Links With Your Coffee
- Placebo is not what you think it is : White Coat Underground
- The 7 Benefits of Faith-Based Agnosticism | Daily Renewal: Freethinking Bipartisanship
- CNN's Beck on the blind: "Just to piss them off, I'm going to put in Braille on the coffee pot ... 'Pot is hot.' Ow!" | Media Matters for America
- Why chess is a perfect game for fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk
- The Innocent by David Szalay| Book review | Books | The Observer
- Please give us all your money – Bad Science
- Left Behind.
- Skeptic » Lectures » The Philosophical Baby
- What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, especially when it's Jesus on a toilet : Respectful Insolence
Comments
I would like to thank Glenn Beck for making crystal clear the already blazingly obvious distinction between rebelling against political correctness and just being a gigantic asshole.
The Placebo article is really interesting. Not just because of the contents, but because the author of the Wired article shows up in the comments to defend his work.
I didn't read all of the comments (so I'm not sure if the following was already brought up there), but I find something about the article unsatisfying. A strong placebo effect (e.g. a situation where both the placebo and the drug show an improvement over no pill, and in some cases the placebo is statistically similar in its effect to the drug) can be for a variety of reasons. Foremost is the powerful effect of believing that you are being given a cure, and then your attitude, actions, etc. change in a positive (helaing) direction. This presumably only works if you trust your health provider. The reported "improvement" in placebos of late could be due to increased trust of patients in their providers, a better job of these providers of exuding trust, or crappier drugs. I felt that the Silberman piece did not adequately address these possibilities.
There's actually that discussion in the comments. Also Greg Laden puts up a post of his own in which the author of the article also interacts.
Finally the answer to, "If God is everywhere, is he in the toilet?"
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