It’s time for BLOGATHON 2011!

Wooooooooooooo!
My readership has grown a lot since last year, so let me explain for the newbies. Every summer I do something called Blogathon, a 24 hour blogging marathon for charity. Starting Saturday, July 23rd at 7:00am PST, I will make a new post approximately every 30 minutes until Sunday, July 24 at 7:00am PST. This isn’t a clever use of autoposting or writing things ahead of time – I’ll be coming up with new material all day.

Why am I so keen on spamming your Google Reader? Like I said, it’s for charity! Just like you’d pledge money to support someone who’s running in a marathon, you get to pledge money to support… someone who will be frantically typing in her pajamas while guzzling caffeinated beverages.

Hey, do what you’re good at, right?

And like the last two years, I’ll be raising money for the Secular Student Alliance, a non-profit organization that helps college and high school secular groups, primarily in the US but also globally. I’m on the SSA Board of Directors so I can attest to how amazing it is. And I hope this year’s Blogathon can crush our previous accomplishments:

2009: $531.17

2010: $2809.10

Assuming linear growth, that means we should definitely be able to reach at least $5,000 this year! …Shush, don’t lecture me on the hazards of putting a trendline through two data points.

So, what’s in it for you, my dear readers?

  1. You get lots of posts from me, and I do try my best to not resort to filler. Well, unless the previous post took a little longer to write because it’s more in depth. Or I have to take a particularly long potty break. …Though I do have a laptop now, hmmm…
  2. You get to watch my inevitable and hilarious decline into sleep deprived delirium.
  3. You get to feel proud about donating to a wonderful cause that’s fostering our next generation of secular leaders. D’aawwwwww.

You can donate by using the ChipIn widget below:

How much should you donate? It’s up to you! Whether it’s five dollars or five hundred, everything is appreciated. Or maybe you want to donate a penny per word. Or a certain amount of money every time I use a particular word. Or $10 per lolcat (looking at my past blogathons, I’d advise against this unless you’re wealthy).

Though this year I’ll start a new incentive: The people who make the top ten largest donations before 12:01am on Friday the 22nd will get to request a topic they want me to write about. You can do this either by leaving a comment with your ChipIn donation, or emailing me using the same email you donated with. I’m making the cut off early so I have a day to muse over these topics, so I don’t disappoint you with a completely asinine post. I’ll post the top donations (without donor information) on Thursday so you can attempt a last minute bid, or increase what you already donated.

But I warn you… Any super lewd or ridiculous requests will either be ignored or dealt with in the spirit of the monkey’s paw or the devil from Bedazzled. Do not try to out-clever me.

EDIT: And if you donate $5 or more, you’re entered into a raffle to win a signed copy of Michael Shermer’s new book, The Believing Brain. I have eight copies to give out!

And if you can’t donate, which I totally understand, I ask that you please help spread the word. Or email me/comment with blogging ideas (if I haven’t responded to one of your emails, it may be because I’m saving it). Or at the very least, keep me company during the blogathon! It gets lonely when it’s 5am and I’m blogging into the void.

Thanks for tolerating the info dump! And I hope you’ll be very entertained next Saturday.

Welcome, Savage Lovecast listeners!

As a longtime fan of the Savage Lovecast, I had an absolute blast recording the podcast with Dan. If you found my blog through it, I assume you came here because you found me vaguely interesting.* I talk about a little bit of everything here – mostly atheism, feminism, science, and sex – but here are some posts you’ll probably enjoy:

If you want a more in depth analysis on how crappy current G-spot research is, check out my recent post. And if you want more information on the survey by Dr. Darrel Ray that showed atheists feel less guilty about their sex lives, Greta Christina has a wonderful summary article here.

Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the internet!

Current readers – You can find the podcast here.

*Though it’s entirely possible you came here to tell me to stfu and not infringe on your Dan Savage time, which is totally fine since I feel that way about some guests too.

An important rule to remember

My friend Jaki just sent me this shirt as a surprise gift:Jen wearing a shirt that reads 'Don't drink and blog' while holding a bottle of wineThough she didn’t send me the wine. That was a gift from the Imagine No Religion conference. And an aptly named on, too – Big Bang wine from Blasted Church winery.

