Announcements
oracknows | March 29, 2011Well, it's over.
The grant is in, but it was painful, and I was exhausted, both in brain and body, last night. That's why there's no Insolence right now. Last night, I chilled, cracked open a cold one, watched some utterly mindless TV, and crashed early in order to be ready for a day in the OR. So that means it's time for my favorite blog space-killing gambit when things get too busy for me to lay down my daily dose of Insolence: Open thread!
Have fun. Well-rested, I'm off to the OR. I'll be back later.
oracknows | March 15, 2011Our (mostly) benevolent but unfortunately all-too-uncommunicative Seed Overlords have finally bestowed upon us another report regarding the ongoing DDoS attack. Believe me, I know many of you can't access ScienceBlogs and, most important of all to me, this blog, the better to read every word of Insolence, Respectful and otherwise, that pours from my keyboard. I can even see it reflected in my traffic over the last week or so.
Here is the latest on the explanation:
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating…
oracknows | March 9, 2011You, my readers, have been complaining about flakiness in Sb that goes above and beyond the usual technical flakiness of the site. So have many other readers, in particular PZ's. After a couple of days where the blog loaded slow as the proverbial molasses in Minnesota in January, our benevolent but not particularly communicative overlords have finally revealed to us the reason for our problems:
We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that…
oracknows | March 2, 2011Well, I'm off to the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology in San Antonio, where, as usual, I hope to learn about the latest advances in cancer surgery and hang out with old friends. Unfortunately, that means I didn't get around to writing a new post today, even though there is one development in the news that I really wanted to write about. Oh, well, if it still interests me, I'll get to it tonight while sitting around in my hotel room. If not, it probably wasn't that interesting in the first place!
In the meantime, today looks to me like a good time to do a lazy blogging trick…
jhalper | February 27, 2011The day has finally come. In our very first post, back in June, we wrote that the launch of the new website was slated for later in the summer. In fact, by then we had already been at it for months, and if we had known how much longer it was going to take, we might have thrown up our collective hands on the spot. So we are quite pleased to say that our new website is now on line, and it even seems to work most of the time. There are, of course, some new articles to read - a new wrinkle in insulin production, why fish scales shine, molecular Frisbee, and more - as well as press releases and…
oracknows | February 22, 2011What's the good of having a blog if you can't pimp your own appearances and those of friends?
In that spirit, let me just announce that Steve Novella will be featured as the guest on a live chat with Trine Tsouderos discussing alternative treatments for Alzheimer's, ALS and other neurological conditions at noon CST. Be there, aloha.
oracknows | January 14, 2011Bummer, people.
The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism has been announced for 2011 and will take place on April 9 and 10 in New York. It's going to be bigger and better than ever, going from one day to a whole weekend, and it has a killer lineup of speakers.
And I can't go. Damn you American Association for Cancer Research. If you had scheduled the AACR meeting one week later, I could have done what I did last year and made my meeting trip a two-fer, with a stop off for the NECSS conference first and then concluding with my yearly dose of cancer research updates. Oh, well...
But…
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
illconsidered | November 22, 2010Okay, "A Team" was a little to simple, and it was taken. Instead I would like to inform readers of the "CSRR" Team, or CSRRT. I will let the press release speak for itself:
NAME: Climate Science Rapid Response Team (CSRRT)
WEBSITE: www.climaterapidresponse.org
WHO & WHAT: The CSSRT is a match-making service between top scientists and members of the media and office holders and their staffs from various levels of government. Our group consists of dozens of leading scientists who wish to improve communication about climate change. The…
oracknows | October 20, 2010I really have to give those guys at McGill University's Office for Science and Society credit. They're fast. In fact, they've already uploaded video for all the events at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium. Here's the main page with the videos (the 2010 Trottier Symposium occurred on October 17, 18, and 19), and here are the individual links:
2010 Lorne Trottier Roundtable (moderated by Dr. Joe Schwarcz)
2010 Lorne Trottier Public Syposium
Investigating Pseudoscientific & Paranormal Claims with James Randi
Enjoy!
