Every Bad Science column published since 2003 is archived here, and the new ones get posted every week, along with anything else I write. It’s searchable and you can make comments. The site is ludicrously outdated and will sometimes invite you to subscribe via “bloglines“, an ancient internet service run by a company that probably went bust before you were born.
You can browse the articles by category on the right: for example, you can see everything on “nutritionism” by clicking “nutritionism” in the categories section. You can also search by any keyword, just like google. This is a rather excellent resource: quote me, steal my ideas, but credit me or contact me first.
You can comment on most of the text: just click on the article’s title, and a place for you to write will magically appear. Here are the, er, “rules”, from the rules page in the pre-jurassic internet era of approximately 2003. Today they are preserved only to serve the obsessions of anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, caught forever in the MMR wars of the early 21st century. Quacks desperately portray them as a manifesto for censorship: I view them as the bored plea of a man in his twenties who wanted somewhere that dorks could discuss evidence and have fun:
Rules. Like I want to make rules.
You can comment on most of the text: just click on the article’s title, and a place for you to write will magically appear. This is healthy and more people should do it.
Sometimes you’ll find that there’s a fight going on already. Try to be combative, intelligent, and rude, but remember these three things: personal stories about your health will always be deleted; childish personal attacks are only permitted when they are very funny; and if your post is more than one thousand words long then you are officially a loser.
If your post is off-topic, or simply rabid, and you want to talk about you, you, and you, you might want to go here instead, where it won’t get in the way of an ongoing discussion. The discussions here are unusually high level, and linear, people read each other. If you prefer to troll then I’ll happily give you space but not at the expense of an interesting ongoing discussion.
If your post doesn’t appear, it’s pretty unlikely that I’m “censoring” your comments, regardless of how dramatic and exciting you might find that prospect. The spam filter has probably been triggered, and I don’t get round to looking in that bin too often. Just bung me an email and I’ll hook you out.
I really don’t think it’s a good idea for you to post anecdotes about your own health problems and treatments here. It’s extremely unlikely that they will inform a discussion about evidence, and experience here suggests that you may become offended and angry when other commenters disagree with your interpretation (as they are very entitled to do). Invite people elsewhere to discuss your anecdote, and if they want to, they will follow your link.
No libel, thanks. If you have been unfairly abused and you don’t like it tell me with an email and obviously I’ll get rid of it, sorry I can’t watch everything that happens here.
I happen to think it’s slightly more stylish to comment under your own real name, but that’s one of few things here that is only an opinion. Perhaps you don’t want your employer catching you skiving on the interweb, or you want to avoid hatemail from the anti-MMR lobby (forward it to me for a hate archive I’m compiling).
Generally if you’re an “involved party” you probably ought to identify yourself openly. If you don’t I may do so, especially if you are from the company/lobby being discussed and pretend not to be.
Cheers!
The discussion forums are here. I’m amazed they’ve not gone tumbleweed, given the number of places to discuss things on the internet, and I’ve not looked in for years, but afaict there are some nice and some nasty people there, like the internet. Any problems, email badsciencemods@gmail.com
You can read what I’ve recently been reading online on my “del.icio.us” page here.
You can also subscribe to the site as an rss feed by hitting this button [I bet that doesn’t work either]:
Or if you’re clever, www.badscience.net/?feed=rss2 is the address for the rss feed.
