oracknows | March 3, 2016Well, I'm here.
Yes, last night I arrived in Boston for the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting down at the convention center. For any skeptics who might be so inclined the Boston Skeptics are planning a meetup on Saturday, details firming up. No talk this time, but at least we can hang out for a while. There probably won't be too much drinking on my part, either, because I'll be flying home Sunday morning, and flying with a hangover is not a good thing. How do I know this? Don't ask. I am, however, happy not to be in Detroit tonight, given that the Republican debate will be occurring mere…
oracknows | October 8, 2014
I mentioned yesterday that this week is Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014, or, as I like to call it, Quackery Week. At the time, I wasn’t sure when or if I was going to do another post about the quackery that is naturopathy this week. I was going to play it by ear and see what came up. Then, one of my commenters mentioned this subreddit, Read what naturopaths say to one another. Conclusion: manipulative, poorly trained, and a threat to public health. Now, I’m not a big fan of Reddit, largely because I can’t figure out how to find things easily, and I hate the sheer ugly and user hostile…
gregladen | June 21, 2013Kickstarter has said this, about this:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found…
gregladen | June 21, 2013Humanity truly sucks and I can prove it. One word: Reddit.
UPDATE: ONLY PART OF HUMANITY SUCKS SEE THIS NEWS
OK, you may want some background.
A Reddit Regular, perhaps a Reddit celeb (or at least he is now) wants to write a book on how guys seduce women, and he's asking for money on Kickstarter. One of his tips is this: You move in close, pull out your penis, take the woman's hand and .... whatever.
I find it interesting that many commenters are referring to that as inappropriate, or sexual assault, by way of objecting to it. I'm pretty sure, though, that it is rape. Probably depends on…
kbonham | January 15, 2013There are a lot of reasons that posts to this blog sometimes don't happen for months at a time, but one of them is that I can often get sucked down the rabbit hole that is Reddit. If you don't know about reddit yet, you may not want to click that link, but if you do know (and you're reading this blog), you may know about one of the communities (subreddits) there - a place called r/askscience. It's a forum where people can ask questions of a scientific nature (anything from "Why are pigeons so successful as an urban animal?" to "What's so special about the speed of light?"), and then actual…
jwilbanks | January 27, 2009Science Commons got picked up on reddit this week. It was surreal - we hit the top of the charts for about 24 hours, got way more web traffic than usual, and the SC/Dylan video got almost 4000 views. Wacky.
And now our logo's embedded on the reddit logo on the home page.
This is neat. We've spent years toiling away at Science Commons and save one or two articles, mainly which tend to focus on me personally, we don't get a lot of attention. I was surprised and gratified to see this happen, organically, from a lot of folks who I wouldn't have expected to give a hoot about us.
I'll address a…