Blogging
oracknows | August 5, 2006Amazing. As hard as it is for me to believe, it looks as though I might have spawned another one. One of my regular commenters has decided to dip her foot into the blogosphere. Oddly enough for one of my offspring, the blog concerns motorcycles. (I've only been on a motorcycle a couple of times in my life and never as the driver.) Even so, I'd be a really neglectful blog parent if I didn't give her a plug for Ren and the Art of Motorcycles.
oracknows | July 22, 2006Head on over and give fellow physician and outspoken warrior against pseudoscience Dr. R. W. a hearty congratulations!
Today is his first blogiversary.
May there be many more!
oracknows | July 16, 2006It was a sad day when of the earliest and most prolific medbloggers, Medpundit retired from blogging a couple of months ago. However, like many of us, she's found that she just can't keep out of the blogospher, and, via Kevin, M.D. and GruntDoc, I've learned that she's back:
Well, it's official. I'm a blogging addict. I can't give this up. Not quite two months away from it, and I'm forsaking my family to rejoin the blogging life.
I'm not really forsaking them. They urged me to return. Smothering mothering is not working out well for us. Not only that, without blogging, my rants against the…
oracknows | July 7, 2006On Wednesday, in response to really bad analogy attacking the NAACP and the Black and Hispanic Congressional Caucuses, I wrote a rather lengthy post that attempted to educate the rather clueless blogger by the name of LaShawn Barber who had produced the rant about how the white nationalist teen singing duo Prussian Blue (who, according to LaShawn, are only expressing "white pride") got their name from a technique of Holocaust denial.
Well, it turns out I've been trolled. LaShawn has posted an update that's basically one big gloat:
A belated "Happy Independence Day" to all the left-leaning (…
oracknows | July 5, 2006This week's issue of Nature features a list of the top five science blogs, based on Technorati rankings for number of incoming links, narrowly defining its science blogs as blogs written by working scientists.
Not surprisingly, a ScienceBlogs blog Pharyngula came out on top at number one, followed by that stalwart resource for information about evolution and the debunking of creationism, The Panda's Thumb. Coming in at number five is new ScienceBlog The Scientific Activist. Not a bad showing at all, with seven of the top ten science blogs belonging to the ScienceBlogs collective, particularly…
oracknows | June 27, 2006One year ago yesterday, a turd flew, the first of many to come.
A new skeptic had arrived in the blogosphere, and he called himself (appropriately enough, given his propensity for lobbing fecalgrams at the credulous) The Pooflinger.
I feel real bad that I missed his blogiversary because of something as insignificant as being on an NIH study section. Well, no, I don't actually feel that bad, because being on my first study section is a major step in my career. But, now that I'm back, I have to send Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger) some belated blogiversary wishes.
As you may know, Matt quickly…
oracknows | June 27, 2006Busy at NIH Study section today, I didn't have time to compose anything extensive. (And there is most definitely something that needs a little Respectful Insolence going on; unfortunately, it will have to wait until tomorrow to receive it.) Fortunately, I had some thing in reserver for just such an occasion. From my e-mail several weeks ago (name & location withheld):
Dr. Orac,
My name is D. I am a Chiropractor and a Medical Doctor (IM resident at Medical Center X). I knew something wasn't right about the whole Chiropractic thing about half way through my education but could never quite…
oracknows | June 20, 2006Pearls Before Swine captures the joy of blogging...
I know how Goat feels sometimes...
oracknows | June 13, 2006Grand Rounds, no. 2, vol. 38 has been posted at the Haversian Canal. Get your medblogging fix for the week there.
Also, a belated shout-out to yesterday's RINO Sightings at Tinkery Tonk: You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers.
oracknows | June 11, 2006Janet started it. John and Mike picked it up. Afarensis used it to avoid working on a post. John and Bora quickly chimed in as well.
Well, given that it's a Sunday and that I usually don't do any heavy duty science or medicine posts on Saturdays and Sundays, it looked like a perfectly good way for me to waste some time in a (hopefully) entertaining way for my readers, particularly since the questions are actually pretty good ones.
Yes, it's the ScienceBlogs v.2.0 Meme:
3 reasons you blog about science:
It's my life's work. (What else am I going to blog about, besides science and medicine?)…
oracknows | June 9, 2006Today is the day.
Today is the day that Seed has decided to launch a revamped version of ScienceBlogs, complete with a spiffy new front page. It's long overdue, as the front page as it was had caused a number of frustrations, not the least of which is that bloggers whose posts are not as frequent would see their posts pushed off the front page in a matter of hours. Similarly the lack of any real categorization of the blogs, made it a less than ideal format. It worked OK when there were a few of us. We all knew that it couldn't work when it came time to add a significant number of new bloggers…
oracknows | May 28, 2006OK, PZ, Grrlscientist, and John have all done it. They've used a cool little applet to show their blogs as graphs.
