Skepticism
pharyngula | March 23, 2006
I'm staring at that thing, and all I see is some cracks in a flood-damaged wall.
The church was flooded by Hurricane Katrina; causing some drywall in the building to buckle into an image that church members believe is an image of Jesus on the cross.
Touching it causes miracles, they say—the blind see (or, at least, the myopic think their vision is a little better), kidneys start working (maybe), but the most important miracle of all is…
Church leaders say it really doesn't matter if you believe any of the testimonials about people being healed. But what is a fact, is that more and more…
tsmith | March 17, 2006 Is Crohn's disease caused by Mycobacterium avium pseudotuberculosis (MAP)?
In an article out yesterday, Australian Dr. Thomas Borody claims yes, and that the medical community is simply too "stuck in their ways" to admit it. I explain below why I think this is incorrect--or at least, premature.
I mentioned several times in the various AIDS threads and in the prostate cancer/virus thread that it's often difficult to determine an infectious cause of a so-called "chronic" disease. Not only is there generally a time lag between infection and disease development, but it may be that only…
tsmith | March 16, 2006Over at Immunoblogging, Joseph has a multi-post series on the evolution of the immune system that I've been meaning to highlight, since obviously the claim that there's no research done in this area plays a large part in IDists' claims. So, some background reading on a few of the issues:
Part OnePart TwoPart Three
and a bonus (if a bit older) post on Toll-like receptors here, along with a newer overview here.
Additionally, at the new Good Math, Bad Math, Mark discusses Dembski's use of the NFL (No Free Lunch, not the sporting league) theorem and creationist use of probability. Check 'em…
tsmith | March 16, 2006Following up a bit on my hobbit post from last week, SciAm Observations has a new post (part one of what I assume will be at least a series of two!), describing a bit of the back-n-forth at a recent American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting in Alaska. You can also listen to the author (Kate Wong) in a SciAm podcast here, describing the background on H. floresiensis and the conference.
pharyngula | March 16, 2006Check out these compendia of blogginess and comment on them, or anything else that strikes your fancy.
Skeptics' Circle
I and the Bird
Carnival of the Liberals
pharyngula | March 16, 2006Nah, I thought this has got to be a joke:
The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.
But no…there is actually a DARPA call for proposals.
DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as…
tsmith | March 9, 2006Guess I should've held off an extra day on this post. Yesterday was blog against sexism day. Lots of excellent posts linked there if you're looking to spend several hours getting depressed, then pissed off, then ready to go out and kick some as over the state of affairs and the treatment of women in the 21st century. Locally, Janet shares some of her experiences.
In other "can you believe this crap is still happening in 2006?" news, Orac notes that the offices of the Holocaust History Project were attacked by arsonists (more details here). This latest outrage comes after an extended…
tsmith | March 8, 2006One final word on all the HIV stuff for now then I'm taking a break to get in some more interesting subject matter. I've started responding to this comment, but it's getting lengthy so I'm going to start it as a new post below the fold.
Matt,
Regarding being a "left vs. right" issue, who's characterized them as such? Indeed, I mentioned in an interview here that AIDS denial runs the political spectrum. And just because it's a "prevailing paradigm" doesn't mean it's incorrect, or that the left should for some reason rally against it. Aren't progressives supposed to value logic and…
pharyngula | March 7, 2006Please forgive me: you've probably all forgotten Fred Hutchison, the incredibly delusional right-wing paragon of hubris, but I've got to bring him up again. He wrote one of the more painful diatribes against evolution on Alan Keyes "Renew America" site (yeah, that Alan Keyes; you know we're deep in crazytown already) which I ripped up a while back. This is a guy who gets everything wrong, and wraps it all up in the most astonishingly pretentious, arrogant tone. Hutchison himself is a CPA. He thinks he has demonstrated that Darwin and Einstein were all wrong.
That's right. He thinks he is a…
pharyngula | March 2, 2006Never mind me, I'm running around with classes and meetings today…here are a few quick links.
The 29th Skeptics' Circle.
The Tildification of Norwegianity.
The Terry Writing Challenge—there's real money involved.
An in-depth interview with PZ Myers.
I and the Bird.
Intelligent Design subverts itself.
An example of the research promise of ID.
Don't trust the NIH.
