Blog housekeeping
oracknows | November 13, 2011This morning, I was forced to do something that I rarely do, namely shut down a comment thread and ban a particularly noxious troll for sockpuppetry. The post in question dealt with one Michael J. Dochniak and his ridiculous and scientifically unsupportable notion (I refuse to dignify it by calling it a "hypothesis") that Latex used in the packaging of some vaccines causes autism. In truth, I probably let that thread go on far longer than I should have. Also, I probably should have banned Mr. Dochniak a couple of months ago for repeating the same arguments again and again and again after…
oracknows | July 4, 2011Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Believe it or not, your normally blogorrheic host is taking this holiday off. For one thing, I have to work on my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshop at The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 next week. For another thing, I have a fair amount of work for my actual job to do before tomorrow morning. So in the meantime I'll do what I like to call a "lazy blogger trick," namely to post an open thread. I'll also refer you to an excellent post by Mark Crislip about the difference between clinical thinking and critical thinking. It's such a good point that I might have to…
oracknows | April 21, 2011
I demand the sum of.....ten MILLION visits! Muhahahahahaha!
Yes, I know I did that bit before--twice, three times, even!---but I liked it so much that I wanted to do it again, at least until my readers run screaming away, annoyed that Orac, of all people, would recycle the same old joke over and over.
Of course, after 3,000,000 visits, I basically gave up even noticing at each new million visit mark; so it's been nearly three years since I recycled this particular joke. This time's different, anyway, even though it's been six years, four months, and ten days since December 11, 2004 that I've…
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…
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,…
oracknows | July 20, 2010...remember that the following three domains will always point to where I am:
http://www.respectfulinsolence.net
http://www.respectfulinsolence.org
http://www.respectfulinsolence.com
Also remember that, should anything happen, I still have my old Blogspot blog Respectful Insolence, which can be reactivated at a moment's notice, as I did last year when an attempt at a software upgrade at ScienceBlogs took longer than anticipated.
The fastest way to find out what's going on, though, is probably my Twitter account:
http://twitter.com/oracknows
And, don't forget, I also have my other super secret…
oracknows | May 31, 2010Today is a holiday in the U.S., Memorial Day. This is a day when we remember our war dead, but the three day weekend that accompanies the last Monday in May is also viewed as the unofficial start of summer. Consequently, I decided to take it easy and simply post a bit of e-mail from a reader apparently with the 'nym trose313:
You need a good dose of positive energy. Such negative rantings cannot be good. Plus, you are very one sided, which is never good. There is a lot of wonderful alternative treatments out there and when one hides behind such slanted information as you, I tend to wonder…
oracknows | May 17, 2010Yesterday was a sad day indeed, as a blogger that I've been following almost since I myself started blogging has decided to close up shop:
It's been a long time coming but the time has come. Effect Measure is closing up shop, after 5 and a half years, 3 million visits and 5.1 million page views of some 3500. You commented on them some 37,000 times. It's been a grand ride but to all things there is a season. It's time to simplify my life and while my family has had me all along, at times science got short shrift. Now my time is getting short and I want to turn my attention to my research, the…
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…
sb admin | December 8, 2009From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ):
Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org
(I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
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…
oracknows | November 8, 2009In a nod to fellow ScienceBlogger Ed Brayton, with his hilarious Dumbass Quote of the Day, I hereby inaugurate the "Idiotic Comment of the Week," culled from this very blog. I don't guarantee that I'll do it every week, but when I see neuron-necrosing idiocy below and beyond the usual call of pseudoscientists and quackery boosters who occasionally like to try to match their "wits" (such as they are) with my reality- and science-based commenters, usually to hilarious effect, I'll give it the "honor" it deserves. This week, despite highly intense competition (thanks to a recent infestation of…
oracknows | November 1, 2009I just looked over my statistics for the month of October 2009, and I was shocked. Pleasantly shocked, but shocked nonetheless.
Why do I say that?
I say that because traffic from October 2009 is more than twice the traffic from October 2008. Moreover, it's not an anomaly. Although there have been fluctuations in traffic over the last year, so far the trend has been steadily upward, so that I've more than doubled my traffic since this time last year. Not bad, not bad at all. Actually, it's more than that. It's friggin' unbelievable. If, when I started this thing nearly five years ago, someone…
oracknows | October 22, 2009Apparently, some of my readers in Canada are getting this when they look at any of my Suzanne Somers posts:
No other country seems to be affected; at least, no readers from other countries have reported the problem to me.
This will not do. The Overlords have been informed. In the meantime, if you are in Canada, I apologize. Ads for such rank quackery and misinformation have no more place on ScienceBlogs than the creationist ads that popped up a while ago. Fortunately, from my locale, I have not been able to replicate the problem. However, if you are in a country other than Canada and see…
oracknows | September 22, 2009Science-based Medicine, a place where sometimes a "friend" of mine pontificates, is temporarily down. Recently, the SBM crew moved the blog to a new server. Beginning over the last two or three weeks, the blog became buggy. Very buggy. Response times became painfully slow, and then last Friday SBM went down and stayed down nearly an entire day. Valiant efforts and arguing with the hosting company got it up and running again over the weekend, although it remained painfully slow to browse. I thought I had harkened back to those days of yore when I used to use a 9600 baud modem. Then, sometime…
oracknows | July 30, 2009The last couple of nights, I guess, have proven that Orac is not quite as durable as his namesake. Having been up nearly all night working against a deadline for my Komen Foundation grant application and only gotten a couple of hours of sleep each of the last couple of nights, this morning, I've got nothing. I overslept by over an hour and came flying into work all late and discombobulated. (Fear not. Thursday is not my O.R. day. My patients are safe.)
So what does a blogger do in this circumstance, when he's all tired and has zero time to produce a substantive post? What else? Open thread!…
oracknows | July 2, 2009I may be a little late to the party, but that's because my laptop happens to have ad blocking software installed. However, blog bud PalMD rubbed my nose into a little kerfuffle that's been going on here the last couple of days. Basically, some really, really bad advertisements have been popping up. Ads for quackery like this popped up:
Lovely. Here I am pointing out why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy is an unethical boondoggle of a quackfest, full of violations of the most basic protections for human subjects, and what's appearing above my post?
Ads for chelation therapy! And I…
oracknows | April 2, 2009While I'm trying to hammer my grant application into good enough shape to show my collaborator and given that it's been nearly a year since I did this last, now seems as good a time as any to have an open thread. Say your piece.
Oh, and by the way, I see that HIV/AIDS denialists have infested Tara's brief post about Christine Maggiore. While you're waiting for more pearls of insolence from the fevered mind of Orac, you might want to give her some tactical air support.
oracknows | January 9, 2009...but only temporarily!
As you may have heard, our benevolent leaders at ScienceBlogs are finally doing a major upgrade of our blog publishing software. That's the good news. I'm hoping the back end is much easier to use and more responsive. The bad news is that the whole ScienceBlogs site is going to locked down. It will still be there. You can still read it and browse every scintillating post, but none of the ScienceBloggers will be able to post, and none of the readers will be able to comment. Bummer. Hopefully the upgrade will be worth it.
The lockdown period will begin at 1 PM.…