Guess I’ll have to refrain from blogging for the next hour or so…

Sometimes you can’t win

That’s the look I give when I’ve just lost a couple more brain cells.

[Transcript:
Day 1:
Man: Men are sexual beings! We evolved to be promiscuous!
Woman: Um, but biology isn’t an ultimatum. You can control your actions.
Man: *angry* YOU FRIGID FEMINISTS ARE TRYING TO SUPPRESS OUR SEXUALITY! I AM NOT A EUNUCH!!
Day 2:
Man: We should care about a skewed gender ratio because then I’d have more women to date!
Woman: No, we should care because women also have ideas to contribute. We don’t just exist so you can have sex with us…
Man: *angry* THAT’S SUCH A SEXIST STEREOTYPE!! WHY DO YOU ASSUME DATING = SEX?! MEN AREN’T SLAVES TO OUR BIOLOGY!!!
Woman: *stares blankly at viewer*
The Joys of Feminist Blogging]

Blag Hag 2011 Census Results Pt. 3

Time to respond to some of your comments! First of, a HUGE thank you to all the wonderful, thoughtful comments people left me. I really appreciate having people thank me for the blog and telling me to “Keep being awesome” (a phrase about 40 of you used, haha). Looking down the list and seeing that most of you just want me to keep doing what I’ve been doing definitely makes me feel like I’m doing something right.

Blog related:

Post moar plz :P

This was one of the most common comments I got, haha. Trust me, there are days where I have four great post ideas but I’m stuck doing homework – grad school keeps me a lot busier than undergrad. But at the same time, I do waste a lot of short posts on tweets, I’m going to make a more conscious effort to keep those things for posts. I’m trying, I’m trying!

I think it is always very interesting to read about your family (Dad atheist, Mum theist, grandparents mustn’t know that you are atheist…) so I would enjoy more posts, but then, this goes into a very private area and I understand if you’ve got limits here.

Honestly, I don’t blog about it too much because religion just doesn’t come up that much with my family. Oddly enough, knowing some of my family now reads my blog has made me shy away from a couple of other topics. Is it weird that I have no problem talking about certain things to total strangers, but I’m awkward when it comes to my family?

As a scientist, how about blogging your thoughts on Mother Nature a little bit more? Or is that more PZ Myers territory?

That’s something I hope to do more of as my confidence as a scientist grows – maybe my Science Communication class will help. Part of me just doesn’t feel informed enough to write good science articles. And to be perfectly honest, I’m a little lazy. It takes a lot more time and effort to write a good science blog post than something that’s opinion based.

you could explain a little more about your studies/research.

I would love to talk about my research more. Unfortunately I can’t really discuss stuff publicly until it’s been published, lest our ideas get stolen by someone else. I should talk about what I’m learning in my classes more. I guess at the end of the day, I blog to relax, and I don’t really want to think about school anymore, haha.

I truly appreciate you comments on feminism. You give me ideas with which to shape my discussions with my daughter, son, and wife.

I really appreciate your posts on feminism, particularly those that relate it to skepticism But really, any feminism posts are filling a void in most of your male readers daily rss feed, I assume. As a male feminist, or at the very least a feminist ally, I think it’s nice to have the patriarchal bullshit that women have to face brought to our attention from time to time. We sometimes need to be jolted out of complacency. Keep up the good work!

Keep updating on your involvement in the atheist community, especially with a feminist bent. The posts about feminism in atheist might end up putting up the biggest bullseye on your blog, but I for one appreciate them the most.

LOVE the feminism blog posts, and I 100% agree with you on these issues. It’s seriously disturbing to discover how some atheists respond to discussing feminist issues, especially when I typically hold such faith in the atheist community as a whole. I really value your voice and discussion on these topics.

I very much enjoy reading perspectives that combine sex-positive (granted this is more subtle and not a main focus of the blog, but I appreciate having a skeptical feminist place that doesn’t portray all porn as they enemy of women), feminist and skeptic interests. Your blog fills a space that I feel should have greater recognition at large.

Nope, you’re doing awesome. I must say, I absolutely love the feminism stuff you post on your blog, but I really hate the shit that you get for doing so. You are able to put into words ideas that I have been mulling for ages but haven’t yet been able to fully verbalize, and I appreciate that. Keep up the good work, and think of the haters as simply giving more data for your analyses.

