Mmmmm. Chocolate cake. As in “cake” with “chocolate” in it. It’s a straightforward, yet somehow radical, concept. Except it’s not that radical. It’s just everyday, common-or-garden, run-of-the-mill chocolate cake. Tastes nice, but is not good for you; eating lots of it makes you fat, etc., etc., etc. Everybody knows this. […]
Last Friday, the Irish Examiner published an opinion piece by pop psychologist Tony Humphreys, presenting a re-hash of the now anachronistic view that autism is caused by poor parenting (the so-called “refridgerator mom” theory). Oh, and despite claiming to explain the causes of autism, he simultaneously sought to argue that […]
Late last year, I posted a piece on a hoax news story then doing the rounds online, concerning a local councillor in Ireland who claimed that his area was especially suitable for cloud computing because of all the clouds. The post received a bucket load of hits, scooping the Daily […]
Here is an opinion piece I wrote for in this week’s Modern Medicine magazine. The version below is the final draft prior to some very minor typographical edits. The article also appears online at irishhealth.com, where you can also read a companion article presenting an opposing perspective on complementary medicine. Modern Medicine […]
L’Oréal are at it again. Today the UK Advertising Standards Authority have once more come down hard on one of their advertisements, which has now been banned. The ad was deemed flawed in one pretty critical respect. It was flagrantly — and knowingly — dishonest. In pushing its Revitalift anti-wrinkle cream, […]
The scientific method is truly amazing. Not only can it be applied to such clichéd domains as physics, chemistry, biology, flying people to the moon, curing cancer, adding ears to the backs of mice, cloning sheep, and running tarantulas through MRI scanners, it can also be used to resolve age-old […]