The Carnival of the Liberals.
tsmith | March 2, 2006Well, Orac got dragged into it. While I only briefly mentioned RFK Jr.'s nonsense here, Orac's done a more thorough rebuttal here, complete with lots of links to his older posts on thimerosal/autism. And like PZ, political lines don't stop me from pointing out mistakes either.
tsmith | March 1, 2006Wall of Distrust in Nigeria Bird Flu Fight
The peasant farm hands were deeply suspicious as they watched the police marksmen trying to control bird flu kill 168 ostriches the farm had reared over eight years. Days later, when the 160 workers were invited for tests to see if they, too, were infected, nearly everyone fled.
"Most of them feared they would end up like the ostriches, to be shot dead for having the virus," said one of the more enlightened of the Sambawa Farms workers, Ibrahim Hassan, who turned up promptly for medical checks.
"Nearly everyone fled." This is pretty much a worst-…
pharyngula | February 27, 2006I've followed some of the doings of the Scientology cult, and it wasn't that long ago that criticizing the Religion That Elron Built would win you a lifetime supply of harrassment; they have long memories. Back in our naive youth, my brother and I made the mistake of taking one of their "tests" when we were on a stroll in Seattle, and that earned my brother years of obnoxious junk mail offering him their path to perfection.
So I was a little surprised that Rolling Stone is willing to wrestle with the brutal beast and has published an article by Janet Reitman on the religion.
It's not bad. It'…
tsmith | February 24, 2006A lot on my plate this morning, but if you've not seen these already from yesterday, check out Respectful Insolence, where Orac has a post on using chemical castration as a treatment for autism. Just when you think things couldn't get any crazier...
PZ also has a post drawing your attention to a statement in this week's Science magazine: Medicine needs evolution.
The citation of "Evolution in Action" as Science's 2005 breakthrough of the year confirms that evolution is the vibrant foundation for all biology. Its contributions to understanding infectious disease and genetics are widely…
tsmith | February 23, 2006As promised, a discussion on the paper, Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in northern California: results from a ten-year study.
First, let's backtrack a bit and see what's already been said, lest I repeat myself. The little summary below can also catch anyone up who's not up to wading through 250-odd comments. Those who've already done so can skip the quoted parts and scroll down...
[Note: I've uploaded a .pdf of the Padian paper for anyone to access Here.]
Hank Barnes said here about the paper:
1. It was the longest and largest epidemiological study of…
tsmith | February 10, 2006 Chris has been excoriating Tom Bethell (author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science") over on The Intersection and elsewhere (see, for example, here, here, and several posts here). However, since he's not yet done a takedown on Bethell's chaper on AIDS (titled "African AIDS: a Political Epidemic"), he suggested I have a go at it. Man, I knew the book would be bad, but it reaches a whole new level of terrible.
Bethell's central thesis will be familiar to anyone who's read the anti-HIV arguments by Peter Duesberg and others. As the chapter title suggests, Bethell claims that…
pharyngula | February 6, 2006Where do you think this peculiar practice is going down?
OK, let me get this straight. A bunch of muttonheads are burying idols in their yards thinking it will magically get someone to buy their house, the Strib runs it as a straight story, yet the right wing somehow claims that the mainstream media is hostile to religion? Unbelievable.
Yeah, nice middle-class neighborhoods in suburban Minnesota.
Then there was the guy at the booth behind me at the coffeeshop bragging about how his "system" at the slots in his weekly trips to the casino was paying off, and he was investing all of his…
tsmith | February 6, 2006In the comments to my interview with DarkSyde, another parent and I discussed "alternative" medicine and some of the autism literature. Today over on Respectful Insolence, Orac has an excellent post on how using data from the VAERS database isn't the best way to accurately gauge adverse effects.
A bit of background on VAERS: this is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. If you or your child has a bad reaction to a vaccine--a serious illness after receiving it, an unexpected side effect, etc.--they're the folks you contact to report it. These adverse effects are then analyzed to see…
pharyngula | February 3, 2006If you can only read one thing today, make it Skeptico's answers to Why did the chicken cross the road?
It's dead-on funny—read the hypothetical answers from all the skeptics and loons like John Edward and O'Reilly and Icke and many others, which are just perfect—I'm stealing Behe's answer!
A chicken crossing a road has:
eyes
legs
a road
the other side
If any one of those irreducibly complex parts is missing the chicken will be unable to cross the road, so if it looks, walks (across roads) and clucks like a chicken, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, it's an intelligently…
pharyngula | January 27, 2006Jody Wheeler is at James Randi's The Amazing Meeting, and is blogging the event. If you aren't there, now you can find out what you're missing.