via egrandprix.com

Electric Motorsport Inc. (EMS), winners of the TTXGP Isle of Man 2009 Open Class, is back again for TTXGP 2010 series.

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If you think the “War on Christmas” meme started recently - think again. Rightwing nutjobs have been using this for years, centuries actually. The alternet article goes over the history

A major bit is the John Birch Society in 1958 who, in a lull of fighting floridation, talked about the UN fanatics who launched an assault on Christmas in 1958.

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Electric Vehicles: Electricity can be used as a transportation fuel to power battery electric vehicles (EVs). EVs store electricity in an energy storage device, such as a battery. The electricity powers the vehicle’s wheels via an electric motor. EVs have limited energy storage capacity, which must be replenished by plugging into an electrical source.

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What is Green Transportation? The negative effects of our transportation system is large and the “greening” of the transportation system is very important. Unfortunately the phrase “Green _____” is widely used for many different things, but doesn’t have a very precise meaning. Obviously “Green” is meant to have a meaning other than the color, but it appears that different people have different meanings for this phrase.

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Biofuel is defined as solid, liquid or gaseous fuel obtained from relatively recently lifeless or living biological material and is different from fossil fuels, which are derived from long dead biological material. Also, various plants and plant-derived materials are used for biofuel manufacturing. Biofuels are interesting because they can theoretically be produced sustainably, unlike fossil fuels which will require the planet multimillions of years or more to produce.

Biofuels are most commonly used to power vehicles, heat homes, and for cooking.

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A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a–shall we say?–realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM) make. Back in the day (say, a few years ago), such CAM practitioners and apologists used to try very, very hard to argue that their modalities had actual efficacy, that they had actual, measurable effects that made them medicine rather than woo. Never mind that even back then they had been trying for at least a couple of decades to come up with preclinical and clinical evidence that various magical CAM modalities worked, without any appreciable success. Worse for them, it’s only gotten worse over the last few years. As I’ve documented here and elsewhere, the larger and better-designed the scientific study, the more likely it is that a CAM modality will show no efficacy detectably different than placebo effects. When we test a drug or medical device, finding no difference between the treatment arm and placebo arm leads us to conclude that the drug or device (or whatever intervention) does not work; i.e., does not have effects detectably different from nonspecific effects. When CAM practitioners find no difference between the treatment arm and placebo arm, they conclude that their treatment has promise. I love the double standard, don’t you?

In any case, as more and more evidence comes in failing to find CAM modalities to be any more efficacious than placebo, the inevitable conclusion is that most of CAM is placebo medicine. Given that placebo effects have not been shown to have any detectable effect on the actual pathophysiology of disease, that they are variable, unreliable, and generally weak, and that invoking them requires deceiving the patient, it is considered at best ethically dubious and at worst completely unethical to treat patients with placeboes. They are not particularly effective, and a practitioner must, in essence, lie to his or her patient. Paternalism, although by no means gone in medicine, is soooo 1950s; it’s slowly disappearing, and the disapproval of using placebo medicine is one part of that decline–except in CAM, apparently.

In any case, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, when faced with more and more evidence that the vast majority of CAM is placebo medicine, what do CAM pracitioners do? Do they do what a science-based practitioner would do, at least eventually, and give it up? Of course not! Instead, they double down and embrace the “placeboness” of their treatments by invoking the “powerful placebo” and claiming that they are “harnessing the power of placebo” to produce “powerful mind-body healing,” of course!

I thought I was done with this topic, at least for a while, but then I found a post in–where else?–that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post by someone named Robert Schiffman, who is apparently a journalist and wants to tell us How the Placebo Effect Proves That God Exists.

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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CRP Racing eCRP 1.0 First Look

Azhar Hussain, Lord Drayson, Livia Cevolini (CRP Owner), Franco Cevolini (CRP Owner), Giampiero Testoni (CRP Partner)

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via egrandprix.com

Electric Motorsport Inc. (EMS), winners of the TTXGP Isle of Man 2009 Open Class, is back again for TTXGP 2010 series.

read more

If you think the “War on Christmas” meme started recently - think again. Rightwing nutjobs have been using this for years, centuries actually. The alternet article goes over the history

A major bit is the John Birch Society in 1958 who, in a lull of fighting floridation, talked about the UN fanatics who launched an assault on Christmas in 1958.

read more