{"id":35,"date":"2010-12-15T10:17:05","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T10:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/?p=35"},"modified":"2010-12-21T20:06:56","modified_gmt":"2010-12-21T20:06:56","slug":"settling-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/2010\/12\/15\/settling-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Settling in"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sorry, another “place-holder” post, end of teaching semester and pre-Xmas “Help I still haven’t done XYZ!” kind of thing, all a bit frantic, hopefully some new content coming….<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve just penned an official sign-off post at Nature Network<\/em> <\/strong>to indicate to any remaining readers there (both of them?) that I have relocated. So I will leave this as mostly an Open Thread for anyone who wants to comment on the re-location (keep it clean).<\/p>\n

It has been an interesting experience blogging at NN. When I set up there almost exactly a year ago I was already a fairly experienced online ranter, having been blogging for a couple of years (and commenting round the blogosphere for a couple more) as part of the UK “bad science”<\/em> community<\/a>. I started the NN blog as an outlet for my more respectable (non-ranting) material, though it probably didn’t actually work out that way.<\/p>\n

In particular, when I started at NN I had thought to use the blog to re-publish the kind of respectable stuff I write as editorials and historical pieces for the Physiological Society’s<\/a> magazine\u00a0Physiology News<\/a><\/em> – which does not, as yet, have online comments threads. However, those pieces took quite a lot of re-writing to “re-direct”<\/em> them from a solely physiology audience to the general science \/ cell mol biol readership at NN. As a result I never did as many of them as I was \u00a0hoping, and Not Ranting<\/em> tended instead to switch back to my regular preoccupations of pseudoscience, science in the news for various reasons, and annoyances (though history still got a decent representation).<\/p>\n

Now, I am one of those weird people who actually read comments threads. Indeed, I like<\/em> comments threads, and lurking in them and discussing on them, much more than I actually like writing blogposts.<\/em> So one definite reason for re-locating here was to have a less restrictive comments policy than at NN (specifically, \u00a0not requiring registration), \u00a0and thereby hopefully to generate a bit \u00a0more discussion.<\/p>\n

The other reason was to try and widen the readership a little beyond the very scientific-focussed one at NN. \u00a0This was probably less of an issue for me than the comments, as my other blogging is already directed at a more general readership. Indeed, one of the reasons so many scientists blog about pseudoscience is that it connects with a lot of non-science\u00a0people, simply by\u00a0virtue\u00a0of it being something they have\u00a0often\u00a0been exposed to in their daily life.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I live in hope of new readers, and new commenters. And to close out with, in case there are<\/em> any browsing and they would like to know a bit more about what to expect here, I thought I would post up a few links to my back-catalogue, highlighting the kind of areas likely to recur here.<\/p>\n

As I already posted<\/a>, the three main topics here seem likely to be science in the news\/or science policy, scientific history, and pseudoscience. So I will indicate some favourites from last year under each.<\/p>\n

First, some history pieces: the first and third one are derived from articles in Physiology News<\/em>, while the middle one is a tribute to my father’s scientific mentor, Professor Jean Hanson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Charles Darwin, the physiologists and the physiological society – from the 1870s to the present<\/a><\/p>\n

Pioneer of muscle contraction (Jean Hanson)<\/a><\/p>\n

A hundred years ago – the Hill Equation<\/a> (on AV Hill<\/a>)<\/p>\n

On science policy, I would probably pick my piece on why concentrating funding on a few high-flying labs – the preferred solution of most agencies to the UK science funding squeeze – is not really a solution:<\/p>\n

Funding the elite is not the real problem – a response to Sir Paul Nurse<\/a><\/p>\n

– and I was also pleased with:<\/p>\n

The grass may be green somewhere, but the blue skies here look pretty dark<\/a><\/p>\n

– which dealt with the ever-vexed idea of whether you can predict which scientific discoveries are ultimately going to turn out to be important.<\/p>\n

And finally, on my most regular theme of pseudoscience, there is my Summer adventure with the anti-vaccine gang, in which I was accused of being an “official front blogger”, or something, for “the magazine” Nature – which seems especially ironic about now!<\/p>\n

Just when I thought I was out…<\/a> (Part 1)<\/p>\n

It’s a conspiracy – and you’re ALL in on it!<\/a> (Part 2)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorry, another “place-holder” post, end of teaching semester and pre-Xmas “Help I still haven’t done XYZ!” kind of thing, all a bit frantic, hopefully some new content coming…. I’ve just penned an official sign-off post at Nature Network to indicate … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-pseudoscience","category-science-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}