Blogging
oracknows | December 12, 2007
It's times like these that I wonder if I've been at this blogging thing a bit too long. I ask that question because I've done it again. I've done the same thing in 2007 that I did a year ago in 2006.
I missed my own blogiversary.
Yes, believe it or not, yesterday was the third anniversary of a cold and dreary Saturday when, more or less on a whim, I sat down in front of my computer and wondered if I could do this blogging thing that had been written about in the media so much over the preceding few months. After all, I had had several years' experience sparring with Holocaust deniers,…
oracknows | December 12, 2007Let's see, the ScienceBlogs collective started out in English. Earlier this week, our German partner Hubert Burda Media soft-launched ScienceBlogs.de, a German version of the ScienceBlogging collective that you've come to know and love (or, in some cases, hate).
Now, our benevolent (well, most of the time, anyway) overlords at the Seed Collective Mothership in New York ask:
What language shall we tackle next?
Personally, I vote for French, but that's just because French is the only language other than English that I used to be able to speak and can still understand to some extent.
oracknows | November 29, 2007...for reaching a milestone in blogging.
One thing that's always puzzled me is why Abel's traffic isn't much higher (and mine lower, to be honest). True, I post much more frequently than he does, but that alone doesn't explain it. (Maybe it's EneMan.) Whatever the case, Abel deserves a much larger readership. There's a disconnect between the quality of his blog and the size of his readership.
oracknows | November 14, 2007...or so sayeth Reason.TV, where a credulous blogger didn't like what Orac laid down and found him oh-so-humorless.
Orac, Killer of Buzz. You know, I sort of like the sound of that. I like the sound and humor of this, too.
Of course, some buzzes deserve to be terminated with extreme prejudice; so just for laughs I'll throw out a few fun links that fellow ScienceBlogger Tim Lambert turned me on to (or led me to through other links) over the last couple of days:
Climate scepticism: The top 10
Skeptic Arguments
Convenient Untruths
Climate science: Sceptical about bias (which fellow…
oracknows | November 7, 2007
I demand the sum of.....two MILLION visits! Muhahahahahaha!
Yes, I know I did that bit before, but I liked it so much that I wanted to do it again.
Sometime yesterday, this blog hit another milestone. Sometime yesterday morning, Respectful Insolence⢠recorded its 2,000,000th visitor. Unfortunately, "sometime yesterday" was while I was at work, and, due to pesky duties like meetings, I was unable to record the 2,000,000th visit for posterity, as I did for my 1,000,000th visit.
That was on January 22, 2007. To reach the 1,000,000 mark took 2 years, 1 month, and 11 days. To go from 1,000,…
oracknows | November 2, 2007
Amazing.
I didn't actually expect this, but it appears that some knuckleheads have actually nominated Respectful Insolence again for the Best Medical/Health Issues Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and, even more oddly, I somehow managed to be finalist. It turns out that P.Z. Myers is also a finalist in the Best Science Blog category as well.
I was actually a finalist in 2005 and--shock of shocks--won the category last year. I don't really have any idea who nominated me or how I ended up being a finalist, but thanks to all. The only question is: Can I make it a repeat? It's probably too much…
oracknows | November 2, 2007Don't forget, once again the time is fast approaching.
Soon yet another installment of the Skeptics' Circle will be upon us. In fact, it's less than a week away and due to land at the Holford Watch on Thursday, November 8. Skeptical bloggers, there isn't much time left for you to get your entries done and submitted.
Finally, if you're a blogger and want to host an edition of the Skeptics' Circle yourself, drop me a line. For some reason, the Circle doesn't have as many hosts lined up as far into the future as I would like. Indeed, the wait to host is shorter than I can remember its ever being…
oracknows | November 2, 2007Arguing with cranks can be an extremely frustrating experience, which is why I don't do it very often anymore except on my terms on this blog. Yes, I did cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, for several years doing just that in the totally unmoderated and wild free-for-all known as Usenet before I dipped my toe into the blogosphere on a whim one cold December afternoon, but these days blogging has gotten me far more satisfaction, visibility, and influence than I could ever have dreamed possible. Consequently, I rarely visit my old stomping grounds anymore.
