Blogging
sb admin | November 27, 2009This week we are reading Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. This video was produced with a dedication to Kate, who explained to me why kids like this book so much even before they understand everything that's happening in it. She wisely told me that it's because kids rarely get to hear a story about a kid getting really mad, expressing their feelings, and without a neat fairy-tale or moralistic ending. Alexander just has a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, and he's not afraid to tell us about it.
I'd also like to dedicate this post to all of…
sb admin | November 20, 2009I am not in charge of SciWo's Storytime. Sure, it might look like I'm the one reading the books and operating the video camera, but Minnow exerts the ultimate executive authority as editor-in-chief. Some weeks no videos whatsoever are allowed to be made, some weeks she's content to let me pick the book, and some weeks she is quite happy to make a whole string of videos, so long as she chooses the content.
With that proviso, Minnow presents this week's edition of SciWo's Storytime featuring the book Little Squire the Fire Engine by Catherine Kenworthy and illustrated by Nina Barbaresi.
Now…
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 | September 23, 2009Hurt, but not defeated, the humongous giant clam....
Wait. Wrong story. Actually Science-Based Medicine is back. Finally. Go. Read. Enjoy. Particularly a bit about crank conferences.
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 | September 21, 2009Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime this morning or early this afternoon, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been "suspended." This is the second time it's gone completely down, the first being Friday for most of the day, and the performance of the site has been painfully slow all weekend, with interminable waits for page loads, etc.
The SBM team is aware of the problem. All I can say is that the problem is being worked on, but the technical guys are…
oracknows | September 18, 2009Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime earlier this morning after 7 AM but before around 10 AM, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been "suspended."
The SBM team is aware of the problem, and, quite frankly, I'm disturbed that the site isn't back up yet. I can tell you (and many of you may have noticed) that the site's performance over the last week has, quite frankly, sucked, with slow as molasses page loading, frequent database errors, and general poor…
oracknows | September 15, 2009This can't be right. As I was perusing the blog a little while ago, I noticed this:
That can't be right, can it? This blog can't be number one by any measure, be it the Healthcare100.com or anything else. It has to be a bug in the software. Top ten, I can believe. Number one, not so much.
But then, this blog passed the 5,000,000 mark a few weeks ago, and I didn't even notice. I must be getting jaded. Either that, or I'm full of crap with false modesty. Take your pick.
And I do think there must be a bug in the software somewhere to let me hit number one. I expect that the error will be…
razib | September 10, 2009I don't usually say much about September 11th because I don't have much original to say. Bu I realized recently that to a great extent September 11th was one of the reasons I got into blogging in the spring of 2002. Obviously I don't talk much about foreign policy or politics in any substantive manner, but in the wake of those events in September the media ecosystem seemed ill-equipped to respond to the changes in the story fast enough, and so non-tech related weblogs arose to fill the vacuum. And arguably that is why you are reading this right now (I actually had a blog for 1 week in the…
emjohnson | July 17, 2009
The World's Fair is recreated in all it's glory! Skulls in the Stars is currently hosting the thirteenth installment of the History of Science Blog Carnival. There are some amazing pieces in this edition so head on over right now and check them out. GG was also kind enough to include my post The Grassroots of Scientific Revolution.
Some of the most interesting pieces I read in this edition include:
Brian at Laelaps discusses the controversy of the cuttlefish:
Meyranx and Laurencet's paper played right into Geoffroy's hands. Even though they had not intended on refuting Cuvier, the…
oracknows | July 11, 2009I'm back from the Penn & Teller Show at the Rio. It was, as usual, highly entertaining. I haven't seen P&T since sometime in the late 1990s in Chicago, but they're just as good as I remember them.
Next issue: Shy and retiring putz that I am, it never occurred to me that any of my readers might want a meetup until one reader asked me about it yesterday. Perhaps my thoughts were colored by the memory of the couple of times before when I tried to do this with embarrassingly minimal to nonexistent responses. Judging from Twitter, though, there are at least a handful of you out there who,…
oracknows | July 9, 2009TAM or no TAM, Vegas or no Vegas, I can't help but mention that one of my favorite bloggers from years past, who shuttered up his blog back in 2007 back when he was with us here at ScienceBlogs, has reopened his Examining Room. Please take a moment to welcome him back to the blogosphere.
Now...back to TAM.
emjohnson | July 6, 2009Scientia Pro Publica #7 is now up at Greg Laden's Blog. This is the crème brûlée of science carnivals and includes the best writing from the past two months. Greg was kind enough to include my recent post The Struggle for Coexistence. There are some excellent posts in this edition, so click on over and check them out. Some of the ones I found particularly interesting in this edition include:
A Primate of Modern Aspect looks at the evolution of a malaria resistance gene in wild primates, a paper co-authored by my former professor Susan Alberts:
This is an important step forward in the…
razib | July 5, 2009An Index Of Blogging Clients:
Blogging clients allow you to prepare posts and then upload them directly. Useful for
-composing drafts of posts offline
-easier editing of HTML
-easier inserting and handling of photos
-easier editing of existing posts
Here's a list of the ones I know of. Any additions welcome.
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…
emjohnson | June 28, 2009 Our newborn takes after his father.The following is something of an impromptu experiment in live birth twittering. It started out simply as a means to update friends and family, but as events transpired we received some unexpected international attention. The entire labor lasted 47 hours, involved three different locations and two surgeries. This after we had carefully planned for a natural birth with no interventions. Thank you to the hundreds of people in at least eight countries who followed our story and sent messages of support. Special thanks to Henry Gee, Senior Editor of…
sjurvetson | June 26, 2009As I prepare to hand off this photoblog to Cobalt123, I thought I would share my favorite non-rocket photos. Each clicks through to a story or geeky observation.
Last Thoughts
Magic Toes
Fire & Ice
A Beautiful Computation
in the Wolfram sense
Curiosity
Diamond Age & Eyes
and even some people
Namaste.
gregladen | June 8, 2009Last week, a very bad thing happened to me, a life changing experience, the kind of thing many people with blogs would tell everyone about, trolling for sympathy and making everyone feel bad. Well, I am certainly not above doing that, but strategically I've decided to tell only a few people what is going on, and everyone else ... well, I'm going to leave you in a state of wondering. Which, of course, is my own narcissistic way of getting attention.
Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence. ... "There was no dinner," she said. "It was me…
oracknows | June 6, 2009Dr. Jay is back.
You remember Dr. Jay (namely Dr. Jay "I'm not anti-vaccine but I give vaccines only 'reluctantly' and am convinced that they cause autism" Gordon), pediatrician to Evan, Jenny McCarthy's son and frequent apologist for the antivaccine movement in the media. Specifically, he was most unhappy over my posts about Dr. Bob "too many too soon" Sears and about a child who died of Hib. If you peruse the comments in those two posts, you will see him once again disparaging science, touting his own personal clinical experience over the science failing to find a link between vaccines and…