Larry Moran has already mentioned this recent article in Cell on this strange new fad of science blogging. He was interviewed along with many others of us, including me. I don’t know about this bit:
The rock star of scientist bloggers is Paul Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, who writes Pharyngula. With about 20,000 visitors per day, Pharyngula is currently the most popular science blog according to Technorati. Myers started writing about 4 years ago. “It was a casual decision. One summer I had some free time and started typing away. And people started coming to the site,” he recalls. “I thought that I would stop in a month or so but I didn’t. I find it useful for communicating with other scientists and the community.” Myers not only writes about his brand of science, developmental biology, but often discusses politics and religion. “The blog would not be as popular if it was only about science,” he says. “I am popularizing science using political issues as a hook.”
This just isn’t good enough. I need to know which rock star. The Roger Waters of the blogosphere would be cool. David Bowie would be nifty, too, although I’m not thin enough. The Keith Richards of science blogging would be troubling … but if I’m the Ozzie, I’m hanging it up.
You’ll know you’ve really made it in the blogosphere when people start bragging about achieving first post. Heh.
Isn’t that pretty much a banning offence around here?
Sadly the article requires a login.
Maybe you’re Weird Al.
I rather see you as the Frank Zappa of the science web.
A little late to not acquire a reputation for biting the heads off the batty…
Ted Nugent ?
Just take one of the countless useless quizzes out there. Then you’ll know.
I always envisioned you more as a Jerry Garcia kind of guy.
Actually, Martin C nailed it– Ted Nugent! You’ve got a hardcore audience of slightly nutty diehards, you enjoy ripping folks a new one with “take-it-or-leave-it” opinions, and you both frighten people with your unique love of animals.
If you ever cut your leg open wielding a chainsaw, I’d say you’re a shoe-in.
The Captain … or Tennille?
Look, unless you’re snorting lines of cocaine off the taut belly of a teenage groupie, the comment was hyperbole.
And if you *are* snorting cocaine off said groupie, why in the name of Darwin are you reading this comment thread?
Damn you, Zeno. You stole my line.
With luck you also stole my impending dsmvwlmnt.
PZ,
Personally I like to think of you as the science bloggin’ world’s version of Little Richard, banging away on the piano of the godless, shrieking, and generally creating a stir…
Good Golly, Miss Order-Of-The-Molly?
Sorry, you gotta be John Lennon. You know, the banning after the “more popular than Jesus” issue… and, of course, who else had a song titled “Octopus’s Garden”?
Not quite. He needs to acquire a love of guns, loincloths, and bow-hunting as well.
Have you ever taken up the habit of snorting dead relatives like Keith Richards?
I thought “Octopus’s Garden” was one of Ringo’s.
“Man, the Beatles were so high they let Ringo sing a couple of tunes.” — Bill Hicks
Take a walk on the wild side… at Pharyngula!
Loooooooooou!
Heil, Ronnie James Dio of developmental biology.
Rock Star? Wait, you’re a geologist?
How about Tom Petty? He still has youthful exuberance & is playing better than ever.
Did someone say Bowie?
Wait a sec. What rock star is fire-breathing on stage but mild-mannered in person?
Judging by what some of your detractors say, I’d think you’d be Marilyn Manson. [Looks at bio pic.] Okay… maybe not.
DaveX wrote:
Pssst… it’s shoo-in.
Nugent sounds closest to me thus far (excepting some obvious differences), which is a shame since I’m such a Bowie fan, and he’s a pretty close match. But then, if I followed my own musical preferences, I might want PZ to be TMBG, and nothing good could come of that. Although…Minnesota…accordions…science songs…hmmm…
Sequins. Leather pants.
Jim Morrison. WWJD?
“The Roger Waters of the blogosphere would be cool. David Bowie would be nifty, too, although I’m not thin enough.”
Hmm… You’ve got the temper of a Roger Waters, and I do recall you scored very much a female-like brain on the BBC test, which makes you very much like Bowie (at least early Bowie)… this is a tough call…
Elvis from hell!
Then again, maybe you’re a member of ‘Godsmack’.
Britney
It used to be about the blogging, man!
Re rrt@26:
I like TMBG for PZ’s rock-star avatar. Heck, at times TMBG can sound like a musical science blog. F’rinstance, they “believe” that the Sun is a mass of incandescent gas, not a chariot driven by a mythical sky god.
