oracknows | September 28, 2017Two years ago, I wrote about a study that demonstrated how the antivaccine movement had learned to use Twitter to amplify their antiscience message. At the time, I noted how in 2014, when the whole "CDC whistleblower" conspiracy theory was first hatched, antivaxers were so bad at Twitter, so obvious, so naive. The Tweeted inane claims at government officials, scientists, legislators, and whoever else might have influence on vaccine policy, using hashtags like #CDCwhistleblower and #hearmewell. (These hashtags are still in use, but much less active.) However they did get better, to the point…
gregladen | August 15, 2017In a series of strange events, President Donald Trump once again invoked violence against a CNN reporter and, apparently, embraced the idea that he is a fascist.
Following the homicidal terrorist attack on anti-White Supremacist demonstrators, trump saw fit to post the following tweet, memorialized here in a retweet by Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer.
Similar to an earlier contrived production in which Trump himself is shown in a video beating a CNN reporter, this shows a train labeled TRUMP running over a CNN reporter in cartoon form.
That tweet was deleted soon after being posted. I…
gregladen | June 29, 2017Trump is reportedly pressuring public news media and other outlets to not distribute information about Obamacare, as they normally would, in an effort to sabotage the n-Law. This is what dictators do.
Trump's people in the "press" room have bullied the press to the point that they are finally starting to lash out. This is what dictators do.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/879783260137504768?ref_src=twsr…
Trump has attacked another female journalist, this time Mika Brzezinski, with another enigmatic blood coming out of her body parts comment.
This is what dictators do.
https://…
gregladen | January 23, 2017I'm not sure this has happened before, and most people are unaware, so I thought a quick note was in order.
If you were previously following the President of the United States on Twitter, when it was Barack Obama, you followed @POTUS.
Twitter has created an account called @POTUS44, which is for President Obama. You are now automatically following that handle.
Twitter redesignated @POTUS to apply to President Trump, and left all of the President Obama followers on that account as well. So, you are now following President Trump at @POTUS.
The same applies, in parallel, to the First Lady and…
oracknows | August 25, 2016I’ve mentioned on quite a few occasions that there’s a quote attributed to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that is much beloved of cranks:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
I also like to point out that Schopenhauer probably never said this and just how silly the thought behind this quote is when you think about it. Unfortunately, as I was perusing Twitter yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of this quote, but not in the way quacks and cranks usually intend. Rather, I was thinking of…
oracknows | July 7, 2015One of my favorite quotes from classic literature comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, when Alice encounters a rather strange character named Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty, as you will likely recall, was a giant egg with whom Alice got into an argument about the meaning of words:
And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down…
oracknows | June 8, 2015Before 2005, I did pay attention to the antivaccine movement, but it wasn't one of my biggest priorities when it comes to promoting science-based medicine. That all changed when Robert F. Kennedy published his incredibly conspiracy-packed black whole of antivaccine pseudoscience entitled Deadly Immunity. Sadly, almost exactly ten years later, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hasn't changed. He's still spewing the same antivaccine pseudoscience and conspiracy theories that he was spewing a decade ago, with no sign of letting up.
One thing that has changed over the last decade is the social media…
oracknows | November 12, 2014
Getting old sucks. I had a relatively long and busy day in the operating room yesterday, the kind of day that not so long ago I’d handle with no problem. This time around, though, it wiped me out, to the point where not long after dinner I crashed. Hard. Then I woke up around midnight long enough to drag my sorry posterior upstairs to my bed. It happens. It’s just that it seems to be happening more often these days.
So it was that I missed one of the most amusing Twitter happenings that I’ve seen in a long time; that is; until I woke up again early this AM. Dr. Oz just got pwned on Twitter…
oracknows | August 26, 2014Remember yesterday how, I referenced the ever-awesome bit about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and how after pulling the pin you must count to three, no more, no less, before lobbing the grenade at thine enemies? The implication was, of course, that I was on my third post in a row about the so-called “CDC whistleblower” and that was enough.
I lied.
Well, no, actually I didn’t lie. (But look for a crank to quote mine that two-word sentence.) Rather, I changed my mind. The reasons are three-fold. First, this is a crank storm that just keeps on giving when it…
gregladen | September 10, 2013What if you went to drive to work one day and the highway on ramp was closed, and a big sign across it said "Highway is closed. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Well, you would find your way to a different highway entrance. But say that one was closed as well.Then, you check around and find out that all the highways in your state are closed because the state decided to close them. No more highways for you.
Or, one day you go to check the mail and there is a single post card, and nothing else, in your mail box. The post card reads "The United States Postal Service has permanently suspended…
oracknows | March 31, 2013It's been less than a week since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski. In fact, as hard as it is to believe, I've been trying not to. Obviously, I'm failing, but what can I say? Things keep happening.
