Part 2 my video podcast, aka “vlog” — just two years after the first episode. Apropos for April 1st. (I have been informed by JoHo that his friend Jon had a similar vlog.)
PicPedant Coverage
PicPedant (previously) now has over 11,000 followers, and the last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of interesting media exposure. In addition to the first interviews with ExposedDC and Buzzfeed, I had an interview on NPR’s TLDR podcast with Alex Goldman, alongside Adrienne LaFrance:
And shortly afterward I appeared on BBC World to do a 5 minute segment on debunking fake photos. I wore a Thinkgeek 8-bit necktie, which host Jon Sopel seemed to like.
I have MetaFilter to thank for catalyzing all this media exposure (also see MetaTalk). In addition, I’ve also had interviews with Craig Silverman at Poynter and Malcolm Coles at the Daily Mirror.
Coverage has also extended to Petapixel, MediaBistro, Imaging Resource, and even ABS-CBN News back in the Philippines.
Update: I also spoke with Glenn Fleishman for an article in The Economist.
The interviews and media exposure have died down now, but the pedantry continues. I’m still wondering where else I can take this. (I’ve registered PicPedant.com and pointed it at a placeholder but haven’t had time to do much beyond that so far.)
Recent Reading
Our theme today is Dubious Medicine.
The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Vitamins. I grew up in a rather Vitamin C-affirmative household, and it’s only just recently that I learned how much if it was from the influence of Linus Pauling and his strong — if unscientific — advocacy for Vitamin C megadosing.
Multivitamin researchers say “case is closed” after studies find no health benefits. I’ve heard of doctors prescribing low-sodium V8 instead of vitamins for people with certain diseases because vitamins can stress the liver. Confession: I still take a gummy vitamin every morning but it’s mainly because I got diagnosed with a Vitamin D deficiency over the winter.
Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience. I occasionally go to Whole Foods for organic meat and vegetables but still shake my head when I walk by the aisles with homeopathic and naturopathic remedies. Same deal at Trader Joe’s and Mom’s Organic Market.
Seeing Even More Quackery in Your Facebook Feed? Natural News Is to Blame.
Caturday!
Seriously, these cats.
Great Falls
Some photos from Great Falls Park (the Virginia side) where we stopped for a quick hike while it was nice out last Sunday. (We had previously visited Great Falls in 2006, seeing it from Olmsted Island on the Maryland side.)
We also hiked a bit up the Patowmack Canal Trail, but it was rather muddy and we didn’t get too far.
From one of the overlooks we also saw kayakers going over the falls in the near-freezing water, and I got some fuzzy slow-motion video:
PicPedant
- @PicPedant
- Exposed DC Interview
- Slate story on viral pic accounts mentions PicPedant on page 2
- Buzzfeed: 14 Incredible But Fake Viral Images – And The Twitter Account Debunking The Picspammers (by Tom Phillips)
There’s a certain class of Twitter users who post nothing but pictures, calling themselves names like “HistoryPics”, “EarthPix”, “SpacePorn”, and such. They’ve been popping up a lot lately, posting photos (and Photoshops), minimally captioned and rarely attributed, duplicating each other to extend coverage, or spawning copycats. The pics tend to go viral, then the accounts collect thousands and millions of retweets and followers, and they leverage the traffic to sell spammy promo tweets and affiliate ad links.
This annoyed me, so I started @PicPedant on a lark. Late on a Friday afternoon, PicPedant replied to pic accounts with cursory corrections, attributions, and links to original photographers and artists. It took little more than simple reverse image searches and a little extra hunting, harking back to my days debunking Filipino urban legends with my old site “Pula.ph.”
Two days later PicPedant had over a thousand followers. Now, a week later, it’s at two thousand and still growing, with messages of encouragement and gratitude from journalists, photographers, developers, designers, educators, and even people who work at Twitter. It’s nowhere near the hundreds of thousands that the other picspam accounts have, but does reflect a vein of passion on the internet for deeper engagement with scientific and historical imagery than the insipid, decontextualized captions churned out by the picspammers.
ExposedDC interviewed me about it, and Tom Phillips of Buzzfeed has highlighted some good debunks. (Tom was doing similar debunk articles before me, and also ran pedantry hub Is Twitter Wrong?, which in hindsight was a definite influence.)
Now I can’t stop. What have I gotten myself into?
- More from The Atlantic on the two teenagers who run “HistoryPics” with a cavalier approach to image licensing and fact checking. They earn up to $44,000 a month, leveraging this ill-gotten fame into a social marketing company.
- It’s history, not a viral feed: on how the viral “history” and “fascinating” pic Twitters detract from serious education.
- “Fakes”: ongoing series of debunks on Paleofuture by Matt Novak, one of my favorite people on the internet.
- Charlie Warzel: 2014 is the year of the viral debunk.
Frosty
Cold snaps and polar vortices have been dropping temperatures down to single digits (ºF) lately, forming these lovely sheens of frost on the car windshield; it almost seems a shame to have to scrape them off.
(And at least once the frost was on the inside.)
Caturday!
Brought the cats to the vet today for their annual checkup and vaccine boosters. Here is how Martha looks at the vet:
And here is how Amelia looks at the vet:
Amelia has a bit of gingivitis and will need daily applications of gum gel. You can tell which cat was much less happy about this trip.
Bill Murray on Mendel and the Philippines
Interesting quote from the Bill Murray Reddit AMA thread about how a visit to the Philippines made him think of Gregor Mendel:
But I would like to know about Mendel, because i remember going to the Philippines and thinking “this is like Mendel’s garden” because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.
Gregor Mendel was the Augustinian friar and gardener whose experiments with peas laid the foundation for modern genetics, in what would become the Czech Republic, back in the 19th Century.
The Philippines, of course, has been colonized by Spain and the United States, and its people have always been a mix of Southeast Asian, Chinese, Spanish, South American, and Pacific Islander genes since prehistoric times. Basically, Bill Murray said we’re a lot like Gregor Mendel’s peas. Some time I will need to write about my Genographic Project DNA test results; they were surprising.
Catgrab
Sometimes Amelia Cat likes to hang out on a shelf and ambush me with a grab as I pass by.
This reminds me that both cats are about due for a claw-trimming.