All Hail Bad Science
My girlfriend (the word fiancé is weird and horrible sounding) got me Bad Science by Ben Goldacre for Christmas. It's a most excellent book which explains exactly why so much Science reporting, mainly in the area of health and diet, is so dodgy and in some cases downright dangerous.
It's also very readable and very funny. I picked it up to have a quick look on Christmas day and ended up reading half of it. Brilliant.
Oh and the author also has a website/blog at badscience.net
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6 comments:
Great thanks for link, used to read his regulary column in the Guardian!
Love this: http://www.badscience.net/2009/01/the-barefaced-cheek-of-these-characters-will-never-cease-to-amaze-and-delight-me/
Yeah, he still does the guardian columm but I didn't know about the book. Well worth reading if you liked the column. It's not just a collection of columns.
Gillian McKeith, she of the poo fetish, springs to mind!
There's a whole chapter on that charlatan in the book, and most amusing it is too.
My favourite bogus science field is evolutionary psychology, eg. "girls naturally prefer pink because the traditional role of women in stone age society was gathering berries, that are often reddish in tone" and complete bollocks like that. Any of that in the book?
Not exactly. But he does cover that kind of story in general terms, how they get produced, who writes them, how little 'science' there is behind them. By that kind of story I mean, stuff that's been put out by PR agencies on behalf of a client with an agenda to sell.
Like he mentions "the most depressing day of the year" or "we'll end up as two species".
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