You have probably taught me more about feminism than any other internet writer, and these days – in large measure thanks to you – I am proud to call myself a feminist.

I got 38 comments exactly like these. Thank you guys so much – it’s awesome knowing what I’m doing is worthwhile and making a difference.

Don’t listen to those whiny commenters who start their blubbery bitchiness whenever you do something that dings their sensibilities. They don’t pay the bills, so they should just go fuck themselves three ways from Friday…Whatever that means.

Unfortunately my awesome commenters don’t pay the bills either. But thank you!

i have no idea if you really read the comment threads much, or just let them go, but they’re usually pretty interesting, when i read them.

I read 99.5% of the comments people make here. Occasionally people will get into deep philosophical discussions that aren’t really related to my original posts, and sometimes I’ll tune out on those.

I find some posts to be too US-centric. The underlying assumption seems to be that all of your readers are American. Please consider the fact that “www” stands for “word-wide web” (And America is NOT the whole world). People of all different cultures read your blog, it would be nice if you could keep that in mind. Thank you.

I do try to keep this in mind, but it certainly is a bad habit of mine. I’ll try to be better in the future!

I have a rather selfish comment, but since you asked, I might as well respond. Every now and then, you have posts consisting of a humorous picture, and some response to it in the subject or the post that can only be understood if you’ve seen the picture. As I’m totally blind, I feel left out of these sorts of posts. It may be that describing the picture would remove some of the humor, but if it can contribute or not detract, it would be helpful. These posts are certainly rare, and the majority of your posts are predominantly writing, and I enjoy those.

Oh crap, I never even considered this! This, folks, is a perfect example of privilege. I’ll try to be better about captioning photos in the future. Though knowing how forgetful I am, I will probably forget from time to time – I apologize preemptively to anyone this is an issue for.

Teen pop music should play when I come to the page and there should be no way to turn it off. Also you have a serious lack of pixelated gifs dancing around the page at random. Attend to that.

I’ll find a way to get Rebecca Black on auto-play ASAP. Maybe even a midi version.

Misc:

Ask out the dude on the bus already, sheesh!

But, but, it would be so awkward! And the likelihood of him actually having things in common with me (other than just being cute) aren’t very good! Argh!

Friend me on Facebook :D

Sorry, but I stopped friending blog readers on Facebook – it was just getting unusable. If you’re desperate to connect to me via facebook, Blag Hag has a fan page.

Get yourself invited to go on “Ask an Atheist.”

I was invited! A couple times, now. We just haven’t worked out a date yet. One day, one day it will happen.

I’ve had an internet crush on you for a while, and wanted to tell you to boost your self-esteem. I didn’t know how to tell you without coming off as creepy. I’m 19, so I hope that you think I’m young enough to find this adorable. :)

Haha, it’s cool – I have my fair share of internet crushes too. As someone who was that awkward unpopular nerd most of her life, it does give me a bit of an ego boost.

Keep doin’ what you’re doin’! Also, stay in school! I couldn’t go straight to grad after under, and won’t be able to for a while yet. You’re living the dream! The exhausted exhausted not-enough-time-to-study/research dream. *noncreepywomanonwomanhugs*

Give up academia and concentrate on being entertaining and informative.

Haha, such mixed opinions. Trust me, giving up on academia has crossed my mind. Unfortunately, blogging doesn’t pay the bills. That and I really do love science, as much as a pain it can be at times.

Go to Dragon*Con!

Speaking tour of Australia?

Find someone to buy me the plane ticket :P

Just so you know, i’m finishing up my B.Sc next year, and am now somewhat terrified about the prospect of grad school. But on the plus side your scary spider stories make me laugh.

I’m glad you get enjoyment from my suffering :P

I just wanted to say, as an atheist undergraduate biology student, it made me feel really good to know you watch America’s Next Top Model as well :)

Oh my god, it’s like crack. It’s so horrible and against everything I stand for, but I can’t stop watching. I mean, what the hell is up with Alexandria?! I’m rooting for the plus size model or the adorable southern bell.

I guess asking for cheesecake shots would be labelled as “sexist,” huh?

Maybe a bit, but hey, since you were brave enough to ask, here you go.

