Blogging
sa smith | July 8, 2012Hai guise!
Because of some complaints that NatGeo is getting about the posts/comment threads at ERV, Im taking them down here and putting them up at an alternate location (lots of you have offered, havent decided where yet, will update yall when its worked out).
No big whoop-- This is NatGeos property and I dont want them getting harassed over our free speech rights. And frankly, I like being advertised on NatGeos homepage (this is a science blog, after all) so following their rules is conducive for that.
So, #1, if you all want to comment here, try very hard to follow NatGeos suggested…
oracknows | May 27, 2012My American readers don't need this reminder, but, because I'm continually humbled at how many international readers I have, I thought I'd just mention it anyway. We here in the States are in the middle of a three day holiday weekend for Memorial Day on Monday. As a result, I'm taking it (mostly) easy, although yard work still calls, as do my grant and paper that need to be submitted. Given that, I thought this lazy Sunday would be a good time to provide a blog status update about the ill-fated transition to WordPress that began on Monday. I'll try to have a "real" post tomorrow or Tuesday.…
oracknows | May 21, 2012...the long-awaited migration to WordPress, promised ever since NatGeo took over:
Notice: ScienceBlogs.com will be migrating to a new publishing platform starting on the evening of Monday, May 21 at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. Please do not add any comments or posts between then and Tuesday afternoon. We will update this page when maintenance is complete and normal blog activity can resume.
More recently, we were informed:
Please plan to make any posts on the Moveable Type platform before 7 pm ET; otherwise they are unlikely to be moved to the WordPress platform during tonight's "catch-up"…
sa smith | May 21, 2012Hi guise!
SciBlogs will be changing cosmetically a bit in the next day or two (gonna look more NatGeo and less Classic SciBlogs).
There is no point in commenting between 7 pm Eastern Time tonight and when the update is complete (sometime Tuesday, afternoonish is the goal, we will tell you when its done) , because your comments will not be transferred. Comments made before 7 pm Eastern should transfer fine.
So, youve got about two hours left if you want to say something.
Then you have ~20 hours to admit anything you want to the entire internet and the comment will disappear forever Tues…
oracknows | April 2, 2012Blogging might be a little sketchy for the next couple of days, because I'm at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting (AACR) in Chicago, all to to imbibe the latest and greatest in cancer research. I'm sure I'll manage to get a post or two in while I'm here, but I doubt there will be any Orac-ian epics before Wednesday (other than, perhaps, a recycled blast from the past) or Thursday because, well, there's just not a lot of time, and Internet access can be dicey at times while I'm traveling.
In the meantime, until I get a chance to post something later today or tomorrow, it's…
kbonham | February 27, 2012If you've been reading science blogs for a while, you probably know about Open Laboratory. It's a yearly anthology of the best science blog writing on the internet. And the submission form is now open (there's a handy little badge in the left sidebar too).
If you appreciate the stuff that I do here, please consider submitting the posts to Open Labs. With so many amazing science bloggers out there, I doubt I'll make it very far, but I've decided to put this out there because I think it will help me strive to work harder. When blogging has to compete with my work at the bench, and with…
oracknows | December 16, 2011Seeing Martin's mention that he's hit the sixth anniversary of his entry into the awoke a vague sense of unease in me. It was that sort of unease that one gets when one realizes that he's forgotten something but can't quite remember what it is that he's forgotten.
Then it came to me.
Somehow, some way, I had missed my very own seventh anniversary of starting this blog, which was last Saturday. Yes, seven years ago, on a gray and dismal Saturday in December, something possessed me to start a Blogspot blog (these days, if I were to start a new blog, it would be WordPress) and then to generate…
oracknows | September 13, 2011Unfortunately, I don't get to see very many movies these days. My wife and I both lead very busy lives, and with periodic spasms of grant writing, plus several new administrative responsibilities, it's just hard. Last weekend, however, a movie that I'd rather like to see came out. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet; so I can't give you a definitive review, but the movie caught my interest because it shows at least one thing that I don't recall ever having seen in a movie before. The movie is Contagion, and here's its trailer:
It's not so much the storyline that interests me. After all,…
lborkowski | August 23, 2011As those of you who read other ScienceBlogs are probably already aware, the ScienceBlogs overlords have decided that all bloggers on this network must blog under their own names -- no more pseudonyms. I don't understand or agree with this policy. Some of my favorite ScienceBlogs are written by authors using pseudonyms, and the quality of their content is consistently high. Readers may not be able to check these authors' credentials, so the amount of trust they place in the authors' blogs is based on the content of posts. (I don't know that quality and credibility are the rationale for the no-…
oracknows | August 21, 2011Sadly, a crank has silenced another skeptic.
