Blogging
oracknows | October 13, 2017As you probably noticed, I didn't manage a post yesterday. Nor did I manage one today, other than this. That's because I was busy preparing for QEDCon, where I will be on a panel and giving a talk, and, of course, putting together my talk. As I write this, I'm horrendously jet lagged; so I probably couldn't write much that's coherent anyway. Consequently, there likely won't be any new posts until next week.
I will take a moment, however, to mention that there will be significant changes to this blog in the near future. It's a process that will likely take a couple of weeks, and I'll update…
oracknows | March 9, 2017In case anyone's interested, the reason that there was no post today is because we had a rather massive windstorm here in the Detroit area that left 800,000 without power. Unfortunately, that number included my wife and me. I valiantly tried to take care of my blogging addiction last night, as the temperature in the house plunged to the 50s. With nothing but residual battery on my laptop and mobile hotspot from my phone I ended up giving up in order to save battery charge, particularly on the phone. Given that the power is still out and I'll be surprised if we get it back before tomorrow or…
oracknows | December 15, 2016I don’t know if other bloggers out there have experienced anything like this, but I’ve experienced this a few times since starting this blog. Last night I started writing about an article that—or so I thought— was the perfect distillation of the message of the NCCIH and its desire to co-opt nonpharmacological treatments for pain as being “integrative,” “complementary” or “alternative.” As I sometimes do when I’m tired and, no matter how hard I try, can’t motivate myself to finish it before dozing off, I chugged through about half of what I saw as the ultimate length, meaning to get up in the…
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2016A year ago I took a look at the surrounding landscape here at Sb, investigating which of the blogs were active – defined as which ones had seen an entry during the month up to 24 Jan '15. Now I've looked at the month up to 17 Jan '16. The result isn't great. Four blogs have gone quiet and one has re-awoken, bringing the total down to 16. Not one new blog has been added to the roster in the past year. You may wonder what the Sb Overlords are thinking about this. I sure do.
Here are the currently active ScienceBlogs (apart from the one you're reading). Check them out and drop them a few…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2015I’ve been blogging for a bit more than ten years now, having started on 16 December, and today Aard turns nine! I was inspired to begin blogging by my wife who started in October 2005. She worked as a news reporter at the time, and journalists were early adopters in Swedish blogging. I was doing research on small grants and applying for uni jobs.
In late 2005 we were living happily in a three-room apartment in a former council tenement, my son had just started school and my daughter was a baby. Things have changed a bit over these ten years as we've moved into middle age: both kids are now…
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2015I'm not a big blog reader, sad to tell, and I have almost no insight into what's going on elsewhere in the science blogosphere including ScienceBlogs. But a few days ago I got curious about what the network I'm on is like these days, and I did some investigating. I was surprised by what I found. In the following, when I talk about active blogs, I mean blogs that have seen an entry in the past month.
On 24 January, ScienceBlogs had only 19 active blogs.* Eleven of these opened in 2006, Sb's first year. The network had no less than 112 inactive blogs, most of which started after 2006. This…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2014I’ve been blogging for a bit more than nine years now, and today Aard turns eight! Traffic for Oct, Nov, Dec has been ~450 daily readers. Dear Reader, is there anything you'd like me to write about?
oracknows | July 9, 2014Today, I'm winging my way to sunny Las Vegas. Yes, in the middle of summer, when southern Nevada's weather is most like an oven, I will be there. The reason? I'll be doing a workshop and a panel with fellow supporters of science-based medicine at The Amazing Meeting.
I don't know how many of my readers will be there, but if you're there and see me hanging out at the Del Mar or in the hall between sessions, feel free to introduce yourself. For everyone else, I guess we'll have to consider this an open thread. Don't worry. I plan on doing some blogging while I'm away, but it might be more…
oracknows | May 16, 2014As seems to happen more frequently, Orac has had his attention wholly taken up by contemplating a black hole. (Actually, he's at a medical conference on quality care in breast cancer.) Consequently, after a four and a half hour drive to the hotel, dinner out with the conference staff, and preparing for his talk, he didn't have time to deliver the Insolence you all know and crave. So he's asking you—yes, you!—to create your own Insolence. That's right. It's open thread day, although I do want there to be a bit of guidance. Are there any particular topics or targets deserving of Orac's loving…
oracknows | January 22, 2014And now for something completely different.
There was a time when, as a blogger, I would have been instantly aware of an incident like the one I'm about to discuss, instantly aware of it and all over it within a day. That it's been a few days since this happened, and I remained blissfully unaware of it until yesterday tells me how much I've changed as a blogger since my early days. Sure, some things haven't changed much, as anyone who reads my first post cum manifesto can see if he goes back and reads it, such as the subject matter of this blog and my commitment to science and science-based…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2013I've been blogging for a bit more than eight years now, and today Aard turns seven. Traffic for late 2013 is ~600 daily readers, pretty low compared to the most recent peak at 1000 in early 2012. This is probably because of my lower posting frequency and because the URLs of individual older blog entries changed when ScienceBlogs migrated to WordPress last year. The lower posting frequency, in its turn, is largely due to Facebook, where stuff that might have made short blog entries in 2007 ends up now. Some of the Facebook bits show up here afterwards as Pieces of My Mind.