I am drunk, in a french hotel, at midnight having attended the worst conference I’ve ever been to. Nothing I could possible write here would be coherent.

And with that winning comment, we’re done.

That’s all you got, Ken Ham?

Allow me a moment to gloat.

Ken Ham is bragging about how much traffic his various anti-science websites have received in the past year, and how much they’ve improved from the year before. Let’s ignore for a moment that a good chunk of that traffic is people showing up to giggle at his wackiness and just look at the numbers:

• In 2010, the Answers in Genesis main website had more than 10 million visits for the first time (10,225,465 visits, previously 8,726,503–a 17% growth) from more than 5 million unique visitors (5,445,617 unique visitors, previously 4,650,206–a 17% growth).

• The Creation Museum website had more than 1 million visits for the first time (1,079,290 visits, previously 899,890–a 19.9% growth).

• The Answers Vacation Bible School (VBS) website had more than 100,000 visits for the first time (110,767 visits, previously 34,231–a 223% growth), with almost half a million page views (476,551 page views, previously 122,301–a 289% growth).

Alright, Answers in Genesis has me beat – even though Pharyngula‘s traffic dwarfs it. But I owned the Creation Museum. One million visits? Blag Hag had 2,316,028 visits during it’s second year of existence. It had 344,158 visits it’s first year – a 573% growth. And when you look at page views, I had a 791% growth.

Oh, and Answers Vacation Bible School? Psshhh. I beat you in a single day – 261,474 on the day of boobquake. The following day beat you too.

Even if you factor out all of my boobquake traffic, I still got over a million visits this year and a 295% growth. Me. A godless science student with a free Blogger account, some opinions, and a little bit a free time. I outpaced your multi-million dollar, highly advertised, anti-science “Museum.”

Two words:

Wah wah.

Blag Hag 2011 Census Results Pt. 2

And now for the questions about atheism and blogging!

As always, click the images for bigger versions.Last year men used the terms “skeptic,” “freethinker,” and “anti-theist” more often than women. This year “anti-theist” is still used more, but “skeptic” and “freethinker” are not significantly different. However, “atheist” and “infidel” were used less by women now. There’s a general trend of women avoiding terms that tend to have negative associations.

I’m intrigued by the changes in term usage since last year. All of the labels except “freethinker” were selected by a smaller percentage of readers this year. “Atheist” was hit particularly hard, dropping from 82% to 42%. The next biggest change was for “agnostic,” dropping from 23% to a measly 3%. I think the most likely explanation is that I’m attracting a much broader readership, while I originally started out predominantly as an atheist blog.

Oh, and most people still hate the label “Bright.” Wah wah.

Favorite open responses:

  • Evil
  • Evil baby-eating atheist
  • Baby-eater (I’m seeing a trend)
  • Awesome
  • Badass
  • Cool
  • BAMF (Again, a trend…)
  • He Who Shall Not Be Named
  • Chaotic good
  • Bipedal furhead
  • Devoutly in the awe of the unknown
  • “Indifferent agnostic” – it’s not that I don’t know, it’s that I don’t really care
  • I’m not a pastafarian, but I do think they are sexy. Is that ok? (Yes)

I’m not sure what I was expecting to find here, but I was just curious. Unsurprisingly, people are more likely to do activism that requires the littlest amount of time and effort – being out, buying a book, commenting on a blog.

I was a little surprised that the only gender difference was in writing letters to the editor (anyone have an explanation for that?). I guess from personal experience I expected women to participate less. Of course, there are two potential problems here. One, this doesn’t look at the frequency of these events – maybe they showed up to a single event or wrote a single blog post. Two, we have a biased sample – these are women who are already reading at least one atheist blog (mine), not women in general.This one surprised me a bit. I thought everyone would keep updated about the blog using some sort of RSS reader, like Google Reader or Blogger Dashboard, mainly because that’s what I do. Apparently slightly more people manually check the blog through bookmarking or some other sort of link. I have 3,928 subscribers. Using this updating method data as an estimate, I probably have approximately 8,000 readers. Wow! Not to shabby for a 2 year old blog.

Twitter and Facebook are rarely used on their own, but rather in addition to another method. Though you can see a slight difference when seeing how much people comment:It seems that people who use Twitter and Facebook, either alone or in addition to bookmarks or RSS feeds, are more likely to comment. Maybe they use those things because they’re more socially interactive online in general?