Many of you may know EpiRen, which is the Twitter and blog handle (and sometimes commenting handle here) of René Najera. René is an epidemiologist employed by the state public health department of health of an East Coast state and has been a force for reality- and science-based discussions of medicine, in particular vaccines. In fact, he's come out as a strong defender of vaccines against anti-vaccine lies.
Unfortunately, EpiRen is no more, at least online; that is, if he wants to keep his job.
As related to my by Liz Ditz, A Public Servant,…
sa smith | August 9, 2011It gets lonely here in virus town.
Its like me... and Vincent... and... me...
So Im always happy to stumble across another virology blag, especially ones written by fellow grad students!Rule of 6ix
:uncovering the science behind viruses, vaccines and what it means for us
Bamford doesnt post super often, but check out the side bar in his archive to get caught up on some cool topics that I have *not* covered in that kind of depth before here on ERV (and sometimes havent covered at all!).
And actually, while we are talking about it-- If you know of some other virus blogs out there, leave a…
oracknows | July 4, 2011Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Believe it or not, your normally blogorrheic host is taking this holiday off. For one thing, I have to work on my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshop at The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 next week. For another thing, I have a fair amount of work for my actual job to do before tomorrow morning. So in the meantime I'll do what I like to call a "lazy blogger trick," namely to post an open thread. I'll also refer you to an excellent post by Mark Crislip about the difference between clinical thinking and critical thinking. It's such a good point that I might have to…
sa smith | June 13, 2011Oh thank god.
I am not a '3 Quarks Daily' finalist.
While I certainly appreciate readers nominating and voting for me (getting that kind of support for the semi-finals was award enough for me!), the day I win some kind of award for writing is the day before the end of the Universe as we know it. I write ERV for fun and for educational purposes and for lulz, not like, for realsies writing equal to that of Carl Zimmer.
That being said, I am extremely pleased that 'Starts With A Bang' is still in the running. I think Ethan has, hands down, one of the best science blogs. Not just 'best of…
sa smith | June 8, 2011What is going on?
The Nominees for the 2011 3QD Prize in Science Are:
Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:
34. ERV: Barnyard Week: White Chickens Are ERV Mutants
WHAT IS HAPPENING???? I DONT UNDERSTAND!!!
Me no thinks me rites gud, but if u lieks u can votes for me?
cagapakis | May 5, 2011It's been an exciting week for me. On Monday I successfully defended my thesis! Now that I have established my scientific credibility to you all, here is a picture of me at my defense party wearing my "Trust me I'm a Dr" Dr. Pepper t-shirt and hitting my SpongeBob SquarePants piñata.
And on Tuesday I went to two really interesting events/talks/discussions about science and scientists. First up was Debbie Chachra's awesome seminar "Unpacking Gender: Men and Women in Science, Technology, and More," sponsored by the Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering. She described her seminar…
oracknows | April 21, 2011
I demand the sum of.....ten MILLION visits! Muhahahahahaha!
Yes, I know I did that bit before--twice, three times, 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.
Of course, after 3,000,000 visits, I basically gave up even noticing at each new million visit mark; so it's been nearly three years since I recycled this particular joke. This time's different, anyway, even though it's been six years, four months, and ten days since December 11, 2004 that I've…
oracknows | April 11, 2011As many of you probably know, I'm proud to call Dr. Harriet Hall (a.k.a. the SkepDoc) my friend, and, I daresay, so is my wife. We've both hung out with her at the last two TAMs, and we've hit it off pretty well. I also admire her history of standing up for science, reason, and science-based medicine, something she's been doing longer than I have. I can only hope that one day I will reach her level of respect within the skeptical movement. Unfortunately, that will probably never happen until I cease being a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights, but such is the price of pseudonymity…
oracknows | March 29, 2011Well, it's over.
The grant is in, but it was painful, and I was exhausted, both in brain and body, last night. That's why there's no Insolence right now. Last night, I chilled, cracked open a cold one, watched some utterly mindless TV, and crashed early in order to be ready for a day in the OR. So that means it's time for my favorite blog space-killing gambit when things get too busy for me to lay down my daily dose of Insolence: Open thread!
Have fun. Well-rested, I'm off to the OR. I'll be back later.
oracknows | March 15, 2011Our (mostly) benevolent but unfortunately all-too-uncommunicative Seed Overlords have finally bestowed upon us another report regarding the ongoing DDoS attack. Believe me, I know many of you can't access ScienceBlogs and, most important of all to me, this blog, the better to read every word of Insolence, Respectful and otherwise, that pours from my keyboard. I can even see it reflected in my traffic over the last week or so.
Here is the latest on the explanation:
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating…