Skepticblog

A Quiet Moment at Heritage Square: Los Angeles 2009

Last weekend I took a few hours to go back in time and see up close and personal an era where death and the hereafter had an integrity and tradition that barely exists in my celebrity drenched neighborhood of Hollywood. I left behind the moral nihilism of Los Angeles for a beautiful afternoon of walking through the fall leaves on a time-warped cul-de-sac that has been relocated and restored from the crowded vistas of downtown and moved onto a few square blocks of peace and reverence. It was a grand Halloween muse that managed to steer far clear of the manipulative world of Universal Studio monsters and crass commercialization. Entering the mansions At Heritage Square offered precious moments to view a time when death was celebrated with somber dignity with displays of  velvet shrouds, sheaves of wheat, black bordered visiting cards and jewelry made with human hair. The Victorian funeral was in full bloom.

James Daly in "A Stop at Willoughby"

Was the Victorian era a time of bizarre superstitions and strange religious beliefs? Absolutely. But I’m not sure I wouldn’t trade in my tired skateboard tee shirts for a black frock coat any day if I thought I could stay in the quiet comfort of that era for more than one afternoon. Heritage Square’s once a year “Mourning Tour” gives the weary Angeleno a chance to peel back the smog and industrial haze that usually permeates the city and enter into a world of penny-farthing high wheel bicycles and derby hats. I felt like; “Gart Williams,  a man protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt” in the classic Twilight Zone episode, “A Stop at Willoughby.” Rod Serling certainly understood a ”"peaceful, restful place, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure.” I needed that stop at Willoughby. It is at times like these that I think I was born in the totally wrong century.

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Secretly I’ve been holding a public grammar contest, open to anyone who sends me an email. Today, the winner is announced: Mr. Daren Lee of “The Zeitgeist Movement”. Initially, as his writing suggests that Mr. Lee has only a fifth grade education, I was going to disqualify him (must be 18 or older to enter). But the email headers suggest that he may actually be able to hold down a job, and so his entry is accepted and I’m proud to honor him today: (continue reading…)

A couple of weeks ago, a chiropractor lodged a complaint with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) against the Australian Skeptics. Why? Because they had reprinted journalist Simon Singh’s article about chiropractic, which said that in the UK they were making bogus claims about how chiropractic can cure all manners of ills such as asthma and colic in babies, when it’s been shown it cannot.

Got that? This chiropractor, Joseph Ierano, complained against them because of someone else’s article! Brilliant.
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It is with much sadness that we report the death of Norman Jay Levitt on Saturday, October 24, 2009, due to heart failure. His wife of 38 years, Renee Greene Levitt, reported the news to friends and colleagues of Norman, and announced that a memorial service will be held on Sunday, November 1 at 1:30 PM at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel, 630 Amsterdam Avenue at 91 St. She also asked that in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions be sent to the National Center for Science Education, 420 40th Street, Suite 2, Oakland, CA 94609. Our deepest condolences to Renee and to Norman’s family and extended family.

Norman Levitt received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1967 and taught mathematics, specializing in topology, for forty years at Rutgers before retirement. He was a frequent contributor on public attitudes toward science, as well as the follies of academic life that arise in connection with misunderstanding of science, regularly contributing review essays for Skeptic, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. His books include Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (with Paul R. Gross) in 1994, The Flight from Science and Reason in 1997, and Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture in 1999. In 1989 he published a technical work entitled Grassmannians and the Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear Topology.

Norman was best known, however, for his relentless defense of science, particularly against those in the academy — generally labeled as social constructivists, deconstructionists, or postmodernists — who tended to lump science in with other cultural traditions as “just another way of knowing” that is no better than any other tradition, and thereby reduce the scientific enterprise to little more than culturally-determined guess work at best and hegemonic power mongering at worst. In the pages of Skeptic, for example, he reviewed a number of books by such academics, most recently tearing into the British sociologist of science Steve Fuller for his expert testimony at the Dover trial in which Fuller defended Intelligent Design creationism as a legitimate science that deserves equal treatment with evolutionary theory. Already schedule for publication in the next issue of Skeptic was Dr. Levitt’s review essay entitled “Science: A Four Hundred Page Hissy-Fit,” a review of Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara, which we have pre-published in eSkeptic in tribute to one of the finest writers to ever grace the pages of Skeptic. Editing Norman Levitt was unlike editing any other author in the 17-year history of the magazine. His vocabulary was unparalleled and his command of literature, history, and culture was second to none in the sciences. I give you just one typical example, from the aforementioned essay. As you can see, Norm did not suffer foolish authors gladly:

Mutatis mutandis, the British historian of science Patricia Fara has written a book that treats its own vast subject — science and the history of its development — in a similarly contemptuous and condescending way. Fara’s case reposes on the twin shaky pillars of epistemological relativism and self-ascribed political righteousness. It is outlandishly Pecksniffian in tone and substance. She has an appallingly cavalier attitude toward evidence and documentation. She argues by means of flat assertion and unsupported generalization, sins, one assumes, she would never let her callowest undergraduates get away with. When I read a book, however closely, my marginal notations are usually brief and infrequent. Not so in the case of Science: A Four Thousand Year History; my copy is crammed with notes to myself, most of them pointing out the author’s grotesque gaffes. Imprecision reigns on every page; inaccuracies, irrelevancies, omissions, anachronisms, errors, and outright howlers go galumphing through the text with the author’s blithe acquiescence.

