Categories
Friday Woo Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secrets of Jesus and immortality can be yours–for a price

As hard as it is to believe, we’re up to the third week of Your Friday Dose of Woo. And, at week 3, I’m still having the same problem: too many targets of woo, so many so that they overwhelmed my tired brain not unlike Lionel Milgrom’s quantum homeopathy becoming quantumly entangled with my neurons. […]

Categories
Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Still more evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism

The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren’t going to like this, not one bit. What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link […]

Categories
Anti-Semitism Holocaust denial

Prussian Blue, NAACP, what’s the difference?

Hoo boy. Via The Poorman Institute and an anti-Holocaust denial mailing list that I belong to, I’ve learned of an analogy so breathtakingly bad that I have a hard time not blogging about it, mainly because it relates to a topic that I’m very interested in (Holocaust denial) and a related topic that I’ve written […]

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Friday Woo Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It’s not just homeopathy, it’s quantum homeopathy!

While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of […]

Categories
Science

Open peer review: an idea whose time has come?

Over at the Nature blogs, they’re soliciting comments and opinions about open peer review: The goal of any change in the peer review system must be to improve the quality of review, where quality is determined by two distinct functions: filtering manuscripts for publication in a given journal; and making constructive suggestions on how the […]