Blog housekeeping
oracknows | January 7, 2007The name of this band is damned near perfect:
No, not the Shut-Ups (although that's a pretty cool band name, too). Anyone who reads this blog would know that I'm referring to Down With The Woo.
I wonder if their music is any good. If so, they could become the blog band of Respectful Insolenceâ¢. (or at least of Your Friday Dose of Woo, although most people seem to actually like Friday Woo). Fortunately, in that interest, I was informed of their MySpace page, which says:
Up from the ashes of cult heroes, Heros Severum. Powered by Macintosh. DWTW is a live production experiment. Every show is…
oracknows | January 5, 2007Just a word to my readers. The ScienceBlogs site has been having technical difficulties since yesterday.
You may have noticed that the load times were very slow yesterday and that at times the site was even completely unavailable. The same thing happened for a while this morning, and early this morning I couldn't get into Movable Type to do my traditional last minute editing before I go to work. All the feeds for the main page, the Last 24 Hours page, and all the Channels have not updated since this morning, and I've been informed that even blog-specific RSS feeds appear not to be updating…
oracknows | January 1, 2007Sadly, for many, today marks the end of their vacation (or at least of their long weekend). Fortunately, I was smart enough (as well as able) to take one last precious day off tomorrow to head into the city and check out an exhibit at the Met that my wife and I want to see.
As I prepared to take a week and a half off just before Christmas, I had been concerned that I had not heard anything from my intrepid blog mascot (no, not the Hitler Zombie). Would 2007 be a year without him?
Fortunately, the answer is a resounding "No!" He's back, and badder than ever. In fact, you might even say he's…
oracknows | December 30, 2006Yes, after a week off, both from work and (mostly) from blogging, I'm back. I know I promised the occasional new material, but I found that not blogging for a week was actually a good thing and thus didn't post anything new after Christmas. Even though I'm back, though, I'm taking one more day off before firing up the blog again. In the meantime, I've scheduled for this afternoon the reposting of a couple of tasty posts that were--shall we say?--a bit controversial in their day. I think they're definitely worth reposting, even at the possible expense of drawing an even larger horde of trolls…
oracknows | December 22, 2006Like many, I'm heading out of state today to visit family and friends and celebrate the season. Just like the last time I took a vacation, because my Internet access will be sporadic, I've scheduled some new material to appear over the next couple of days, but for the most part while I'm gone I've scheduled the reposting of a bunch of material from the old blog, this being the perfect excuse to move it over to the new.
However, blogging being what it is, an obsessive activity, time and Internet connection allowing, I'll almost certainly find an excuse to post a bit of new material to save you…
oracknows | December 4, 2006Everyone seems to be taking this quiz, so I thought, what the heck:
Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 81%
You are a terrorist-loving scoundrel who hates our dear leader and the values he defends. There are few redeeming qualities about you. You most likely celebrated when the evil-doers hit us on 9/11, then opposed the Iraq war when we tried to pay them back. You hurt us at every step and cause troops to die in the field by questioning Bush's decisions. You are most likely a lost cause, doomed to be a brainwashed victim of free thought and liberalism forever. No dose of…
oracknows | October 20, 2006Don't forget, everyone, my favorite blog carnival (favorite, of course, because I happen to be the one coordinating it) the Skeptic's Circle is fast approaching and will appear at Left Brain/Right Brain on Thursday, October 26. Naturally, because of Kev's interest in debunking autism quackery, his decrying of the fall in vaccination rates resulting from the bogus MMR/autism scare, and his lampooning of the conspiracy theories popular among the "vaccines cause autism" crowd and the mercury militia. I naturally expect to see a lot of posts about autism and the dubious "therapies" used to treat…
oracknows | September 3, 2006I don't know why, but yesterday I was thinking about Spinal Tap. It's a hilarious movie that I haven't seen in a while, and I've wanted to own the DVD for a while now. Somehow, this thought reminded me of something. Something about the blog. Something that, in my absence and now my return from vacation, I had forgotten to post. A monthly blog ritual, so to speak. Indeed, the memory of one particularly hilarious scene from This Is Spinal Tap triggered a reminder of what I must do.
So, here and now, I rectify my oversight:
I bet you didn't know that EneMan helped to build Stonehenge, did you?…
oracknows | September 1, 2006The latest edition of the History Carnival has been posted at Frog In A Well.
Even though I've been on vacation and blogging (not to mention blog traffic) has been light other than reposts, someone actually submitted something I posted, thus keeping someone linking to me in my absence. I hope the lack of activity is due to lots of people being on vacation at the end of August and my relative lack of new material and that things will perk up after Tuesday. In the meantime, I'm taking it easy and counting down the few remaining days of vacation.
In actuality, though, the only reason I didn't…
oracknows | August 23, 2006From deep in Northwest Ohio, where at my in-laws' house there is no Internet access save for dialup (and then it's a toll call), I've managed to find a Panera's. I've also managed to notice that, for some reason, if you're using Safari, you may not be seeing my spiffy "repost" logo that's supposed to appear in the upper left hand corner of each repost from the old blog, for reasons that I haven't figured out yet. However, on Firefox it works OK. Please let me know if it does or does not show up for you on your browswer in the comments here, and when I get better Internet access in a day or…
oracknows | August 21, 2006By the time you read this, I'll be somewhere on either the Pennsylvania Turnpike or Ohio Turnpike on the our yearly trip to visit my wife's and my families.
