from the Texas Forest Service, the Edwards Aquifer Authority and nurseries. They have taken pictures and conducted studies, but none have…
oracknows | August 11, 2006It's time for a change of pace on Your Friday Dose of Woo.
I'm getting the feeling that you my readers may have gotten tired of the theme I've been doing the last three weeks. I can relate somewhat but I think it served a purpose (other than giving me free rein to indulge in a lot of bathroom humor, that is). First, I subjected you to a rather disgusting foray into the bowels (if you'll excuse the term) of colon cleansing, complete with links to some truly disgusting websites where people not only enthusiastically discuss their poop, but take pictures and post them on the web. Next, I moved…
oracknows | August 4, 2006After the last couple of weeks of Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was in a bind. You see, people were telling me that they really enjoyed the last couple of weeks, particularly last week. For some reason, they were amused by my discussion of various liver cleansing regimens, hot on the heals of having discussed colon cleansing regimens. (Must be the bathroom humor; it gets 'em every time.) Some of you were surprised at the real obsession that alties have with "purifying" their insides from various "poisons" or "toxins." As I discussed, some of these folks seem to believe that their insides are…
oracknows | August 3, 2006Today, the Skeptics' Circle turns 40. Well, not exactly, but it is the 40th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and this time around it's being held at Daylight Atheism. Once again, it's time for an antidote for the rampant credulity in the blogosphere, where dubious stories travel around the world far faster than skeptics can apply critical thinking skills to them, this time by entering the Daylight Atheism Museum of Superstition and Pseudoscience:
The doors of the Observatory are closed, and an eager crowd has gathered before them, milling about anxiously to await the unveiling of the newest…
oracknows | August 2, 2006I had seriously considered jumping all over this story when I first saw it early Monday morning. After all, look at the headline:
Jewish groups call for hate-crime probe on Mel Gibson
A more truly ominous thing to be calling for based on a drunken anti-Semitic tirade I have a hard time imagining. As you may remember from my previous discussions of, for example, the David Irving trial, I am very much against hate speech laws. What I don't recall if I've ever mentioned before is that I'm also very skeptical of hate crime laws. I can see using racial or religious bigotry as an aggravating…
oracknows | August 1, 2006I don't often do reader mailbag sorts of posts, but this question was so good that I thought it would be worth answering on the blog. Indeed, I almost thought of making this whole question another in my Friday Woo series, but decided that I wanted to answer it now.
Reader TB writes:
I've been following your blog for a few months now and love being both educated and entertained. The Friday Dose of Woo is great. While I have an idea of what you mean by woo it would be helpful to me and others visiting the page if you included a definition and perhaps the etymology.
My first temptation was to…
oracknows | July 31, 2006Hard as it is to believe, the time is fast approaching for yet another edition of the Skeptics' Circle. Even though it's set to appear this Thursday, August 3, fortunately there's still time for skeptical bloggers to get their entries in to Daylight Atheism, in order to "lay waste to superstition and credulity with the sharp edge of reason."
So get your best work submitted by Wednesday evening, and join us for an antidote to the credulity of the blogosphere.
oracknows | July 28, 2006I have to apologize for last week's Dose of Woo. No, I'm not apologizing for the subject matter (the obsession that reigns supreme among some alties with "cleansing" one's colon to "purge toxins" and achieve the super-regularity of several bowel movements a day). Rather, I'm sorry I didn't point out just how disgusting one of the links I included was, because among all the glowing testimonials for how great colon cleansers felt after having supposedly rid themselves of all that nasty fecal matter caked on the walls of their colons and achieved the Nirvana of many bowel movements a day (or, as…
oracknows | July 25, 2006Alright, now they've gone too far.
I thought I'd seen every specious and fallacious argument and example that creationists could throw out there to annoy scientists and be gobbled up by the credulous, but I was wrong. They're muscling in on my turf now! No, they're not making fallacious arguments about how chemotherapy resistance says nothing about evolution. Been there, done that, and I doubt I'd bother if I were to see yet another such post. No, they're not twist the fact that cancer is often due to mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressors regulating cell growth and differentiation as "…