Norm, we shall miss you terribly. Your literal voice may be gone, but your literary voice will live on forever.

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A recent study, as reported in the New Scientist, purports to catch the placebo effect in the act using functional MRI scanning. This is an interesting study, and does for the first time show a neurophysiological correlate to reported placebo decreases in pain reporting.

However, reporting of the study highlights, yet again, widespread misconceptions about the nature of placebo effects – specifically that there are many placebo effects, not one placebo effect. Any reference to “the” placebo effect is therefore misleading – it is a convenient short hand, but unfortunate given prevailing misconceptions.

What most people mean when they say “the” placebo effect is a real physiological effect that derives from belief in the effects of a treatment – a mind-over-matter effect. However, the placebo effect, as it is measured in clinical trials, has a very specific operational definition. It is any and all measured effects other than a physiological response to the treatment itself.

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After linking up with The Center for Inquiry West, I’m proud to announce that yes, there are powerful groups of people actively out there formed to combat the woo. CFI’s own Independent Investigations Group (IIG) is going strong, attracting new members including myself and working on up to a dozen applications for their own $50,000 dollar challenge. The up-coming issue of The Skeptical Inquirer will feature a four page spread on the IIG. Reading it will hopefully start a firestorm of new investigative teams that also want to make a difference. (continue reading…)

Reader Ryan Quick is a member of the Yahoo! Group EastRangeFreecycle, a northern Minnesota chapter of Freecycle. Freecycle (http://freecycle.org/) is a fine, nonprofit association of groups where items can be given away for free rather than having them go into a landfill. I’ve never used their service, but I’m a strong proponent of the philosophy and have given away a number of items over the years, mostly furniture.

Someone offered the following item for free on the list:

Offer: Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About
By Kevin Trudeau. Excellent book – I just have two of them.
In Virginia.

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Note: I don’t usually post straight science here, but this is too good to resist. -P

It’s been a while since I’ve sung the praises of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, which takes incredibly hi-res images of the surface of Mars. Thanks to the HiRISE Twitter feed, I found this incredible picture:

Can I get a Holy Haleakala! from the congregation?

Wow. I mean seriously, wow. You really really want to go look at the embiggened version. What you’re seeing here are sand dunes on Mars. This region is in the center of a large crater at mid-north latitude on Mars, a couple of hours past local noon, and with a resolution of 50 cm (18 inches) per pixel. Sand dunes are common in crater beds, where the wind can blow steadily across the surface and sculpt the ever-present sand into those flowing sculptures. (continue reading…)

(Note: this post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on October 16, 2009)

Dear Bill,

Years ago you invited me to appear as a fellow skeptic several times on your ABC show Politically Incorrect, and I have ever since shared your skepticism on so many matters important to both of us: creationism and intelligent design, religious supernaturalism and New Age paranormal piffle, 9/11 “truthers”, Obama “birthers”, and all manner of conspiratorial codswallop. On these matters, and many others, you rightly deserved the Richard Dawkins Award from Richard’s foundation, which promotes reason and science.

However, I believe that when it comes to alternative medicine in general and vaccinations in particular you have fallen prey to the same cognitive biases and conspiratorial thinking that you have so astutely identified in others. (continue reading…)

The Huffington Post, an online news source, from its creation has embraced anti-scientific pseudomedicine. It has been a home for a number of anti-vaccine cranks, as well as promoters of all kinds of medical nonsense. Occasionally there appears a brief flower of reason (token efforts at best) – for example our own Michael Shermer recently publicly called out Bill Maher on his anti-vaccine nonsense in the HuffPo. Here’s the money quote:

As well, Bill, your comments about not wanting to “trust the government” to inject us with a potentially deadly virus, along with many comments you have made about “big pharma” being in cahoots with the AMA and the CDC to keep us sick in the name of corporate profits is, in every way that matters, indistinguishable from 9/11 conspiracy mongering.

But these brief incursions of reason aside, the HuffPo has been in continual free fall into medical woo since its inception. Although in retrospect it has been hopeless for a long time, for me it crossed the veil into complete an utter advocacy of woo when it hired Dana Ullman as a regular blogger.

Ullman is notorious as a homeopath and internet lurker, spreading undiluted nonsense as far and wide as his typing fingers can manage.  I will have to resist the urge to deconstruct every bit of medical misdirection he will spread with his new forum – that would be a full time job for one blogger. But as I have already received numerous requests to take a look at his latest post, I will give him some deserved skeptical attention.

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