I saw an article from National Geographic entitled “How much do you really know about science?” The article contains a quiz to test your science knowledge. However, the author of this article makes a typically fatal mistake: mistaking facts about the natural world obtained through the scientific process with the […]
Science
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I saw on Facebook today some repeats of a CBS article from Atlanta entitled “Study: 70 Percent Of Americans On Prescription Drugs” [1]. The news article cites this actual scientific article from the Mayo Clinic’s “Mayo Clinic Proceedings,” entitled “Age and Sex Patterns of Drug Prescribing in a Defined American Population” [2]. […]
Many people think that alternative medicine – what I call “sham medicine” – is the positive opposite of science-based medicine. Peddlers of sham medicine make all kinds of opposition claims. Claim: Science-based medicine has negative side-effects, whereas sham medicine only cures and never hurts. Claim: Science-based medicine is the domain […]
Gotta hand the folks at Wunderground some credit on this one – I love their “Climate Change” tab, and especially the way they have organized the evidence for climate change. Hats off to you! http://www.wunderground.com/climate/evidence.asp?MR=1
As my colleague Prof. Scalise likes to say, it’s stupid – and a little bit funny – when pseudoscience peddlers and scam artists try to use their nonsense on people that teach a class in fighting pseudoscience and scams. I got my first one today, in Twitter (of all places). […]
Author’s Note (2013/12/6): A commenter noted I was off by 10 in my extremely conservative upper limit on the mass of zinc present in a lozenge. However, that estimate was so conservative as to be ludicrous – it’s not based on homeopathy, which Zicam claims to use to prepare their […]
Facebook recently added a “Your 2012 Year in Review” feature. It claims to show you the “20 biggest moments” in your life in 2012. It sucks. In no way did it capture anything that was important in my life this year. Why? Well, first and foremost, I don’t post strongly […]
[Author’s Note: thanks to Ray and Luke for their excellent comments. I’d like to note that, while I leave this post up for now, I don’t agree any longer that gun licenses are a good proxy for gun ownership. There are other studies now available regarding things like “stand your […]
Today, we began lecturing about one of the hardest things to discuss: how creationism and intelligent design are not science. I know . . . to a scientist who keeps their scientific life separate from their religious life, this sounds strange. But the reality is that for many people without […]
Good timing! The company – Boiron – that produces that same homeopathic sleeping pill that we overdosed on in Friday’s lecture also recently published a TERRIBLE study of their migraine “remedy.” It’s a great example of how bad science can seem legitimate by making its way into a journal. The […]
I thought it might be useful to write a short post on what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite lectures in Cultural Formations B/Physics 3333 at SMU: homeopathy. Prof. Randy Scalise and I delivered the lecture yesterday, and the audio is available here (I excerpted it from the recording […]