Skepticism
pharyngula | November 16, 2011The infamous Kensington Runestone is kept in a museum just a few miles up the road from me. It's a carved rock that was dug up on a farm in the 19th century by a Swedish farmer, and purports to tell the tale in runes of a doomed Viking expedition that had come down from Hudson's Bay to meet a tragic end at the hands of the Minnesota natives. More likely, it's a cunning artifact produced by the farmer, Olof Öhman. It's an unlikely bit of pseudo-history, and I'd love to see an unassailable disproof of its source.
Martin Rundkvist is reporting that Öhman's signature has been found on the stone.…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2011The Kensington runestone of Minnesota is a rather obvious 19th century fake. But in a recent paper in Saga och Sed 2010, Mats G. Larsson shows something less obvious: the hidden signature of the stone's carver, who also was its finder.
Olof Ãhman came from Forsa in Hälsingland, central Sweden. He claimed to have found the stone among the roots of an aspen tree he had felled with his son. Now Larsson points to the unique rune for à on the stone, which is an O with a small N inside. This looks a lot like O-n, an abbreviation of the man's surname. And as it turns out, Ãhman came from a…
pharyngula | October 24, 2011Aww, the students of Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists have warmed the frigid, friable cockles of my black heart. They're having a protest of homeopathy on the Twin Cities campus this Friday! They're hosting a lecture debunking that nonsense, and are planning to poison themselves with homeopathic dilutions.
Take that, Center for Spirituality and Healing! We all see right through you.
Homeopathy is renowned for both its popularity and the overwhelmingly incorrect pseudoscientific tenets it purports. In the UK, the growing 10/23 protest has called for the end of government support of…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2011Swedish academic archaeology has a few hard-core post-modernists. Their attitude to the discipline tends to be meta-scholarly (they study people relating to the past rather than the remains of the past), radically knowledge-relativist (they reject rationalist science with its aim to gain cumulative objective knowledge about what the world is like) and influenced by Continental philosophy, sociology and "critical theory". My attitude to these colleagues is such that if I were the one who decided who gets research funding and teaching jobs, they would all be doing fieldwork on highway projects…
gregladen | October 5, 2011Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2011
I visited the Gothenburg Book Fair for the first time because of my new book. The Academy of Letters needed people to put on the Researcher's Square stage, and conveniently one of their staff had just published a book with them - me. When the local organiser saw me she did a double take because I was way younger than she had come to expect from the Academy.
The book fair, as I understand it, exists to let publishers and writers communicate with each other and their customers, and also to entertain and inform these customers. The main convention hall is packed with display booths and throngs…
pharyngula | September 23, 2011Tonight, at 8pm ET, the cast of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe will be bracing themselves with caffeine for their overwhelming plan to saturate the world with a non-stop 24 hour live program. I think it's a kind of anti-homeopathy: they'll be delivering a super-concentrated dose of an effective agent all at once to their audience. Tune in and listen, especially since it would be so sad if they were exerting themselves so magnificently to a tiny group of people.
I'm going to try and catch bits and pieces of it. Unfortunately, I'm not insane, so I will be getting more sleep than the SGU…
pharyngula | September 16, 2011Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he's antagonized the agriculture lobby. On a recent show, he claimed that apple juice was loaded with deadly arsenic — a claim he supported by running quick&dirty chemical tests on fruit juices, getting crude estimates of total arsenic, and then going on the air to horrify parents with the thought that they were poisoning their children.
One problem: his tests weren't measuring what he claimed. The FDA got word of the fear-mongering he was doing, and sent him a warning letter.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA…
pharyngula | September 14, 2011There was another Republican debate (I skipped it; there are limits to the horrors I can endure), and apparently, many people think Michele Bachmann trumped Rick Perry by jumping on his 'liberal' endorsement of using the HPV vaccine to prevent cancers in women. Bachmann ranted about the federal government forcing innocent little girls to get mental retardation injections, and the teabaggers loved it. They loved it almost as much as they loved Rick Perry's record of executions.
Orac rips her apart. It's great fun, and informative, too.
As I've pointed out time and time again, Gardasil is…
pharyngula | August 30, 2011My wife and I have three kids, and while that pregnancy and childbirth thing is way, way back in the past, we did have some strong opinions after our experience. Midwives were wonderful, we had only the best and most positive experiences with them, and they were the indispensable supporters we were glad to have there. The doctors…meh. They didn't seem to be involved much, and it was rather strange when they'd come by after all the work was done and sign the birth certificate, as if they were taking credit. But my wife had relatively uneventful, uncomplicated deliveries (the second was a bit…
pharyngula | August 30, 2011Jobs is stepping down from his leadership role at Apple, as has been all over the news for the last several days, and I had to say that he's someone I've really admired. Not just as a fully committed member of the Cult of Mac, but because I've really liked his style.
