To quote Michael Shermer, I “investigate paranormal claims, pseudoscience and fringe groups, and cults and claims of all kinds between science and pseudoscience, and non-science, and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old nonsense.”
1. Cancer Boy is now cancer-free – As Carl Sagan once wrote, science delivers the goods. Many months ago, I blogged about the continuing saga of Daniel Hauser, the boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma whose crazy anti-medical mother kidnapped to keep him from being poisoned by his court-ordered chemotherapy, but who later returned home with him. Unfortunately, while the boy was receiving real medical care, he was also being given bogus “alternative” medicine” products, which pretty much guarantees that the medicine denialists won’t give science the credit its due. But what’s most important is that Daniel Hauser is cancer-free and the chemotherapy didn’t poison him to death like the medicine deniers predicted.
2. An economic collapse didn’t occur today, so the world won’t end on Wednesday! – Cause I know you were all worried that it would. Ever since September, I’d been blogging about the constantly moving doomsday goalpost of one really delusional website. First, it predicted the world would end on September 21st. Then that turned into October 21st. Then October 23rd. But now whoever’s running it is wising up and adding conditions. Yesterday, the prediction was that if an economic collapse occured on November 9th, The Rapture would come on November 11th. Well, the Dow Jones went up over 200 points today, so I guess we’re all safe. Phew! That was a close one.
Habibollah Latifi, Ehsan (Esma’il) Fattahian and Sherko Moarefi have all been sentenced to death for “enmity against God” in unconnected cases over the last two years. They are believed to be on death row in a prison in Sanandaj, the provincial capital of Kordestan.
4. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry definitively and demonstrably defeat the Catholic Church in debate – At the start of the debate, 678 people in the audience thought that the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world while 1102 disagreed and 346 were undecided. But by the end, only 268 thought the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world while 1876 disagreed with only 34 left undecided.
The secret to a happy marriage for men is choosing a wife who is smarter and at least five years younger than you, say UK experts.
And in related news, money can be used to buy goods and services.
2. Anti-vaccinationists like Skepacabra’s recent commenter J.B. Handley prove nothing is off limits when attacking critics – Several days ago Amy Wallace wrote an in depth piece on Dr. Paul Offit and the history of anti-vaccination movement in Wired magazine. In response, JB Handley wrote an essay using rape imagery to describe Wallace’s relationship with her interview subject, Offit (which he then quickly removed and replaced with Jonestown Massacre imagery by the time I read it on Age of Autism). Anti-vaccinationists have since threatened and intimidated Wallace as well as calling her a “cunt,” because that’s what classy folk they are. David J Kroll also defends Wallace here.
1. The Deity’s Nightmare – The other day the Atheist Foundation of Australia and Global Atheist Convention websites suffered a Distributed Denial of Service attack. In retaliation, they’ve called on all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to unite in a “global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God.”
Due out in autumn 2011, What is a Rainbow, Really? will take on topics including who the first man and first woman were, why there are seasons, what the sun is, how old the world is and why there are so many animals, first answering the questions with myth and legend, and then with “lucid scientific explanations”.
In a statement EFCC, which has previously relied on raiding cyber cafes and complaints from the public to clampdown on the crime, said it has now adopted smart technology working in conjunction with Microsoft, to track down fraudulent emails.
When operating at full capacity, within the next six months, the scheme, dubbed “eagle claw” should be able to forewarn around a quarter of million potential victims.
2. Health insurance companies declare past rape a pre-existing condition - After 2 men slipped her a knockout drug, Christina Turner feared she’d been raped. As a precaution, her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine, which turns out to have made her virtually uninsurable. Several months later, she lost her health insurance. But although she never developed HIV, when considering whether or not to cover her, health insurance companies decided the HIV medication raised too many health questions and told her to come back in 3 years. Where’s the outrage, Sarah Palin?
. . .in 1658, Archbishop Ussher determined that the world was created precisely at 9am, 23 October, 4004 BC, making today the official creation day, and the earth 6012 years old.
4. FDA and FTC go after Andrew Weil – Weil is one of the most notorious “alternative” “medicine” conmen working today. Now the FDA and FTC have sent him a warning demanding he stop selling bogus herbal flu remedies containing astragalus on his website. And of course leading Quack Profiteer Mark Adams is very grumpy about this no doubt because he suspects he might be next.
The outbreak was traced to a child who went to Britain – where the illness is more common because of lower levels of vaccination – and then attended a summer camp upstate, apparently infecting dozens of kids.
1. Actimel yogurt commercial banned – The Advertising Standards Authority in the UK banned the commercial for false advertising. They claimed the product supported children’s natural defenses against disease. . .which it doesn’t!
Monkeys are freaked out by almost-but-not-quite-real depictions of themselves. That tendency is well documented in humans, but has never before been seen in another species.
To test their preference, researchers showed macaque monkeys real pictures, digital caricatures and realistic reconstructions of other monkey faces. To the latter, the macaques repeatedly averted their eyes.
3. Chimpanzees Help On Request But Not Voluntarily -
The evolution of altruism has long puzzled researchers and has mainly been explained previously from ultimate perspectives—”I will help you now because I expect there to be some long-term benefit to me”. However, a new study by researchers at the Primate Research Institute (PRI) and the Wildlife Research Center (WRC) of Kyoto University shows that chimpanzees altruistically help conspecifics, even in the absence of direct personal gain or immediate reciprocation, although the chimpanzees were much more likely to help each other upon request than voluntarily.