But overall, a very small percentage of my readers make up the vast majority of the comments. Hello, all of you lurkers out there! Though an interesting trend is seen when you break it up by gender:Ladies! Why aren’t you commenting as much?! No wonder blogs can look so male dominated. Seriously though, why are women less likely to comment? Are we less inclined to speak up thanks to social conditioning? Is there something about the environment in the comments that make them seem unwelcoming? If you’re a lurker (lady or otherwise), please let me know. I’m generally curious, but I also want to make sure my blog is a place where you can feel comfortable.I guess a 5 point Likert scale wasn’t the best way to ask this question, since if you stick around to read Blag Hag, you probably like most of the topics. Oh well. I should check to see if non-US readers are the most apathetic about politics, and if everyone but graduate students are apathetic about my grad school posts, haha. Other than that, I didn’t get too much out of this question. Going to keep doin’ what I’ve been doing.

The only topic that differed between the sexes was Feminism:Women readers really like when I talk about feminism. Shocking, I know. Thankfully my male readers still generally like it! …Of course, I’ve probably scared off all the dudes who can’t stand it. Hm.
A couple interesting things on how people found my blog:

  • If you want readers, get Pharyngulated. PZ has the power. Though he seems to send mostly guys over. I’d be really interested to see the gender makeup of his readership – is it really that male biased? I wonder what my gender ratio would look like if you took out the Pharyngulites…
  • Boobquake attracted equal numbers of male and female readers. Take that, haters who say it’s only guys sticking around for my boobs!
  • More women seem to find their way here after being referred by friends (or according to some comments, family). Maybe this is their first step into the atheist community? Regardless, thanks for recommending my blog to friends!
  • Of the “Other blogs” specified, the most common mentioned were Dan Savage (25), Skepchick (10), Greta Christina (2), Daylight Atheism (2), and Boing Boing (2), JT Eberhard (2), and “feminist blogs” (2).

Other interesting ways people found my blog:

  • Webcomics – Something Positive (5), Girls with Slingshots (2), Wapsi Square (1)
  • The Bloggies (5)
  • Flyers for my speaking events (3)
  • Met at convention or group (9)
  • “Your landlord” (…This is kind of scary)
  • OkCupid (Nope, this is scarier, haha)
  • “Jesus made it come to me in a dream” (Oddly less scary)

I still haven’t even attempted to look at how location or past religious beliefs correlates with anything… If you have something you’d like to investigate, let me know. But before that, I’ll look at some of the comments you guys left in the free response, since even I can get sick of making graphs.

Like always, feel free to discuss in the comments.

Blag Hag 2011 Census Results Pt. 1

A big thanks to everyone who participated in the Blag Hag 2011 Census – a whopping 2167 readers filled out the survey! That’s almost 5 times as much as last year, and means the data will be even more robust. But remember – this data doesn’t necessarily represent atheists as a whole, but rather people who like reading this particular blog and taking surveys.

Like last year, here’s how I indicated statistical significance on graphs:
* P-value less than 0.05
** P-value less than 0.01
*** P-value less than 0.001
**** P-value less than 0.0001

Part 1 will focus on demographics. As always, click the image for a bigger version:The following is the break down of how people identified:

  • 1309 Male
  • 822 Female
  • 9 Transgender
  • 8 Transgender Male
  • 10 Transgender Female
  • 2 Transgender Male & Female
  • 7 Female & Male

I was planning on having an “Other” option, but totally forgot to click the box allowing that – my apologies to everyone who felt pigeonholed into any of these options.

While my readership is still significantly male biased, there has been a huge improvement since last year (72% Male and 27% Female).

Last year I pondered why a blog by a woman that frequently talks about feminism would still be male biased. Did male atheists really outnumber women? Were the ladies just not into blogs? Had they not found mine yet since it was so new? Was I still doing better than other atheist blogs? I’m not sure if I can narrow it down yet, but I did see some interesting gender differences in my other questions, so maybe those will help guide us to an answer.The overall age distribution is very similar to last year, with the most common age group being the one I fall into (I’m 23). Though a new interesting trend emerged this year – there is a 1:1 ratio of men to women in all the age groups under 30. In the other age groups, men significantly outnumber women.