My "friend" also reports that a great time was had by all and he…
oracknows | October 18, 2010Posting will probably be very light the next couple of days because I'm at the Lorne Trottier Symposium. Not only have the organizers have packed my day with skeptical and science goodness, but I only have Internet access when I'm back at the hotel, which isn't very much. This is somewhat distressing to me because several readers have sent me a truly bad study implying that (with the press out and out saying that) because investigators couldn't detect signs of cancer in Egyptian mummies there must not have been cancer in pre-industrial times, the further implication being that all cancer is "…
oracknows | October 11, 2010
Well, this looks interesting. It's the 2010 Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium at McGill University in Montreal. This year, the theme is Confronting Pseudoscience: A Call to Action. A certain "friend of the blog" will be speaking with Ben Goldacre and Michael Shermer on Monday, October 18 from 5 to 7 PM on the Threat of Pseudoscience. He'll also be on Dr. Joe's radio show on CJAD 800. On Tuesday, October 19, the ever-amazing Randi will speak on investigating paranormal claims.
If you happen to be in the Montreal area or can get there on October 18 and/or 19, come on over to McGill. It…
illconsidered | October 4, 2010For any fellow Vancouverites out there, you can catch a free screening of "A Sea Change" (a movie about ocean acidification) at UBC. It's at the Norm Theatre in the Student Union Building this Tuesday, Oct 5, at 6:00 pm. It's being put on by the Student Environment Centre.
illconsidered | September 26, 2010We now return to previously scheduled programming.
Though some of us wonder if life will ever be the same again!
oracknows | September 19, 2010If there's one area where I've been remiss, it's been in promoting new skeptics groups. Maybe it's the enormous Orac-ian ego. Maybe it's sheer laziness. Maybe it's becoming too engrossed in work and my two blog projects. I will try to rectify that in the future beginning by flogging a new skeptics group from my hometown. Well, not quite my hometown, but southeast Michigan nonetheless. I'm referring to the Michigan Skeptics Association, which now has a blog, has had a meetup, and has announced a new podcast dubbed the Drunken Skeptics Podcast, which will debut soon. It's to be hosted by Adam…
oracknows | August 17, 2010...you might want to check out this talk by a certain "friend" of this blog, as well as the reception to follow (although why anyone would want to pay any money to hang out with him, I have no idea). A little birdie tells me it'll be pretty good.
oracknows | August 11, 2010...in not pointing out that one of my favorite blogs from the "old days" (as in four years ago) is back. The Second Sight, which closed up shop in 2007, reappeared a couple of months ago. It's as great as ever. Check it out.
thusspakezuska | August 2, 2010This blog has moved to http://scientopia.org/blogs/thusspakezuska
This announcement supersedes the announcement in the previous blog entry.
Thanks for reading TSZ here at ScienceBlogs, and I hope you will continue to enjoy reading TSZ at the new digs over at Scientopia.org.
oracknows | August 2, 2010...Scientopia, a new science blogging collective that just opened shop today.
You'll note that several of its founding members are refugees from right here at Sb, including White Coat Underground, Good Math, Bad Math, Adventures in Ethics and Science, The Questionable Authority, This Scientific Life, and Thus Spake Zuska. There are also several other intriguing-looking blogs there with which I'm not familiar. I might have to check them out.
Hmmm. The entire collective looks rather promising...
jstemwedel | August 2, 2010With this post, I say goodbye to ScienceBlogs.
Am I leaving because of the fiasco with the PepsiCo blog? Not directly.
That's not to say that there weren't serious issues raised by the whole incident. Many of these lie in the realm of journalistic ethics, at least as understood by people you might regard as affiliated with old school journalistic outlets (notwithstanding the fact that many such outlets currently have a significant online presence). The analyses by Paul Raeburn, Curtis Brainard, and John Rennie all do a nice job setting out the central issues in case, so do click through to…