Remember, Universe Man is usually kind to smaller man! ;^)
Took the test for you. You’re Carl Barât, the frontman and lead guitarist of Dirty Pretty Things (a metaphor for all biology). Results:
Carl Barat
Pete Doherty
Johnny Borrell
Ricky Wilson
Which english indie rock star are you?
created with QuizFarm.com
I vote for Roger Waters,
“What God Wants, God Gets, God Help Us All.” -R. Waters
Hmmm…yes, Bill, I see your point. And Triangle Man is (according to some TMBG theorists) symbolic of the oppressive and violent nature of religion…
… and your fans are called “squidheads.”
— CV
Sorry, PZ, but considering your eclecticism, your wide popularity and your staying power, you are clearly the Paul McCartney of sciencebloggers. Now let it be.
… or maybe “Pharynguloids.”
— CV
Maybe you’re Greg Graffin of Bad Religion.
Brian May, Queen guitarist, never (yet) finished his astronomy Ph.D, but he’s published, and a notable geek (come on, the guy built his own guitar!)
How about Neil Peart? Can PZ do the Drum Solo of Life?
I just sent you an e-mail that I hope doesn’t get lost in your filters, concerning Roger Waters.
Iggy Pop. Definitely.
Agree with Helder Sanches. You’re clearly John Lennon:
“Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only sky”
How about Neil Peart? Can PZ do the Drum Solo of Life?
– Rey Fox
PZ is allergic to Ayn Rand (as are all sensible people).
I’m going to be exceedingly cruel and suggest Ian Anderson (“Rock and roll’s answer to the garden gnome”).
Pharyngula comments section: “We’ve got all kinds of animals coming here, occassional demons, too”
Fire breathing on stage, but nice in person? That sounds like Rammstein’s lead singer Till Lindemann. The guy wields flaming implements and is a self described atheist. I saw them in concert, and we found the rest of the band back by the bus, but Till wouldn’t come out because he was too shy. The rest of the band said that he’s very nice and soft spoken as well.
You should form a band. You could call yourselves The Apocalyptic Cephalopods, then wow your fans with a fifteen-minute guitar solo performed on the head of a life-sized statue of Chtulhu.
And then blog about it the next day.
Oh, but it’s so obvious…. David Lee Roth!!!
Like a squid eating dough in a polyethelene bag.
Fire breathing on stage but nice in person?
I’d say Alice Cooper, but he’s religious these days.
PZ wrote: “but if I’m the Ozzie, I’m hanging it up.”
You’ll only end up like Ozzie at the end of your career, after a lifetime of exposure to brain-damaging substances. In Ozzie’s case, it was hard drugs; in your case, creationists.
The two most squidulous rock-stars are Captain Beefheart and Robyn Hitchcock. However, PZ’s blog posts are usually a little easier to understand than the lyrics to ‘Trout Mask Replica’ or ‘I often Dream of Trains.’
I’d say PZ’s anger at creationism makes him the Elvis ‘I’m-so-Angry’ Costello of science blogs.
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy seems more of a Paul ‘two thumbs aloft’ McCartney. He can write a great tune- and he’s excited by everything.
If PZ is a rock star, does that mean that the idiot squad over at Uncommon Descent is The Polyphonic Spree?
Perhaps you could be Nick Lowe, the “Jesus of Cool”….
Damon Albarn or Thom Yorke.
GWAR. PZ rocks like GWAR.
David Byrne, maybe?
Sammy Hagar?
GWAR is so 90’s
You mean Lordi!
I went to see Rammstein once. Lindemann did a whole song while he was on fire.
Neil Peart, the lyricist of “Natural Science”?
Maybe you’re like the Jello Biafra of the (olden times) Dead Kennedys. You seem to anger conservative bigots the same way.
I’ve never heard them. But any band that makes and album and calls it “The Arockalypse” has got to be awesome.
I changed my mind, I second Dustin!
Either Stan or Yosh Schmenge. The Happy Wanderers!
They’re silly. Playing MSG this week.
Lordi represented Finland in the Eurovision Song Contest 2006 finals with the song “Hard Rock Hallelujah”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordi
If we’re going for the Radiohead comparisons, I think Jonny Greenwood is a more exact match than Thom Yorke. The man’s on fire onstage but won’t say a word off it… hides behind a curtain of hair… and for goshsakes, he’s a Composer-in-Residence for the BBC in Oxford, where he doubtless pals around with Dawkins all day.
(but Iggy Pop is still an all-around better rockstar match… I’d like to hear PZ cover the song Mr. Pop recorded with Teddybears. ” ‘Cause I’m a Darwinist, yes I am…”)
@Tinni
I was thinking the same thing. Jello Biafra is a good call …
The Dead Kennedy’s label was Alternative Tentacles.
Twenty five years ago he was warning about the rise of the religious right on In God We Trust Inc.
