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Computers and social media Personal

In case you’re wondering why the Insolence is so light today…

…the reasons are threefold. Reason #1 is my iPhone. As I mentioned the other day, the microphone mysteriously stopped working while I was in Phoenix. At first I thought it was a network thing, as on less rare than I would like occasions I had had difficulty with AT&T in which I might have trouble […]

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Computers and social media Personal

Bizarre iPhone behavior, or is it AT&T?

So here I sit in the Phoenix airport, which (woo-hoo!) has free wifi, contemplating a most puzzling problem. My iPhone, which was working just fine last night and which still seems on the surface to be working fine is behaving most strangely. My wife tried to call me, but I couldn’t pick up because it […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery

Another failure of the memory hole, thanks to the Internet

Poor Jeni Barnett. You remember Jeni Barnett, don’t you? She’s the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for “copyright infringement” in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett’s show. […]

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Computers and social media Medicine Politics

President Obama and technology

It’s no secret that I’m a Mac geek, at least not to any of my readers, family, or friends. Neither is it a secret at my job that I’m a Mac geek, mainly because, although the university where I’m faculty is perfectly fine with Macs, the cancer center where my laboratory, clinic, and office are […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Television

Jenny McCarthy gets Rickroll’d

As you may remember, the evening after the Hollywood face of the antivaccine P.R. machine Jenny McCarthy was scheduled to take part in a web chat. At the time, I suggested sending questions in to the Oprah website, to see if any would get through. I’m sure there was some serious screening and vetting of […]