If you want to see the difference…
oracknows | October 29, 2007Every so often, as a blogger, I get e-mail. Well, actually, I get a lot of e-mail, much of which I just don't have time to answer (nothing personal when it happens), but every so often an e-mail makes me feel as though Rod Serling should be popping up at the end. I got this one not too long ago:
From: "eric swan" (xxx@xxx.xxx)
To: oracknows@gmail.com
Subject: 911
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 23:23:22 -0400
who are you, what are your motives and who are you working for?
Eric Swan @ xxx@yahoo.com.
Eric Swan happens to be a 9/11 Truther who's appeared in the comments before, spewing 9/11 conspiracy…
grrlscientist | October 22, 2007tags: humor, cartoon, blogging
Image: Isabella Bannerman [slightly larger view].
oracknows | October 21, 2007Maybe this is the one. On the other hand, it may be more appropriate to the victims of Orac's Respectful (and not-so-Respectful) Insolenceâ¢.
Maybe I'm beginning to understand this LOL cat thing after all...
oracknows | October 15, 2007Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn't be more different other than their being twits.
One of the longest-running and best autism blogs, Left Brain, Right Brain, is closing.
It would be one thing if the trials and tribulations of everyday life had led Kev to make this decision, as they do for so many other…
oracknows | October 14, 2007Yes indeed, if you ever want to cite any of the pearls of brilliance laid down on a regular basis here, you can. Heck, you can even cite comments on blogs!
So now you know.
Here's a sample citation.
sporte | October 14, 2007I've been reading quite a bit lately about Universities setting up virtual classrooms in Second Life, so when Bertalan Meskó from ScienceRoll invited me to come give a poster, I decided it was time to take the plunge. Besides, I'm going to be teaching an on-line bioinformatics course this spring for Austin Community College, so this seemed like a good time to find out what the fuss is all about.
Tomorrow, Bora Zivkovic (A Blog Around the Clock) and I will be the first ScienceBloggers (that I know of) to give poster presentations in Second Life. Our talk will be at 4 pm GMT, 12 noon EDT, and…
oracknows | October 11, 2007One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine.
So what happens when…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
oracknows | October 9, 2007Let me just take a moment to join fellow ScienceBloggers Ed, Revere, RPM, Zuska, Nick, PZ, Razib, Steve, and Bora in encouraging everyone to vote for one of our own, Shelley over at Retrospectacle, for a $10,000 Student Blogging Scholarship.
Don't do it just because I asked you to. Do it because she runs an excellent blog and deserves it. Also, if you don't vote for Shelley, we'll shoot this dog.
Well, not really. I could never shoot a helpless dog. I love dogs. But vote for Shelley anyway. Or maybe we'll give this dog a bath whether he needs it or not.
laelaps | October 8, 2007The finalists for the CollegeScholarship.com $10,000 scholarship have been announced, and SB's [I stand corrected, excuse the faux pas] Sb's own Shelley of Retrospectacle is one of them! Make sure that you go over to the voting page (the contest from here on out depends on votes from readers like you) and vote for Shelley (and tell all your friends too).
Also of note are two other science bloggers in the long list of 20, The Big Room (and little things in it) and Anthropology.net. I was hoping to make the finals myself, but even though I didn't make it I have something to shoot for next time…
clock | September 26, 2007This was Anton's idea, at the dinner the other night, but I will get it started here anyway.
An interesting animal I had
I never owned an unusual species of animal. As a little kid I had small turtle named Aeschillus. Later I had two horses, half-brothers, whose names meant the same in two different languages - Meraklija in Serbian and Kefli in Hebrew both mean "one who truly enjoys life and good things in life". My wife was a better namer of horses - her last one, the one she brought into the marriage, she named Double Helix and his barn nickname was Watson. A cat and a dog also became "…
oracknows | September 20, 2007In today's earlier post, a commenter stated:
You sure do like that "long run for a short slide" phrase.
I wondered: Is that true? Do I use that phrase too much? So, like any good blogger, I did a search. And what did I find? I found that, in the entire history of this blog since it's been on ScienceBlogs (a year and a half now), I've only used the phrase a grand total of two timestwo times in less than two days, which may have given the impression that I'm overly enamored of that phrase.) In the history of my old blog, there was not a single use of the phrase.
I therefore conclude that I do…