And of course, his favorite album of the DK’s limited released material was titled Frankenchrist.
Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, obviously.
I vote Neil Young, just for the politics:
“Keep on rockin’ in the free world!”
Or, oh wait, Ray Davies:
“I’m an ape man, I’m an ape ape man, I’m an ape man”
G.G. Allin
Roger Waters is a nice choice, but in all actuality you are more like David Gilmour in many ways. (Waters has been notoriously too gloomy, and that’s not you.)
And oh man, he was so gorgeous in his younger days. Atheist too.
“Squidulous”? Zowie.
“Squidulous”? Zowie.
OH! It all makes sense now! PZ is Bowie’s son!
As much as I love Gilmour’s beautiful voice and guitar, I have to second Bernarda and vote Zappa.
Sure, he’s dead, but let’s overlook that for the moment.
He was intelligent, educated, outspoken, rational, irreverent, and uncompromising. He did not suffer fools gladly. He had a sense of humor that ranged from the droll to the profane. And he had some sort of beard or something. And a daughter with an unusual name. And son named Darwin. Ok, Dweezil, but who’s quibbling?
The beard, surely, says ZZ Top?
Or possibly PZ Top.
Re: TMBG
I always thought Triangle Man represented the cold logic of the universe. And Triangle Man outclasses Particle Man by two dimensions. Clearly this makes Triangle Man stronger.
But why does rigid Triangle Man hate Particle Man? Why? WHY?!?
This question has haunted me my entire life. So I necessarily find the Trinity allusion quite intriguing. Perhaps Triangle Man hates Particle Man because Particle Man is an individual, not part of the two-dimensional triangular continuum, And We Can’t Have That Now, Can We!
I will contemplate this whilst staring off into space wearing a vacuous, slack-jawed expression of unmotivated bliss. Thanks! I was wondering how I was going to keep myself busy this afternoon. :-)
Here’s the full text of the article…for those of you who can’t reach it (if this is against the policies of this site, please forgive this transgression of mine):
Scientists Enter the Blogosphere
Laura Bonettaa
aWashington DC
Available online 2 May 2007.
Blogs are one of the latest tools that scientists use to communicate their ideas to other scientists or to the general public. But who are the science bloggers and why do they blog?
Article Outline
Main Text
Meet the Bloggers
Blogging to E-ducate
What Is the Impact?
Why Aren’t You Blogging?
Blogging to Talk Shop
Communities of Bloggers
Main Text
There are close to 50 million weblogs or blogs for short. Blogs provide an online discussion forum for issues of current interest and are updated regularly with new short articles on which readers can comment.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf), an initiative of the Pew Research Center, reports that 8% of Internet users in the United States, or 12 million American adults, keep a blog and 39% read one. Most bloggers (37%) write about their life and experiences; politics is a distant second with 11% of bloggers; and technology, including science, comes in at 4%.
According to the Technorati blog search engine (http://www.technorati.com), there are about 19,881 blogs with a “science” tag. Most of these are “pseudoscience blogs, new age blogs, creationist blogs, or computer technology blogs,” says Bora Zivkovic, a Ph.D. student who writes A Blog Around the Clock (http://scienceblogs.com/clock). Zivkovic estimates that the actual number of science blogs is 1,000 to 1,200 and notes that such blogs are “written by graduate students, postdocs and young faculty, a few by undergraduates and tenured faculty, several by science teachers, and just a few by professional journalists.”
These 1,000 or so science blogs provide authoritative opinions about pressing issues in science, such as evolution or climate change, or aim to engage other scientists in open and frank discussions about the scientific literature or science policy. Because of their freewheeling nature, these blogs take scientific communication to a different level.
Meet the Bloggers
The rock star of scientist bloggers is Paul Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, who writes Pharyngula (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula). With about 20,000 visitors per day, Pharyngula is currently the most popular science blog according to Technorati. Myers started writing about 4 years ago. “It was a casual decision. One summer I had some free time and started typing away. And people started coming to the site,” he recalls. “I thought that I would stop in a month or so but I didn’t. I find it useful for communicating with other scientists and the community.” Myers not only writes about his brand of science, developmental biology, but often discusses politics and religion. “The blog would not be as popular if it was only about science,” he says. “I am popularizing science using political issues as a hook.”
An expert opinion, a wide range of topics, and a distinct personality are qualities that readers seem to value in a blog. Derek Lowe was an insider of the pharmaceutical industry when he started blogging in 2002. He jotted down notes of his daily thoughts without disclosing any information about his own work or those of colleagues. “When I started I was definitely the only one blogging from inside the drug industry. I thought others would soon join but it has not happened,” he says.
