Categories
Skepticism/critical thinking

The President of Steorn tries to explain the failure of Orbo

Last week, I wrote about the latest attempt to defy the laws of thermodynamics and make a free energy machine and how it went down in flames. Specifically, I wrote about Steorn, the Irish tech company that announced last August that it had developed technology to produce a free energy machine and more recently announced […]

Categories
Personal

On the creeping of the years and vision

Last week, I was forced to face the fact that I’m definitely, solidly, undeniably now middle-aged. Oh, I could delude myself before and say that I’m “mature” and even pretend to some extent that the slow deterioration that time causes biological organisms doesn’t apply to me. I could even dismiss the increasing creakiness in my […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: The Galileo Gambit writ large in The Observer

I just don’t understand it. I just don’t understand how anyone can take discredited antivaccination loon Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore. In particular, I don’t understand how any reputable newspaper can actually take him seriously anymore, given how thoroughly he and his “work” have been discredited. First came the news in late December that at the […]

Categories
History Medicine

Before paging systems…

Given that my electronic leash is always with me and that ubiquitous pagers and cell phones make doctors reachable 24 hours a day, it’s amazing to contemplate a time when a PA system at a hospital was considered new and high tech: I especially like the part touting the volume control, as if that were […]

Categories
Bioethics Computers and social media Medicine News of the Weird Quackery

Scariest spam I’ve ever received…

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently perused all the e-mails that Gmail had flagged as spam and to my dismay found a lot of legitimate e-mail, including mailing list e-mails and Movable Type e-mails notifying me of comments being caught up in the filter. However, I found something scarier than that. In fact, I found […]