Blog housekeeping
oracknows | January 1, 2009I realize that I said I would take New Years Day off, but I saw this and felt a brief post was in order.
I also realize that some will never believe that it's not false modesty when I express amazement that so many people show up here day in and day out to read my written meanderings. It's also not false modesty when I marvel that I actually am nominated from time to time for various blogging awards and even (on rarer occasions) win.
So it is again that I've been nominated for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog of 2008 for the Weblog Awards.
Cool. My thanks to everyone who nominated me.
I also…
oracknows | October 14, 2008Blog friend Dr. Val Jones has moved. She's no longer blogging at Revolution Health but has instead gone solo, blogging at Getting Better with Dr. Val. She's also doing a weekly gig at Science-Based Medicine now, and indeed has started out with a bang. Let's put it this way: There are few bloggers I know who have coined a term that is likely to become fairly widely used in the skeptical blogosphere, much less coined the term in their first post.
Dr. Val's work is definitely worth checking out both at her own blog and her sideline gig.
oracknows | August 27, 2008In its quest to rule the science blogosphere, the Borg--I mean ScienceBlogs--Collective has assimilated yet another blog, it would appear. It's a good one too, and adding its uniqueness to us will only strengthen us.
So please welcome blogger (not to mention frequent commenter on this very blog) Blake Stacy and Science After Sunclipse to the Collective. Go on over and say hi. Tell him Orac sent you.
oracknows | August 26, 2008If there is one thing I hate with a burning, red-hot passion in a website/blog/whatever, it's content that autoplays when I access a site. To have a John Philips Souza march start blaring unexpectedly or some video start suddenly and noisily is a jarring experience, and I consider such content to be an abomination, a blight on the web that must be eliminated. I particularly hate such content when it's an advertisement.
That is why I must reluctantly but nonetheless angrily note that our usually benevolent Seed Overlords have seen fit to place just such an abomination on ScienceBlogs,…
oracknows | August 17, 2008It's Sunday, which makes it a perfect time for a little blog housekeeping, especially about a feature that used to appear regularly on Fridays.
As you may recall, after the death of Echo I put Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus for a while because I just couldn't get myself into the appropriately light-hearted and silly frame of mind. Time has passed, and, although things will never be the same, a semblance of normalcy has (somewhat) returned. The loss still hurts--a lot--but my wife and I are slowly and reluctantly adapting. (We did finally share that third ear of corn, by the way; I don't…
oracknows | August 12, 2008I am commanded by my Benevolent Overlords, and I answer.
Seed Media Group, (the aforementioned Benevolent Overlords) are taking a reader survey. To encourage (i.e. bribe) you to participate, they're holding a drawing among those who actually respond to the survey, with the prizes being a lot of great Apple stuff, including an iPhone 3G, a MacBook Air and a 40GB Apple TV. The good news is that at the moment not too many people have responded. That raises your odds for winning the Apple stuff.
Go forth and tell our Overlords what you think.
oracknows | August 5, 2008Remember how I mentioned that the venue for the ScienceBlogs Readers Meetup was going to be changed? Well, the new venue has been announced:
The new spot will be at a bar on the west side called Social. Seed has reserved a room in the back, and it's three floors in case we need even more room. Seed will buy the first round of pitchers (alcs and non-alcs).
Details:
2pm-4pm on Saturday, August 9
Social
795 8th Ave (close to 49th St.)
New York, NY 10019
Be there, Aloha.
oracknows | August 4, 2008Remember how I mentioned last Friday that the ScienceBlogs Reader Meetup is scheduled for 2 to 4 PM on Saturday, August 9 at the Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History?
There's apparently been a change in plans. Don't worry; it's not canceled, but apparently the venue is going to change. There were some major concerns about the number of people who said they were to show up and early weather reports for Saturday afternoon that do not look favorable (thunderstorms predicted). Because of these factors, our benevolent Seed Overlords have decided that a new location must…
oracknows | July 28, 2008
I demand the sum of.....three MILLION visits! Muhahahahahaha!
Yes, I know I did that bit before--twice, 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.
The horror, the horror.
