Talking to the public about cell phones, safety, and cancer risks – Boing Boing.
|
|||||
|
Thanks to Neil Gaiman for posting this video with an explanation of the Psi Wheel parlor trick. What a cool trick this is!
Below is an embed of an excellent video introduction to critical thinking. Brian dunning has released this video under Creative Commons. It’s free to distribute, so you can download the movie here, where you can even get an ISO file, if you want to burn it to a DVD that will play in your home system. Niiiice. I’d mail you the movie, but it’s over a gig. In summary, Dunning takes us through a list of red flags that should be considered whenever listening to any claim. He even subtly pokes fun at himself throughout the video by exhibiting one or two of the red flags in the shooting of the movie. What I appreciate about the film is that Dunning isn’t ranting about woo-woo destroying the earth. He doesn’t pick pet coprolites and smash them to bits. His presentation is thoughtful, and level-headed, and I never felt embarrassed for him. The best part, though, is when his wife rolls over and glares at him. Watch it. It’s a lol moment. I swear.
Slaintè, Q Here are some interesting facts, presented at the recent Amazing Meeting in Vegas, about some of the origins of the current fears about vaccines.
In which I rant. I just stumbled across a link to an article by one Frank Lipman, MD in which he explains why he does not recommend his patients get the upcoming swine flu vaccine. So, I thought I’d read that and see what he had to say. And in part his arguments were understandable, even if I couldn’t agree with them. Statements like: “At this stage, for the most part the swine flu seems benign.”; “We don’t know if the vaccine will be effective.”; and “We don’t know if the vaccine is safe.” are rather weak as arguments against immunization go. The one argument that really worked against him was “Vaccine manufacturers have been insulated from liability by the government.”, stating “By shielding the manufacturers from any responsibility for any harm caused, the pharmaceutical firms have no financial incentive to make the safest product.” Economically, that’s just bullshit. Pharmaceuticals are not Sweeny Todd who can keep a business thriving even though their customers all drop dead. Companies have just as much monetary incentive to make safe vaccines whether they are liable for ill effects or not, simply because bad press is as bad (or worse) than a law suit. Lipman then goes on to list some recommendations for avoiding the flu without a vaccine. These seemed like reasonable recommendations, until I got to the last one, tucked away at the bottom like a red-headed stepchild. “Keep homeopathic Oscillococcinum on hand”. Yep. He played the homeopathy card, making all his previous advice suspect. Homeopathy, while it may have had a plausible hypothesis 200 years ago, has been supplanted with new information. We now know how disease works, we understand germs. Yet people trot out what, in the light of modern wisdom, sounds like technoabble from ST:TNG! How can we, as a society, in good conscience not require medical practitioners to also be good scientists? Because we lack, in general, an understanding of basic scientific principles and the large body of wisdom we have collected, I suppose. Because we have come to mistrust science and scientists again. The pendulum returns. Pfaugh! I can only hope the pendulum’s oscillation is damped, so it doesn’t swing back too far.
Yours in annoyance, Q Hey look! Here’s an illustrated explanation of how homeopathy works. It all makes sense, now. It can be a bit hard to read, because it is rampant with typos and dropped words within the illustrations, but then, photo editors don’t have notoriously good spell-checkers, do they? Q In this article, Dr. Harriet Hall* takes a look at some common misconceptions and outright lies about swine flu and vaccines in general. Well worth a look. * Dr Harriet Hall, MD is a retired family physician and Air Force Colonel living in Puyallup, Washington. She writes about alternative medicine, pseudoscience, quackery, and critical thinking. She is a contributing editor to both Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer, an advisor to the Quackwatch website, and an editor of ScienceBasedMedicine.org, where she writes an article every Tuesday. She recently published Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon. Her website is www.skepdoc.info. I like dry British humor. This video isn’t the best example of it, but it’s pretty funny, nonetheless. via a BoingBoing post from Cory Doctorow: “”Homeopathic A&E,” a sketch from the British comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look invites us to imagine an emergency room (A&E is British for Accidents and Emergencies, the UK equivalent of ER), as run by newage woo woos. That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E (via White Coat Underground)” |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Quentin Hudspeth's Journal - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
DriveThruRPG
Hudspeth Games