What does this mean? There are a couple potential explanations:

  • Older women don’t like my blog, for whatever reason
  • Older men really like my blog (I should check if they’re the same ones who asked for more photos in the comment section…)
  • Younger atheists and skeptics are doing a much better job at being inclusive toward women

I personally hope the last one is true. It’s certainly supported by my personal experience. Student groups seem to be much more diverse than older organizations. Maybe this is more evidence for a trend in the right direction?Again, sexual orientation is almost identical to last year, and not surprising. Women tend to have more bisexual tendencies, which holds for the general public. I’m disappointed, though. My readership hasn’t become any gayer than last year! I’m failing at spreading Teh Gay as per the Evil Homosexual Agenda. Sigh.

Well, maybe. When you break age down by sexual orientation, you get this nifty graph:
It’s busy, but the take away point is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to use gayer labels. This is obviously because of Goal 1 of the Gay Agenda: Corrupt the youth. Not because of cultural differences in the acceptance of various terminology. I mean, just look at the under 15 age bracket. They’re certainly not trying to figure out their sexualities still – no, they just haven’t been completely brainwashed yet. Onward, gay minions!

But honestly, the number one thing these responses confirmed? It’s really hard to squeeze sexuality into neat little categories, even if it makes the stats easier. Many people listed themselves as pansexuals, biromantics, and questioning individuals.

Favorite open responses:

  • “try” sexual
  • Probably hetero, but as I’m extra virgin olive oil I don’t think I can make a definitive statement
  • Pansexual, leaning more towards hetero for companionship and homo for OOHBOOBIES

Amen.

Last bit of demographic information: Education level.Wow, my readers are really well educated compared to the general public. I know not all of my readers are from the US, but just for a general comparison:

Education: General Public , Blag Hag Readers
High school grad: 86.68% , 98.06%
Some college: 55.60% , 93.17%
Assoc’s and/or Bachelor’s: 38.54% , 66.82%
Some grad school: ??? , 14.26%
Master’s degree: 7.62% , 10.80%
Doctorate or prof degree: 2.94% , 5.81%

Now I know why I’m constantly corrected for my typos and poor survey making procedures, haha.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will actually look at blog related questions. Feel free to discuss these interesting trends in the comments!

Take the Blag Hag 2011 Census!

It’s that time of the year again: Time for you guys to give me data so I can drool over correlations and make pretty graphs! Yes, it’s time for the Blag Hag 2011 census!

The survey is only 13 questions, so it shouldn’t take very long. And if you fill it out, I’ll be able to better understand what my readership looks like, what they enjoy about my blog, and how that changes over time. I’m really curious to see if we find any interesting correlations, or how things have changed since last year’s census.

Fill out the Blag Hag 2011 census here!

Last year 467 people took the survey, so hopefully we can crush that number. I’ll leave it up for a couple of days so enough people have the chance to take it. Though knowing last year, I’ll get antsy and want to crunch some numbers, so take it sooner rather than later!

And as a disclaimer, I promise I’m not selling this information to anyone or using it to stalk you. At most, you’ll be part of a pretty graph or some interesting comments will be posted here anonymously.

Now, go take it!

Happy 2nd Birthday, Blag Hag!

Awwww, my little blog is growing up! It came into the world exactly two years ago, after I was extremely bored. I guess that reason can apply to many humans as well.Does this mean this is the start of my blog’s Terrible Twos? I apologize ahead of time if I start making crankier posts than usual, waking readers up in the middle of the night, and leaving my stuff scattered across the living room floor. …Wait, I do that last one already.

I’m celebrating my finishing my research presentation and studying for/taking my Statistical and Computational Genomics final exam. Oh yeah, I know you’re jealous. But if you want to have a celebration on your own, feel free to party in the comments. And if you want to give my blog a present… I heard she really likes it when people share posts they liked with their friends.

Oh, and do you know what the most exciting part is? It’s time for another Blag Hag Census! I’ll get a survey up when this quarter is done so I can crunch the numbers over spring break. And now I know enough Python that I can actually write code to analyze the data instead of slaving away in Excel! I’m almost as excited for that as I am for playing Pokemon.

…What, doesn’t everyone like data like I do?