Blogging
cwilcox | June 10, 2010... drumroll please....
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I'M IN!
I feel so honored to be chosen as one of the top 9 finalists!
Go check out the post that made it: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
Of course, there are some FANTASTIC posts in the top set with me. Go check out all of them! They include my fellow sciblings Jason and Eric, as well as other great bloggers like Ed, Margaret and Carl. Basically, it's a list of everyone I mentioned before, plus a couple of other ones just for kicks ;)
Congrats to all, and good luck to everyone! I can't wait to see who Dawkins picks as the Top Quark!
cwilcox | June 9, 2010Sorry to be so late to the announcement party - my stupid, f-cking lovely computer has decided that it doesn't feel like connecting to the internets anymore, so I'm a little hard up for online time.
Anyhoo, thank you to everyone who voted for Observations of a Nerd! Thanks to you, my post "Evolution: The Curious Case Of Dogs" has made it to the semi-final round. You can see all the other semi-finalists here.
There's some stiff competition in there, notably from fellow generalist sci-blogger Ed Yong, my favorite botanist Margaret, and a slew of scibling like Scicurious, Jason Goldman, and…
laelaps | May 8, 2010
Written in Stone is now available for pre-sale on Amazon.com (as well as a few other online stores)! The description of the book, author bio, etc. will have to be updated, but otherwise it is good to see it get its own page, and many thanks to the several of you who have already pre-ordered copies.Yet another cool new paleo blog - Crurotarsi: The Forgotten Archosaurs. Looks like I am going to have to update my blogroll again.In the "online first" section of Evolution: Education and Outreach there is a new paper on science communication (which also covers the Darwinius kerfuffle) by Carl…
cwilcox | May 2, 2010Ahoy mates, and welcome aboard the 36th edition of the Carnival of the Blue!
The Oceans as a whole:
As many of you might know, CITES had its once-every-three-years meeting during which it decides which organisms are to be regulated and how. As Rick MacPherson explains, the overall message was simple: FU, Ocean. He takes a closer look at the CITES listing process and digs a little deeper into the "secret ballots."
Maybe CITES will take note if the world made it clear that oceans matter. There's no better time than now to take Oceana's Ocean Pledge. If you do, $1 will be donated to Oceana to…
oracknows | April 20, 2010Day 3 of the 2010 AACR meeting dawns, and, sadly, I still have no posts. On the other hand, the reason I have no post yet today is because I've been attending the meeting and hanging out with old friends to the point where, when I got back to the hotel last night, I was just too damned tired to come up with anything coherent (which is really saying something).
What to do...what to do?
I know! Open thread time! It's the time-honored lazy blogger's fallback for times like these. True, I'm not PZ; so I doubt I could get the endless thread going that requires periodic resurrection as new posts,…
hrynyshyn | April 15, 2010When I created the Island of Doubt five years ago, I was fascinated by the battle between science and irrationality. I had just moved to the U.S., it would be several months before my work permit would be granted, and I needed an outlet to keep my writing skills sharp. Inspired in no small part by Chris Mooney's Intersection blog, I began posting weekly ruminations on the what I consider to be the "betrayal of the Enlightenment" so evident in my new home and elsewhere. Within a year or so, however, I began to focus almost exclusively on just one species of reality-denial: climate change…
laelaps | April 12, 2010
Caterpillars must walk before they can anally scrape (Not Exactly Rocket Science)Twitter taphonomy conversation reminded me of one of my favorite books, Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and Their Paleobiological Implications by Johannes WeigeltDeep-sea scavengers risk low-oxygen levels to have ham for dinner (via @mjvinas)The explosive chemistry of coal mines (by @deborahblum)Lemur species rediscovered after 100 years (ht @dendroica)Watch out for those falling blocks! - NYC gets destroyed, 8-bit style (ht @PD_Smith)Creepy cadavers - photos of old school dissections (ht @Bonesholmes)The Science of…
oracknows | April 4, 2010Remember John Benneth? He's a homeopath who runs a website called The Science of Homeopathy and produced a woo-tastic video claiming to show us how homeopathy works. Steve Novella also took on his video. For his trouble, he was rewarded with one of the most hilariously off-base attacks I've ever seen, even from anti-vaccine loons. So full of awesome looniness was the video that it induced in me a distinct sense of envy. After all, all I have is J.B. Handley attacking me.
Now, for reasons that elude me, Mr. Benneth has produced a second video. It's just as outrageous. In fact, it's even more…
laelaps | March 26, 2010
The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book?
Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will undoubtedly be in competition with numerous other science titles for the chance of being reviewed in the few publications which still review science books at all. Book tours, too, have become nearly extinct, and as a virtually unknown science writer I don't expect many (any?) people to show up at their…
oracknows | March 19, 2010I'm envious of Steve Novella.