As to Sb in general…
oracknows | December 17, 2013Whoa.
How did I miss this? Maybe it was all the other stuff going on last week, such as the Sarah Hershberger case, multiple updates on Stanislaw Burzynski, and Katie Couric's sort-of apology about her awful segment on HPV vaccines. So much stuff was going on that I forgot that December 11 was my nine year blogiversary.
Yes, nine years ago on that day, the wonder (or at least obnoxiousness) that was Orac was born (or at least stolen from an obscure 30 year old British SF show). Since I was so exhausted last night that I fell asleep on the couch with my wife and my dog, I figure I might as…
oracknows | September 4, 2013Antivaccinationists, quacks, and apologists for antivaccinationists and quacks (but I repeat myself) seem to have an illusion that I'm just swimming in pharma lucre, that I sit in my underwear grinding out magnum opus-worthy after magnum opus-worthy blog posts, all so that I can rake in the cash hand over fist, lead a life of pure luxury, and enjoy ruthlessly crushing any hint of dissent regarding science-based medicine. Even if that assessment were completely true, as Lord Draconis Zeneca tells us that it is, it's not all easy being a prolific, logorrheic pharma shill servilely doing the…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2013Kay Glans used to edit the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden's main conservative* newspaper, and Axess Magasin, a conservative Swedish arts & social sciences mag that also has a TV channel. The latter's standard is high, and I've been particularly pleased to find repeated staunch rebuttals of post-modernism there. What I don't like much in Glans's oeuvre is a tendency for aesthetic idealism and aesthetic conservatism, of the canon-stroking sort. His writers tend to believe that there are classics that every educated person should read. I'm an aesthetic relativist and accept no…
oracknows | February 15, 2013You might have noticed that I've been...preoccupied. I posted a "rerun" on Thursday, and yesterday I didn't even post at all. That doesn't mean that I don't check in from time to time to see what you all are doing in my absence. That's how I saw this comment from Dangerous Bacon (cool 'nym, BTW—I've always wanted to mention that):
Hey, enough of this “I’m working on a grant application” excuse.
Orac needs to get back up to his mom’s attic and crank out some new posts.
Fear not. The grant has been submitted. On the other hand, I'm giving a talk next week in Missouri, and I have to put the…
aardvarchaeology | February 4, 2013It’s time we had a de-lurk around this here blog! The last one was over a year ago. If you keep returning to this blog but rarely or never comment, you are a lurker, Dear Reader, and a most welcome one too.
Please comment on this entry and tell us something about yourself – like where you are, what your biggest passion is, what you’d like to see more of on the blog. And if you are a long-time lurker who has de-lurked before, re-de-lurks are much encouraged!
oracknows | December 10, 2012As I mentioned yesterday, Orac is currently away at an undisclosed location that is someplace warm. He is there, taking a rare pre-solstice break, preparing for the Mayan apocalypse that is to come on the 21st of this month. (Actually, he's recharging his Tarial cell, the better to be prepared for the utter nonsense that is to come in 2013, given that there is, at the very minimum, going to be another Stanislaw Burzynski hagiography released early in the year.) In the meantime, as I mentioned yesterday, most, if not all, of the posts this week will appear...familiar. At least, they might be…
oracknows | September 7, 2012Believe it or not, after nearly eight years blogging and around five years before that cutting my skeptical teeth on that vast and wild (and now mostly deserted and fallow) wilderness that was Usenet, I have occasionally wondered whether what I'm doing is worthwhile. Sometime around 1998, after I first discovered Holocaust denial on Usenet, and a year or so after that, I found the home of all quackery on Usenet, misc.health.alternative. From around 1998 to 2004, Usenet was my home, and that's where I fought what I thought to be the good fight against irrationality, antiscience, and quackery.…
sa smith | July 31, 2012COOL!!!
Recombinant origin, contamination, and de-discovery of XMRV
I dont know if you all have access to this paper, but here is the relevant portion:
Treatment of CFS patient PBMCs with 5-azacytidine was omitted from Lombardi et al. paper
In September 2011, Abbie Smith, a graduate student and virology blogger, (http://scienceblogs.com/erv/) revealed that Dr. Judy Mikovits, the corresponding author of the Lombardi et al. study, presented a figure at a meeting that turned out to be identical to one in the original paper, but with different patient numbers and experimental conditions (John…
oracknows | July 12, 2012I was thinking of doing a quickie post about the silliness that's erupted in the antivaccine cranksophere over the IACC hearing that I mentioned yesterday. (Of course, a "quickie" post for me is usually only 1,000 words long, as opposed to the usual 2,000.)
Then disaster struck!
My hardy, reliable MacBook Air, my main traveling companion for all trips in which I need to do work and/or give a talk died. It died hard (although not like the movies; there were no explosions or fires). It would not boot. Given the craziness at work with grants in the weeks leading up to TAM, I didn't have the talk…