Popular Culture
oracknows | September 18, 2009Somehow I don't think any cosmetics company today could get away with doing an experiment like this to prove how well its cold cream cleans the most dirt and makeup residue from a model's skin.
I'd also really love a copy of the "Atomic Test Booklet" that people could mail the company to request. You'd never guess from the title that it's about makeup. Also, I have to wonder. Some 50 or 60 years later:
Is the model in this commercial still alive?
How many skin cancers did she have removed from her face?
Inquiring minds wnat to know!
oracknows | September 14, 2009
I just learned that earlier today Patrick Swayze finally died of his pancreatic cancer after having survived far longer (20 months) than the average patient diagnosed with stage IV disease (less than 6 months). All I can say is: Rest in peace, Patrick. Not only did Swayze deal with his terminal illness with courage, humor, and panache, but he was awesome when he slapped down the quacks offering bogus cancer cures:
If anybody had that cure out there, like so many people swear they do, you'd be two things. You'd be very rich, and you'd be very famous. Otherwise, shut up.
The recent revelation…
oracknows | August 29, 2009I don't know why, but I'm tired, lazy, and in a bit of nostalgic frame of mind this morning, which makes coming across this ad dangerous:
Not only that, but Faygo is a Detroit company. At least it was when I was a kid. At least it's still bottled in Detroit. Ah, yes, Faygo red pop. Pure chemically goodness that no child under around 10 can resist--particularly because it would produce that lovely red pop mustache after drinking.
You may now thank me for having injected that unbelievably infectious (and annoying) jingle into the deepest recesses of your mind, where it will dwell for at least…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I've gotten into one of those runs where it seems that all I blog about is anti-vaccinationist loons, but, before trying once again to take a break from the madness, I had to go to the well one more time because this looks a bit frightening:
NBC News' Matt Lauer will take an unprecedented look at the emotional debate surrounding vaccines and the suggested link to autism on Sunday, August 30 at 7 p.m. ET with "Dose of Controversy." In the one-hour Dateline, Lauer speaks exclusively with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 medical study was the first in the world to suggest a…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Unfortunately, I saw this coming, although I had thought that it might be a few more months. Farrah Fawcett has lost her three year battle with anal cancer:
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.
Her death, at St. John's Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.
To an…
oracknows | June 1, 2009Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before.
It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…
oracknows | May 29, 2009I don't much like Oprah Winfrey.
I know, I know, it's a huge surprise to anyone who reads this blog, but there you go. Over the last four years, I've had numerous reasons to be unhappy with her, mainly because, as savvy a media celebrity and businesswoman as she is, she has about as close to no critical thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I've ever seen. Arguably there is no single person in the world with more influence pushing woo than Oprah. Indeed, she puts Prince Charles to shame, and Kevin Trudeau's is a mere ant compared to the juggernaught that is Oprah's media…
oracknows | May 8, 2009I know, I know it seems like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but some creature that I can't identify is having a fight somewhere in the neighborhood, freaking out my dog, and now I can't go back to sleep; so why not blog? In any case, I found out last week that Jenny McCarthy is on Twitter as JennyfromMTV.
Now, when I first saw it, I thought it had to be a spoof, someone pretending to be Jenny. No one could be as inane as to Tweet things like:
Im inside a hyperbaric chamber. This thing makes me feel amazing.
About to fly to jersey. Security stole my sugar free jelly out of my purse…
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 | April 28, 2009I know I've been ragging on The Huffington Post a lot lately. Trust me, I take no great pleasure in doing so. Indeed, more than anything else, it's been a major frustration for me. It's bad enough that HuffPo has been a hotbed of anti-vaccine propaganda and pseudoscience ever since its very inception, continuing through to today. Ditto Deepak Chopra, who has had a home there for at least three years now. But 2009 has been especially bad, adding proponents of distant healing, detox quackery, and, worst of all, the stylings of Kim Evans, a detox maven who thinks that antibiotics cause cancer.…
oracknows | April 22, 2009
After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped--really hoped--that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there's only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that pseudoscience turds dropped onto her blog by…
oracknows | April 7, 2009Note the followup post to this one, in which Orac admits error. You just have to read it, given how rarely Orac messes up when speculating...
Our cancer center has a large, open area interspersed with patient waiting areas, one of which is the clinic where I see patients, that I frequently must traverse to get to the elevators that will take me to my lab. In each patient area is a large-screen television to help patients pass the time during the inevitable wait to be seen by their doctors. As I happened to be wandering through that area on the way to my lab and office, I noticed on one of…
oracknows | April 6, 2009
Embedded video from CNN Video
Over the weekend, a lot of readers sent me links to Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's appearance on Larry King Live. (If you can't stand watching the embedded video of the segment, the transcript is here.) Fortunately for me (and, I hope, you), a "friend" of mine has written a comprehensive takedown of not just the nonsense spewed by Jenny and Jim, but of a new "study" released by Generation Rescue purporting to show that nations with low numbers of mandatory vaccines have low levels of autism. Of course, it shows nothing of the sort.
Find out why at Science-…
oracknows | April 1, 2009...but sadly, it's not. Jenny McCarthy has struck again.
Yesterday, given the release of Jenny McCarthy's new book espousing antivaccinationism and autism quackery and the attendant media blitz the antivaccine movement has organized to promote it, I predicted that a wave of stupid is about to fall upon our great nation.
Well, the stupid has landed. And how. An interview with Jenny has just been published on the TIME Magazine website in which she "surpasses" herself. In fact, so dense is the stupid emanating from what passes for a "brain" in that empty head of hers that words fail me.…
sb admin | March 31, 2009I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a…
omnibrain | March 31, 2009I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a…
oracknows | March 30, 2009Anyone who's read this blog for more than a month knows my dismal opinion of Indigo woo girl, ex-Playboy Playmate, and gross-out comedienne Jenny McCarthy, who since having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder has transformed herself from D-list celebrity to A-list, where the "A" stands for "antivaccine." Her combination of obnoxiousness, the arrogance of ignorance, and a dogged determination to stoke the embers of the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism have endangered public health in this country in the year and a half since she published her first autism book…
oracknows | March 27, 2009Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there appeared to be an occasional voice for vaccines on HuffPo, but they never lasted. After all, RFK, Jr.'s been there nearly four years now and David Kirby almost as long, while pro-vaccine commentary pops up briefly, gets shouted down by…
sb admin | March 20, 2009Funny!
From Jimmy Fallon:
Last night, Michael Showalter (from Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State, your dreams) made a cameo on the show. He and our head writer, A.D. Miles, played a couple of Columbia grad students on spring break. Things got pretty scandalous!
Really funny... but totally off base. It's more like Girls Gone Wild... I promise!
-via everyday scientist-
omnibrain | March 20, 2009Funny!
From Jimmy Fallon:
Last night, Michael Showalter (from Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State, your dreams) made a cameo on the show. He and our head writer, A.D. Miles, played a couple of Columbia grad students on spring break. Things got pretty scandalous!
Really funny... but totally off base. It's more like Girls Gone Wild... I promise!
-via everyday scientist-