In particular, there's Eric Merola. You remember Eric Merola? He's the producer of a propaganda film extolling the virtues of Stanislaw Burzynski who decided that one movie was not enough. He needed to make another, in which skeptics are painted as the enemy, a shadowy cabal. Well, apparently he saw a certain video I posted last Friday, and he was displeased. Whether it was because the speaker…
drorzel | May 25, 2012The blog is recovering from the transition to WordPress, but I'm still not fully confident in it. So We'll turn to another corner of the social media universe for my procrastinatory needs this morning: Having Emmy answer physics questions on Twitter.
The same deal as when we've done this before: If you've got a physics question you'd like my dog to answer, post it to Twitter with the hashtag #dogphysics (or leave it in a comment, or email it to me), and Emmy will answer via Twitter, where she's @queen_emmy.
kcollins | December 16, 2011The second annual USA Science and Engineering Festival is fast approaching and people are starting to take notice of what a great resource the Festival organization has become. The mission of the Festival is to re-invigorate the interest of our nation's youth in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by producing and presenting the most compelling, exciting, educational and entertaining science gatherings in the United States. We are absolutely thrilled to have ranked as one of the 50 Essential Twitter Feeds for STEM Educators by Best Colleges Online!
Throughout the year, we at…
tsmith | June 23, 2011I have written and deleted this post. Twice. But damn it, it needs to be said.
I'm here in charming Montreal for the North American Congress of Epidemiology. It's a good-sized meeting, as far as epi meetings go. The site notes that it's a joint effort between four major Epi organizations: The American College of Epidemiology (ACE); The Society for Epidemiologic Research; the Epi section of the American Public Health Association, and The Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Collectively, those associations represent a lot of epidemiologists.
The conference started off well.…
hrynyshyn | January 19, 2011I've long been ambivalent about the merits of Twitter. Some may recall my "Why Twitter is Evil" post of a while back. That was written with one cheek mostly occupied by my tongue. It now seems clear that, whatever the original designs, the 140-character telegraph has become an invaluable network-building and maintenance tool, particularly for authors, activists trying to organize constituencies. This is all well and good. But the medium's dark side recently became all too clear following this past weekend's wonderful Science Online 2011 conference.
The story begins Saturday afternoon at an…
kcollins | October 8, 2010WE.NEED.YOUR.HELP!!!
Constellation Energy is running a "tweet" a promotion of the USA Science Festival and the Constellation E2 Grants program until next Friday Oct 15th. For each twitter user's "re-tweet" constillation Energy will donate $10 to the USA Science Festival (up to $10,000). And here is something to sweeten the deal. For every $10 raised, the Festival will match $10 so we have the potential of raising $20,000!! This money will be used for bus grants for inner city Washington DC students to come to the Expo. If we can get 1000 RTs, that means $20,000 to bring 4000 student to the…
tsmith | August 24, 2010Readers may be interested in participating in this, from Dave Wessner at Davidson College:
Building on a project I piloted last fall, I will explore the potential role of Twitter more intentionally this fall in a course I teach on HIV/AIDS at Davidson College. I invite you to join me in this exploration.
Here are a few details:
Basically, I am interested in extending the class conversation outside the classroom walls and beyond the appointed class hours. I want the students to begin thinking on their own about what aspects of the subject (HIV/AIDS, in this case) truly interest them. I want to…
sciencepunk | July 20, 2010A conversation cropped up on Twitter the other day about shared audiences. Specifically, Ed Yong and Alice Bell used this tool to compare the overlap in their followers.
So we science nerds wondered, how does that overlap look when you start adding in more bloggers? What is the shared audience between five, 10, 20 of the most prominent writers? This is very interesting to me, because I suspect that, even within a portal like ScienceBlogs, there is in fact very little sharing of audiences. Perhaps that's a reflection of the number of blogs people can reasonably follow. Maybe it's the…
cagapakis | July 16, 2010Check out these iGEM twitter pages to follow the antics of iGEM teams around the world this summer (and let me know if I missed any teams)!
iGEM headquarters @igem
Biotec Dresden @igem_biotec
Bielefeld @iGEM_Bielefeld
Brazil @igembrasil
Calgary @iGEMCalgary
Cambridge @camgem
Canada @igemcanada
Chiba @Chiba_iGEM2010
Debrecen @debrecenigem
DTU @igemdtu2010
Edinburgh @IlluminatiED
EPFLausanne @IGEM_EPFL
Freiburg @FreiburgBioware
Georgia State @iGEMGSU
Georgia Tech @georgiatechigem
Groningen @igemgroningen
Harvard @harvardigem
IIT Delhi @iitdelhiigem
Imperial @imperialigem
Illinois Software @…
eklemetti | July 8, 2010Thanks for all the words/advice about Pepsigeddon here at SB. If you missed it, the powers that be have officially pulled the plug on the PepsiBlog. However, this crisis (as much as blogging can be a crisis) has reinforced a lot of long-standing problems with the management here at SB, so not to sound like Fox Mulder, there is a lot more going on than meets the eye. Now that PepsiBlog is down, I'll return to posting at SB (for the time being at least). However, SB has lost a lot of credibility and very good bloggers as well, so times, they are a'changin'. I strongly believe in keeping a…