First things first – I keep changing my avatar and blavatar. Comments from me should now be showing a baby chimp eating an apple and pingbacks should feature a humbug damselfish. I chose the humbug damselfish because the word “humbug” is the closest word I could think of to “bullshit” and the main point of this blog seems to be to write about humbug. I’ve also changed the blog name to Stuff and Nonsense as I had begun to dislike the title “jdc325’s weblog“. My name is James Cole and I have no competing interests. Except for a fascination with bullshit, humbug, and nonsense.
Contrary to popular belief (hi, Dr Georgiou, JABS forumites etc) I am not an allopathic medic or a Big Pharma shill. Nor am I a robot – despite using the name jdc325, which does look an awful lot like a robot name. A bit like R2D2 or C3PO.
Inspired by the Bad Science blog and following the lead of other Bad Science Forum members, I started blogging in September 2007 – but without any clear plan about what I was going to cover or how. As it turns out, the homeopaths and archbishops have provided a fair bit of material so quite a few early posts cover homeopathy or religion. I actually think that homeopathy is a religion. It certainly isn’t a science.
Other things that interest me include: the anti-vaccine campaigners, nutritionism (Holford et al) and alternative medicine in general. Recreational drugs, pharmaceutical drugs and alternative therapies are all of interest to me – as is the way they are represented in the media and the way they are each presented by their proponents and opponents.
Another subject that has cropped up more than once is the litigiousness of woos – e.g. Dr Obi or the SoH controversy. Older examples of litigious Berties include: Ann “Gobbledegook” Walker and Patrick “Mr Showbiz” Holford (check out Improbable Science and Holford Watch on my blogroll for more on Ann or Patrick).
The front page: categories and archives are on drop-down menus at the bottom of my front page; my blogroll and del.icio.us links are also on the right hand column and my blogroll includes a page titled ‘LINKS PAGE’ which has a full list of the pseudoscience / critical thinking / atheism / sceptic blogs that I occasionally read*; there’s also a couple of video/audio links to lectures from James Randi and David Colquhoun. *I try to keep up with all the blogs in my blogroll, especially those indexed on badscienceblogs, but there are so many it is sometimes difficult.
Adverts: WordPress occasionally uses ads on their sites. See http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/go-ad-free/ for more. These ads are nothing to do with me – and I’m too tight with my money to go completely ad-free. Hopefully most of you will not see these ads, as regular WordPress users apparently will not be shown the adverts.
If there’s anything on this blog that you think is shit or if there’s anything you think I should be covering but am not then please feel free to let me know. Comment here or use the contact email below. Cheers!
New contact email: 325jdc325@googlemail.com
Competing interests: none that I am aware of. I am currently unemployed and receive no payment from anyone for the blog posts I write – I do this for love, not money.
Real name: James Cole
Bits’n'pieces
I am indexed on http://www.badscienceblogs.net/ and some posts are aggregated on BPSDB (the blogging on pseudoscience database).
My twitter page is here: http://twitter.com/jdc325.
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February 29, 2008 at 10:21 am
June 5, 2008 at 10:30 pm
And why don’t you work in normal sphere? Probably you don’t like a payment there, eh? Too small for you?
Generally it is a villainy: to think one thing – but to do absolutely opposite thing!
And more worse – to do dirty deals and simultaneously to speak right words.
What do you think?
June 6, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Thank you for the questions She-Liger.
I am fairly certain that I haven’t done anything in my working life that went against my morals. I do not do ‘dirty deals’. I do not get paid better money because of the field I work in.
June 6, 2008 at 6:25 pm
To work in homeopathy is dirty deal generally. And to work in homeopathy, simultaneously criticising it – is a doublethink.
June 6, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I don’t work in homeopathy.
June 6, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Well, not homeopathy, however – “alternative” medicine.You said: “I work for a firm that is within a sector of the field of ’alternative medicine’. “
June 6, 2008 at 8:40 pm
So anybody who works for a firm that could be said to be in the field of alternative medicine is engaged in double-think and dirty deals?
By the way – I have also responded to your email criticising myself and other bloggers.
June 6, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Probably, yes… Though it is MY opinion and I understand that it is “ultra”
) But simply I saw in my life the worst examples of ” the compromises” mentioned here 
June 6, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Thank you for the letter.
June 16, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Hello there. I would like to share some practical advice with you. You have posted your email address in a format that guarantees that email address harvesting spam bots will “harvest” it. I have a blog post that includes resources links that you can use to “munge” your email address or to create it as an unlinked image to elude these bots.
Eluding email address spam bots
http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/eluding-email-address-spam-bots/
Best wishes for spam-free blogging.