Here's a video of Jobs addressing a rather insulting question…and answering it amazingly well.
He doesn't get defensive, he doesn't defend the details, he just steps back and explains what it means to have the whole picture in his head.
And then his management style was legendarily combative and critical. Jonah Lehrer has an…
pharyngula | August 26, 2011The pair of psychic frauds, James van Praagh and Allison DuBois, who were featured on Nightline, have been called out by the JREF:
The JREF's Million Dollar Challenge Director, Banachek, also featured in the episode, said, "We're issuing a challenge to these fakers: for once, show that you can get this supposedly supernatural knowledge without cheating. If one of you can demonstrate your 'psychic' abilities on randomly chosen strangers—not celebrities—under mutually-agreed conditions, without relying on known cold-reading techniques such as fishing around with vague questions, and without…
pharyngula | August 21, 2011David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate buy unsurprising history of racism. It's wild and crazy stuff, and it's been sidling under the radar for a while.
What initially drew me to DC's site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of…
pharyngula | August 19, 2011Larry Moran is proudly Canadian, so this must have hurt a little bit: Canadian Blood Services is advertising with a load of codswallop about your blood type. This is complete nonsense:
Type A: So, you're an A. You already know that having type A blood suggests that you are reliable, a team player and may benefit from a vegetarian diet*. Did you also know that anthropologists believe that type A blood originated in Asia or the middle east between 25,000 and 15,000 BC?
Type B: So, you're a B. You already know that having type B blood suggests that you are independent, a self-starter and…
pharyngula | August 7, 2011Hey, look, James Randi has seen an integral number of orbits around the sun! Everyone congratulate him today.
Also note that I actually have a t-shirt with his face on it.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | August 3, 2011Another reason to get rid of the silly monarchy: Prince Charles is a quack.
Professor Edzard Ernst criticised the heir to the throne for lending his support to homeopathic remedies and for promoting the Duchy Herbals detox tincture.
In a briefing with reporters at the Science Media Centre in London, Ernst warned that "snake oil salesmen are ubiquitous and dangerous", and named the prince as "one of the most outspoken proponents of homeopathy".
He later told the Guardian: "There are no official criteria for a snake oil salesman, but if they existed, I think Charles would fulfil them."…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2011Here's a guest entry from Charm Quark, one of the bloggers at Skepchick Sweden. When I read it there I asked her to give me a translation for Aard.
I have alopecia, an autoimmune disease in which hair follicles go into a resting phase, causing hair loss. The form I've got, alopecia areata, causes hair to fall out in in patches. The disease continuously regresses and relapses, and I have gone trough several bouts since the age of seven. Luckily, the disease is completely harmless and I have no other symptoms, but you appear to be very ill indeed when you have no hair/eyebrows/eyelashes. People…
gregladen | July 23, 2011Just an idea ... not entirely work safe ... below the fold.
Imagine that Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Barbara Drescher, Stephanie Zvan, All the Skepchicks, Me, all the other bloggers, and most of the commmenters on our blogs discussing Rebeccapocalypse all worked for the same big-giant company and this entire discussion happened at work. Imagine what the HR (Human Resources) department would be required to do, would want to do, would want to avoid. Imagine how they would handle the current discussion, and what they might do to avoid future difficulties like this…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2011
"Pyramidology", says Wikipedia, "is a term used, sometimes disparagingly, to refer to various pseudoscientific speculations regarding pyramids, most often the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt." The encyclopedia goes on to explain that there are several kinds of pyramidology that do not necessarily correspond, one of which is the metrological kind, where the dimensions of these great edifices are studied. In the archaeological trade, we sometimes (uncharitably) refer to writings of this kind as "pyramidiocy".
In late March I got a call from Lars Lison Almkvist who has…
pharyngula | July 16, 2011OK, I'm feeling guilty: I'm off at The Amaz!ng Meeting enjoying myself, and totally neglecting the blog readers who aren't lucky enough to be here too. And since I've been getting lots of requests to put the full content of my talk online, I figured…yeah, sure, I can do that. So here you go, all of the slides and what I said about them, mostly, below the fold. Criticize and argue and do your usual.
TAM is a tough crowd for me: it's a meeting where the emphasis is always on the space sciences, especially this year with a theme that just crows about astronomy, and I'm a biologist. It doesn't…