No, the reason isn't his vastly greater influence in the skeptical community than mine, his podcast The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, or the fact that he gets called a lot more for commentary when something involving quackery versus science-based medicine comes up. He's earned that, having been at this a lot longer than me and under his own name. No, what irritates me is that he somehow manages to get homeopaths to make videos like this trashing him:
"Homeopathy: The persecuted Jew of modern Nazi fascist medicine"? Isn't "Nazi fascist" a bit redundant? Maybe…
laelaps | March 19, 2010
Earlier this week David Williams (Stories in Stone), Michael Welland (Sand), and I started a blog series about the details of publishing a popular science book (Parts 1, 2, and 3), but I have been a bit underwhelmed by the response. I had been hoping for some input from other published authors, questions or comments from aspiring book writers, and for the series to take the form of a conversation. Instead I feel like I am talking to myself. Is there anything anyone would like to know about the process of writing a pop-sci book? Or would you all prefer that I just get back to the science…
oracknows | March 14, 2010...about the internecine warfare that breaks out from time to time around ScienceBlogs. At times we do appear to be a lot like professional wrestling.
Can you find Orac in there?
oracknows | February 9, 2010About a month ago I wrote about how the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, is using the legal system to try to silence and intimidate Dr. Paul Offit. In it, I described an earlier lawsuit in which Dear Leader J.B. Handley sued Dr. Offit, and Dr. Offit ended up settling. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of taking Dear Leader's word for what the settlement was, and Dr. Offit has corrected me:
Thanks to Respectful Insolence for the support in the upcoming lawsuit filed against me by Ms. Fisher. I would point out only that the details of the "settlement" with Mr.…
oracknows | February 7, 2010My adopted alter ego may be nothing but a computer played by a box of colored blinking lights, but those few who are actually familiar with the 30 year old British SF TV show that featured Orac beginning in the last episode of its first season know that Orac is an arrogant and vain computer. Given that, how could I fail to notice a couple of accolades that came my way last week.
First off, on Friday, Respectful Insolence was included in a list of top skeptical blogs, along with Science-Based Medicine, NeuroLogica Blog (which Steve Novella informs me is down due to excess traffic and a really…
emjohnson | February 1, 2010Kind of Curious is hosting the latest edition of the premiere science blog carnival. Stop on in and thank him for an excellent collection.
jstemwedel | February 1, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders' approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it's medicine, but I'm happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities…
oracknows | January 26, 2010Dammit.
I realize that this has been floating around the blogosphere for a couple of days, but when I first saw it at PZ's place, I thought that Chis Clarke had stolen someone's blogging strategy notebook, except that I thought he had stolen mine, so spot-on is his channeling of just the right style to take on pseudoscience mavens, quacks, and other purveyors of woo.
There's just one problem. It's way, way too short to have been stolen from my blogging playbook. It needs to be about two or three times as long, minimum. It also needs a few sentences like this:
This sentence contains tortured…
oracknows | December 16, 2009Last week, I marked the occasion of my fifth anniversary in the blogosphere. Yesterday, my blog bud Abel Pharmboy marked his fourth anniversary in the blogosphere. Anyone who makes it past a year, as far as I'm concerned, has passed the test of time and shown himself (or herself) to be in this crazy thing for the long haul; people who have managed to pump out quality material for four years are exceedingly rare.
Like me, Abel has asked his readers to delurk. However, he has been disappointed by the results. Come on, people! Abel deserves more. If you're one of his readers and see this, do me…
oracknows | December 11, 2009
Has it really been that long?
It was a dismally overcast Saturday five years ago when, on a whim after having read a TIME Magazine article about how 2004 was supposedly the Year of the Blogger, I sat down in front of my computer, found Blogspot, and the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence was born. If anyone is curious, this was my first test post, and this was my first substantive post (well, sort of). Every year (at least the ones where I remember my blogiversary, I find it particularly interesting to go back to the beginning and see how true to my original vision for this blog I've…
oracknows | December 5, 2009My benevolent overlords at Seed Media Group yesterday announced (to me at least) a surprise new initiative. But, then, I'm always one of the last to find out about these things. In any case, it would appear that we're teaming up with National Geographic to share blog content and various other initiatives. The press release describes what's going on:
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIGITAL MEDIA AND SCIENCEBLOGS.COM FORM STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP
WASHINGTON / NEW YORK (Dec. 3, 2009)--National Geographic Digital Media (NGDM) and ScienceBlogs.com today announced that they have formed a strategic partnership…