I figured I'd give it a try, too. Why not?
(Click on the image to see the graph construct itself.)
Basically, the applet shows the tree structure of a web page in a rather interesting way.
The key is below:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML…
oracknows | May 21, 2006It's Sunday. Time for silly Internet tests:
Your Blogging Type is Confident and Insightful
You've got a ton of brain power, and you leverage it into brilliant blog.
Both creative and logical, you come up with amazing ideas and insights.
A total perfectionist, you find yourself revising and rewriting posts a lot of the time.
You blog for yourself - and you don't care how popular (or unpopular) your blog is!
What's Your Blogging Personality?
Obviously this test doesn't take Orac's fixation with EneMan and the Hitler Zombie into account!
Whatever my true style is, having done mostly…
oracknows | May 19, 2006Uh-oh.
Periodically, via Sitemeter, I like to check out what sorts of searches are leading people to my humble blog.
Recently I noticed one coming here from Italy via a Google search for "giant enema." Number two on the search list was this post.
I'm guessing my Seed overlords are probably relieved that the post to which that search led was on my old blog, not the current incarnation of Respectful Insolence. (Or maybe not. After all, traffic is traffic.) Me, I'm curious why someone in Italy is searching the web for giant enemas. Maybe EneMan would like a trip to Europe.
oracknows | May 19, 2006It looks like Orac has acquired a new fan.
You see, yesterday I wrote a rather long fisking of Vox Day. (Don't worry, I'm not going to continue it yet again; this dead horse has clearly been beaten enough). In it, I happened to make a brief mention of and link to an apparent admirer of Vox's who goes by the 'nym of MikeT, who defended Vox's idiotic Holocaust analogy while calling him a "devilishly clever bastard." I found his comments while doing a Technorati search to see what others were saying about Vox's article, and my mention of MikeT was very brief.
This morning, out of curiosity, I…
oracknows | May 18, 2006I'm a couple of days late with this, but yesterday I finally got around to checking some of my usual medblogs when I came across some bad news. Medblogging stalward Dr. Sydney Smith (the nom de blog of Medpundit) is hanging up her blogging keyboard for good. She's been at it since 2002 and in that time had become as close to a fixture in the medical blogosphere as anyone can be. By comparison, I started blogging nearly three years after Dr. Smith, in December 2004, and, although I'm not yet considered an old-timer blogger yet (either that, or I'm deluding myself), I'm rapidly approaching that…
oracknows | May 14, 2006Let me just take this opportunity to welcome one of my favorite evolution bloggers, Jason Rosenhouse, over to the ScienceBlogs fold. I've been following his blog for many months now.
Go say hi to him at his new location at EvolutionBlog, and don't forget to update your bookmarks (which reminds me, I'll have to update my own blogroll; there are some out of date entries there and I've been meaning to clean it up anyway). I sincerely hope Jason's transition goes more smoothly than mine did.
In case you weren't aware, there will soon be several more bloggers joing Jason and us here at…
oracknows | May 11, 2006Normally I like Tim Gueguen. He's an old trenchmate from Usenet and has been blogging longer than I have. But about a week ago, he commented on my facetious piece about a "celebrity nutritionist" with some odd ideas about medicine dating back to the 16th century and involving including dessicated animal "glands" in the supplements that he sells and how he's been rewarded with wealth, hobnobbing with rock stars, and marrying a porn star:
Deliberate attempts at generating blog traffic have never really worked for me. On the other hand I often get hits for folks looking for porn for cartoons…
oracknows | May 3, 2006Kevin, MD, one of the big names in the medical blogosphere, is two years old today. His style is a lot less wordy than mine, as he is more given to "Instapundit"-style "link and comment" posts, but he sure does find a lot of interesting material. I don't know where or how he comes up with it all.
Go wish him a happy blogiversary!
oracknows | April 5, 2006By the time this appears, I should be on my way home from the AACR. For some reason, the meeting this year didn't get me all fired up the way it usually does. Perhaps I'll post in more detail about why that may have been after I get home.
In the meantime, here's something I've been meaning to try out but never have, simply because I never thought I had the critical mass of readers to make it worthwhile. When Daily Kos or PZ has an open thread, they'll gets dozens, if not hundreds, of responses. If I were to try an open thread, I feared I'd get one or two.
I've overcome that fear, though, and…