4. Simon Singh updates us on his legal battle with the British Chiropractic Association:
1. First, Oz says presents his baseless conjecture that autism is truly increasing. This is something that nobody on Earth actually knows. In fact, more and more evidence is starting to suggest that autism is not showing a true increase. So either Oz possesses god-like knowledge the rest of us aren’t privy to or he’s flat-out lying.
3. No Oz, dietary supplements have never proven effective at all in treating autism, only behaviorist treatments. And dairy in moderation is good for you. I think it speaks volumes that the embed of this video on the Age of Autism site is surrounded by ads for their dietary supplement masters:
So we will. Click HERE. Visit our sponsors ARI, TACA, SafeMinds, National Autism Association, and Generation Rescue for more information.
And below the video, it reads:
The treatment category is sponsored by Lee Silsby, the leader in quality compounded medications for autism.
No, no conflict of interest here. That’s ridiculous.
Did I Fall Asleep? Neural Reductionism and Dollhouse – I now occasionally write for The Gotham Skeptic, the official blog of the New York City Skeptics. And today I found a blog from one of my fellow Gotham Skeptics that I found interesting because it explores scientific questions within science fiction and particularly because the TV series Dollhouse is returning this week and Dr. Horrible’s recent interrupting of the Emmy’s reminded me of how much I enjoy the work of Joss Whedon.
I’ve already criticized Bill Maher for his religulous views on medicine, particularly after he was awarded the Richard Dawkins Award for allegedly promoting both atheism AND good science (yup, promoting science is in the official rules). But I’d hoped that his growing involvement with such intellectual luminaries like Richard Dawkins, who’s even done a television special on anti-medical quackery, might lead to someone setting Maher straight on how medical science works and why believing in so-called “alternative” “medicine” is no less religulous than believing in an invisible sky daddy. Though I doubted it.
Well, it seems Maher continues to believe in utter nonsense when it comes to medical science:
And now it’s CVS’ turn to pay up $2.8 million in a settlement over their version AirShield. This is ridiculous! If the FTC can’t get a bogus medical product off the shelves completely, what’s the point? They got to know that the amounts these companies are forced to pay are nothing but petty cash compared to the profits made by these products and that these products will continue to be sold in the cold remedy aisles with only slight changes to the packaging. These products need to be stopped once and for all.
1. Federal Trade Commission bringing the hammer down on Kevin Trudeau – I’ve talked about Trudeau before. I call refer to him as a professional murderer, which, while seeming hyperbolic, is close to being true. His bogus health advice gets people killed. And the government’s had a hell of a time trying to put the man out of business permanently by squeezing a lousy few million dollars out of him even though that’s only a drop in the bucket given how much he’s made off of getting people killed. As an example of his amazing health advice, he promotes a diet plan, which he claims is easy, that involves eating no more than 500 calories a day. He calls it a cure “they don’t want you to know.” I call it the Auschwitz Diet.
2. New creationist film premieres at Sam Noble Museum of Natural History – The film is called Darwin’s Dilemma, and it’s another creationist mockumentary. Its focus is to attack the Cambrian fossil record. Of course it will no doubt be a whole load of crap but the real story here is that a reputable science museum agreed to host a showing of the film. Hey, maybe PZ can get expelled from another creationist film screening.
3. Darwin film fails to get distribution in U.S. until a bidding war started – First, it was looking like the filmCreation, about Darwin wasn’t going to get distribution in the U.S. because evolution is controversial in the U.S. as opposed to the rest of the civilized world. But the latest update on this story suggests that there’s a bidding war for the film’s distribution rights. There was also a brief myth going around that that Mel Gibson’s distribution company (the same company that distributed The Passion of the Christ) bankrolled the film. This turned out to be not true.
1. Cancer Boy is now cancer-free – As Carl Sagan once wrote, science delivers the goods. Many months ago, I blogged about the continuing saga of Daniel Hauser, the boy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma whose crazy anti-medical mother kidnapped to keep him from being poisoned by his court-ordered chemotherapy, but who later returned home with him. Unfortunately, while the boy was receiving real medical care, he was also being given bogus “alternative” medicine” products, which pretty much guarantees that the medicine denialists won’t give science the credit its due. But what’s most important is that Daniel Hauser is cancer-free and the chemotherapy didn’t poison him to death like the medicine deniers predicted.
2. An economic collapse didn’t occur today, so the world won’t end on Wednesday! – Cause I know you were all worried that it would. Ever since September, I’d been blogging about the constantly moving doomsday goalpost of one really delusional website. First, it predicted the world would end on September 21st. Then that turned into October 21st. Then October 23rd. But now whoever’s running it is wising up and adding conditions. Yesterday, the prediction was that if an economic collapse occured on November 9th, The Rapture would come on November 11th. Well, the Dow Jones went up over 200 points today, so I guess we’re all safe. Phew! That was a close one.
3. Iran to execute 3 men for being atheists? – 3 Iranians are charged with apostasy, or leaving Islam:
4. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry definitively and demonstrably defeat the Catholic Church in debate – At the start of the debate, 678 people in the audience thought that the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world while 1102 disagreed and 346 were undecided. But by the end, only 268 thought the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world while 1876 disagreed with only 34 left undecided.
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Posted by mjr256 
Posted by mjr256 
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