But never fear! I've decided to use this opportunity to do something that I've been meaning to do for a ever since I made the move over to ScienceBlogs: Move a lot of what I like to call Classic Insolence from the old blog over to the new blog, starting with some cancer-related posts tomorrow. These posts, lovingly chosen by me, will be appearing at a rate of two to five per day. (Heck, the blog will be more active in my absence than it…
oracknows | July 21, 2006A little blog housekeeping is in order here.
Several days ago, the overlords at SEED Magazine installed a new spam filter, which, despite some fine-tuning over the last several days, unfortunately still seems a bit more indiscriminate than we'd like, sometimes gobbling up legitimate comments without our being able to figure out what words are triggering the filter. On the internal discussion forums, some of us, such as Ed Brayton, have been scratching our heads over what triggered the spam filter on some comments. Worse, because this filter works before Moveable Type ever sees the comment,…
oracknows | July 9, 2006It's come to my attention that new spam filters placed on Friday have caused problems on some blogs with commenting. They apparently have also caused problems posting, because the post I was working on last night kept producing errors when I tried to save it. The process of trial and error led me to figure out that certain ordinary, non-profane words or certain links would trigger the error, which leads me to suspect the new spam filter. (I can't mention the specific words here, because then this post would get eaten too.) In any case, it caused me a great deal of frustration last night,…
oracknows | May 15, 2006Woo-hoo!
Sometime yesterday, while I was in clinic, my Sitemeter hit 500,000 visits!
Let's see, it took one year, five months, and two days to reach that level. When I started my blog I never imagined it would reach 100,000 visits, much less a half a million. (Of course, it takes PZ a little more than a month to rack up that many visits, which keeps me humble--at least as humble as a surgeon can be.) In any case, thanks to my readers who like what I'm laying down and the bloggers who discovered me early on and gave my humble blog a boost.
How long to a million? Let's find out.
oracknows | May 9, 2006In an attempt to periodically provoke discussion on various issues, our overlords at Seed plan on posing questions to us ScienceBloggers. The first question, which some of us have already answered is this:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
At first, I was going to go with RPM's answer (and Razib's almost answer), nuclear weapons. But then I thought about it again, and changed my mind. For one thing, it is unlikely that nuclear power would have been invented without the prior development of nuclear weapons.…
oracknows | May 5, 2006I had planned on posting about this last night, but a late night in the O.R. kept me from it. Consequently, Chad beat me to it, but better late than never, I say.
I join Chad in apologizing to my readers for the tornado ad that started running on ScienceBlogs earlier this week and includes a Flash animated tornado that flies over the page. I don't mind advertising. Really, I don't. After all, something has to pay for ScienceBlogs, and, as much as I like to think my writing is good, I doubt that many people would pay Seed for the privilege of reading it. However, I detest web ads that…
oracknows | April 12, 2006After his behavior in Monday's post about the Geiers, I've reluctantly decided to issue my first ban ever on a commenter. The one on the receiving end?
Fore Sam. Is anyone surprised?
His rhetoric has become increasingly violent-sounding, with his posting comments suggesting that Kathleen Seidel should be taken out and horsewhipped. That's over the top. I cannot tolerate threats, either explicit or implicit, against others in the comments on this blog and have come to agree with Kev. I thought about it a bit after Fore Sam's remark above, and I've decided to ban him for 30 days. After that, I…
oracknows | April 5, 2006By the time this appears, I should be on my way home from the AACR. For some reason, the meeting this year didn't get me all fired up the way it usually does. Perhaps I'll post in more detail about why that may have been after I get home.
In the meantime, here's something I've been meaning to try out but never have, simply because I never thought I had the critical mass of readers to make it worthwhile. When Daily Kos or PZ has an open thread, they'll gets dozens, if not hundreds, of responses. If I were to try an open thread, I feared I'd get one or two.
I've overcome that fear, though, and…
oracknows | March 31, 2006This is just to announce briefly that comment spam has once again reared its ugly head. Some spam comments are actually making it through the filters to be published here. I delete them as soon as I see them, but I'm dismayed that they're getting through.
As a result I may be tightening up the spam filter score a bit. That means more comments than usual might be held up for moderation. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
Blame the spammers, the lowest life form on the Internet.
oracknows | March 23, 2006I forgot to mention in my comment policy yesterday a couple of things that people commenting here should know. Because of our comment spam problem, filters at most of the blogs at ScienceBlogs are set up such that putting more than two hyperlinks in a comment will automatically trigger a filter that will flag the comment for moderation, regardless of any other factors. In addition, there are also a variety of keywords and PERL regular expressions that I have added to the filters to catch additional spam that might occasionally catch legitimate comments unintentionally. I mention this now…