Almost four years ago the first design for Real Skeptic was launched, this was on the 30th of November, 2011. A no-frills design, which made it a tad restrictive in what was possible with it. The second incarnation of this design, which was intended to fix some of these limitations, was launched on the 6th of March, 2013.
Michael Mann
Working with scientists for over a decade has taught me one thing: they are an interesting and varied bunch. Fiercely dedicated to their chosen career, love what they do, very enthusiastic when given half a chance to talk about their research, and very inquisitive. They perk up when somewhere a scientist says “huh, that’s funny.” After all, this often means there’s something new and exciting that they can dig into.
Technology and the science it’s based on are everywhere in our society. Understanding science is crucial for navigating yourself through our society and taking part in the political process. Without this we can’t make sound decisions on what we as a society want to do.
It doesn’t mean that someone has to be completely versed in a scientific subject to make informed decisions. With the amount of information we have on all kinds of science subjects and what this means for the issues we face that is just not possible. Though at least a basic understanding is needed.
During the AGU 2014 Fall Meeting John Cook, Peter Sinclair, and I interviewed a stellar list of scientists. Everyone brought their A game which gave us some incredible footage. At the end of the conference I returned home with about 36 hours of footage.
I’m already working on editing all that into videos that I can upload to my YouTube Channel. But there’s also a lot of material that I can’t use for those videos. Most of the time because they don’t fit the subject I’m tackling. Though it doesn’t mean they’re not good, quite on the contrary.
Since June nothing happened on this website aside from me responding to comments. It wasn’t because I was busy at work, or the other usual time sinks were demanding my time and energy (that’s just the norm). No, it was because I was working on other projects. One of these was building the website for the podcast About a World…
How internet fighting works by SMBC
Anyone who frequents my website regularly, and has either participated in the comment sections or read them, knows I have a very strict moderation policy. I have some very clearly stated rules for conduct, violate those and I will intervene. To me it doesn’t matter if you’re a friend, colleague, opponent, a regular, or just someone passing by. The rules I have for participating on this website get applied equally. There are even clearly stated appeal rules just in case I made a mistake with my moderation.
I already mentioned before that most commenters like the environment that I create with my strict moderation policy. It’s because of those rules that you can freely discuss the merits of what I wrote without the vitriol and derailing of discussions that’s so common. I’ve seen commenters defend my rules as they see what I do and how different my comment sections are because of that.
The past couple of weeks my website wasn’t exactly stable with it often going offline for a couple of minutes. It wasn’t uncommon that my website wasn’t reachable for half an hour or more. To resolve these issues I had a chat today with my hosting company and my website was going down thanks to DDoS attacks. Although these weren’t…
Technically migrating the content to Real Sceptic was already done on the 21st of last month. And on the 27th the domain settings for SkepticTV were changed so that skeptictv.net now points to this website. That day marked the official end of SkepticTV.
One step of the migration I didn’t execute, which was migrating email and WordPress subscribers to Real Sceptic. This turned out to be a bit of a hassle and I wouldn’t be able to migrate all the subscribers. Considering there were just a few subscribers I decided not to do this.
After a good run of almost 3 years SkepticTV will sadly cease to exist (I was the broadcast technician for them). The past 3 years were extremely fun and eventful with our show, the many guests we’ve had, and us appearing as guests on other shows. We also made a difference through the fundraisers we held.
But unfortunately a lot of us had trouble finding the time for keeping the show, website, and our social media accounts running. It takes a lot more time to run a 2 hour live show about scepticism than most people realize. Most of us also have their our own projects, jobs, education, and other real life obligations competing for time. As it wasn’t fair to burden those that still had some time with the sole responsibility to keep SkepticTV running the decision was made to discontinue the show.
This week there was again a distinct lack of updates on my website. Partly because I was sick for a couple of days the previous week, and partly because I had a busy week at work. But mostly because I was spending my time working on an update for the theme I use for this website.
Like the last time that I announced a theme update it means that something significant has changed. With the 2.0.7 update it was about the changes I made to the available pages and their impact on this website. For my visitors this was an important update as those pages contain for example the rules of conduct for this website. Versions 2.0.8 through 2.0.12 didn’t get a mention as they were small point releases that either fixed a small issue or changed something minor.
However, with version 2.1 a few things have changed significantly. Most of it you won’t notice but there are three big changes that influence how you interact with this website.