Monday, September 1, 2008

Blogging has serious downsides

Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. So, the embarrassment continues. As many of you no doubt recall (I wish you didn't), I recently responded indignantly to an article in Nature that reported a skeptic was prosecuted for the negligent homicide of a sick woman. The story ran that the woman was kept alive by the placebo effect and that the skeptic's explanation of the effect, via a display at his museum, undermined its force and thus led to the woman's death. But, as PZ Myers (!!) soon pointed out to me, the article was published in the Futures section of Nature and was therefore, well, science fiction. I thus had to retract my post (very, very sheepishly).

As I reported soon afterwards, the author of the Futures article, Peter Watts, then wrote a nice blog entry on having taken me in, which resulted in quite a few more people witnessing my silliness. And that, I thought, would be the end of it... How wrong I was. Henry Gee, a Senior Editor (!!) at Nature, has now found out about my foul-up and today wrote a piece on his blog about it. So, cue more embarrassment...

Henry, if you're reading this, I'm usually not this gullible. I swear.

4 comments:

  1. Tee hee. Har har. Hoot hoot hoot. *slaps thigh repeatedly*, *wipes tears of mirth from face*, *falls to the floor giggling*.

    Dude, you are FAMOUS.

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  2. I am reading this, and ego te absolvo. We Nature editors must get our olympian pleasures where we may (snort giggle).

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  3. Thanks for the absolution. I sincerely hope you forget about this incident soon, I plan (one day, when I'm big) to submit articles to Nature. :-)

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  4. what...???

    but you were my tutor and tutors have total omniscience and are immortal.
    i dont understand...

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