Sometime overnight, this blog hit another milestone. Sometime early in the morning, Respectful Insolence⢠recorded its 3,000,000th visitor. Unfortunately, "sometime this morning" occurred while I was happily sawing logs, making me unable to record the 3,000,000th visit for…
oracknows | July 26, 2008I'm a bit late with this plug, but hopefully our host this week won't be too mad at me. It's that time again, time for those interested in the application of critical thinking to dubious claims to gather, as we do every two weeks, to celebrate the best the skeptical blogosphere has to offer (and "celebrate" the worst that the credulous blogosphere has to offer). It's soon going to be time for the 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics Circle. This time around, it will be hosted at The Lay Scientist on Thursday, July 31. Martin's call for submissions is here. Guidelines for what the Circle is looking…
oracknows | July 22, 2008It's summertime, and the living is easy...well, not quite. It's been a hectic and depressing summer so far. However, I am going to be able to allow myself one weekend away from the drudgery of grant writing. You see, our Seed overlords are repeating the infamous blogger meetup that happened last year in August. Because they lack imagination (and because it's the time when the largest number of us can make it), they plan on doing it in August again this year. It also turns out that they want to put together some sort of "meet the bloggers" event--in someplace air-conditioned, of course, but to…
oracknows | July 12, 2008Don't forget, everyone, the 91st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and due to land at Sorting Out Science on Thursday, July 17. Check out the guidelines for what we're looking for and get your bst skeptical stuff ready to submit before the deadline. The contact information and deadline for this particular installment are listed here.
In the meantime, I've tentatively decided to take the organizer's prerogative and to host the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle myself in November. If life gets crazy, and I change my mind, I'll let you know. If you still want to host, know…
oracknows | May 30, 2008In a couple of hours, I'll be en route to my favorite city in the world, a place where, although I lived there for but a brief three years, I felt completely at home.
Chicago, baby!
Yes, I'm on the way to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago. While there, I'll be checking out the latest and greatest findings from the world of cancer therapy. As any blogger would, I'm hoping not just to learn something but to find interesting blog material.
In the meantime, don't forget that the 88th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching on Thursday, June 5 at…
oracknows | May 4, 2008Forgive me if you find bloggers trumpeting their traffic numbers to be painfully boring. Truth be told, sometimes I find them boring too. However, I hope you'll indulge me just this once, given that regular readers know how rarely I do posts dedicated to discussing my traffic. (Just remember that blogging is an exercise in ego gratification, anyway.) It's just that March and April have been the best two months ever in terms of traffic on this blog, and I can't resist taking a moment to post about it. Just take a look:
In March, there were 128,996 visits to Respectful Insolence, and in…
oracknows | February 13, 2008
I'm baaack.
Well, thanks to free WiFi at Panera's, I was never really truly away. Thanks to Comcast, I was away longer than usual. In any case, although between waiting for Internet access, running errands, and doing some snowblowing last night, I didn't have time to do the usual epic substantive posts that I'm known (and either loved or hated) for. That's unfortunate, because it figures that when I go three or four days without any Internet access other than that I can manage to find by having lunch or getting coffee at a place with free WiFi, lots of things that I would have liked to…
oracknows | February 11, 2008I hate you, Comcast.
I really do.
My hatred of Comcast also explains the paucity of activity on this blog over the last few days. You see, over the weekend, I moved to a larger house, and I've had no Internet access other than Panera's or Starbucks for the last three days. Before that, I had lined up a couple of brief posts over the weekend, as well as a rerun for this morning in anticipation of being back up and running this afternoon. Instead, here I am in Panera's having a tasty lunch but also posting a brief rant and explanation composed right after my encounter with Comcast.
I went from…
oracknows | December 28, 2007Orac's circuits have yet to recover from the assault on his logic circuits caused by the über-woo of a couple of weeks ago, coupled with the even more powerful woo two weeks before that. Consequently, in order to marshal additional time scour the Internet for only the finest woo to be featured in 2008, he has decided that Your Friday Dose of Woo will take a brief but well-earned holiday hiatus. Fear now, however! There will, however, be at least one, if not two, other posts today, and YFDoW will return in 2008, bigger and badder than ever.
In the meantime, now that Christmas has passed,…
oracknows | December 26, 2007While I'm recharging a bit from the Christmas festivities yesterday to the point where soon I'll be able to write a substantive post, full of the Respectful Insolence⢠and science or medicine that readers have come to expect, here's something to amuse (I hope).
On Sunday, I wrote a not-so-respectfully insolent takedown of a truly mendacious Huffington Post article by antivaccinationist and card-carrying member of the mercury militia, Deirdre Imus, wife of washed up shock jock Don Imus. In essence, while deconstructing her misinformation about the alleged dangers of vaccination, I also…
oracknows | December 26, 2007We interrupt this post-holiday blogging slowdown for an important blog housekeeping message. Something weird happened to Respectful Insolence⢠over the weekend before Christmas.
Sunday, I was composing a little missive to autopost over the holidays. I went to the pulldown menu in Movable Type to assign a category to it and noticed something odd. There were many more categories than I had, many of which had nothing to do with my usual topics and most of them uncapitalized. My user-defined categories for posts were there, but a whole bunch of unfamiliar categories had appeared. Puzzled, I…
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,…