Lowe is mindful of the fact that his blog In the Pipeline (http://www.corante.com/pipeline/) enjoys a broad readership, from chemists, to investors, to the lay public. “I cannot just geek out and have heavy chemistry posts one after the other, or just heavy pharmaceutical industry information. I don’t want to baffle or frustrate those who are not experts,” he explains. Instead, In the Pipeline provides a variety of topics for people to discuss online, such as how to get a certain chemical reaction to work, or how the market might react to a new cancer therapy, or even, how to land a new job.
Blogging to E-ducate
Some scientists first entered the blogosphere by blogging about evolution–a topic that, like climate change, has galvanized public opinion. Tara Smith, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa, got into blogging by writing for Panda’s Thumb (www.pandasthumb.com), one of the first science blogs by observers and critics of the creationist movement. “I got some good comments and I started thinking I had more stories to tell than I could really share so I decided to start my own blog.” She now writes Aetiology (http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology), a popular blog that focuses on topics within Smith’s research field, infectious diseases, but also discusses evolution, science education, and, on occasion, parenting.
Meanwhile, John Timmer, a research associate at the University of California, contributes to the blog Nobel Intent (http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars) published by Ars Technica, an online magazine of human arts and sciences. “When I was following the Dover trial, it was very clear to me that intelligent design is not science, but other people were seeing the same testimony and coming to a different conclusion,” says Timmer. “I realized there are large portions of the public who don’t get science.” Motivated by a desire to help change the situation, Timmer offered to contribute to Nobel Intent. Since 2005, he has been spending about an hour a day, usually at lunchtime, to scan the scientific literature and come up with topics to write about.
The concept of scientists reaching out to a lay audience is not new. “Scientists are an opinionated bunch and they have given their thoughts on discoveries or events by speaking with journalists, writing letters to journals, authoring commentaries,” says Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington DC. “Blogs provide a lot more of that commentary, but delivered almost instantaneously.” According to Nisbet, blogs written by scientists provide an authoritative opinion on a topic, often within a richer context than, for example, a news article. “Science blogs are important because they continue to engage the attentive public in scientific topics,” he says.
Nisbet–whose blog Framing Science (http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science) focuses on the intersections between science, media, and politics–believes blogs are an important communication tool for the scientific community. “In the digital age, information is found based on availability rather than accuracy. If different interest groups start blogs that attack peer-reviewed science, and the scientific community does not engage in similar communication mode, they will miss an important opportunity to educate the public,” he says.
In a recent article (Science 316, 56, 2007), Nisbet and colleague Chris Mooney, a correspondent for the popular science magazine Seed, wrote that “Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively ‘frame’ information to make it relevant to different audiences.” In other words, instead of focusing on explaining the technical details of scientific issues, scientists should define arguments in a way that resonates with the public’s “core values and assumptions.” Scientist bloggers are debating the implications of this approach. Myers wrote in his blog that if he took Nisbet and Mooney’s advice “I’d end up giving fluff talks that play up economic advantages and how evolution contributes to medicine… and I’d never talk about mechanisms and evidence again. That sounds like a formula for disaster to me.”
What Is the Impact?
As the debate about the Nisbet-Mooney article exemplifies, blogs allow discussions of scientific issues that do not typically take place in the scientific literature. “A scientific journal is not the right vehicle for debate and discussion,” says Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto and author of the popular biochemistry textbook Principles of Biochemistry. As a case in point, Moran used his blog Sandwalk (http://sandwalk.blogspot.com) to start a debate about evolutionary developmental biology. “There’s much to criticize in the field of evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo,” leads off his March 30, 2007 entry. It continues “The thing that bugs me more than anything else is the attempt to create a general theory of evolution based entirely on a subset of living species: namely multicellular animals.”
But how significant are these discussions if only a minority of scientists read blogs, or write them? “Blogs are important sources for opinion leaders, activists, and journalists. They help create a lot of the discourse out in the world,” explains Nisbet. Indeed, many discussions that grab the attention of bloggers have ended up in the pages of The New York Times or in the news sections of science journals. “Blogs are having an impact because newsmakers read them,” says Moran. “To some extent we are writing for science journalists. We are saying ‘Here is something getting the wrong kind of coverage’ or ‘Here is something you should be paying attention to.'”
Why Aren’t You Blogging?
Moran, at age 60, is somewhat unique among bloggers. Most bloggers, regardless of what they write about, tend to be younger. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project more than half of all bloggers in the United States are under the age of 30. “Most of my colleagues think what I do is strange. Partly, that’s because they are not into the technology. I happen to have grown up with the Internet and understand its culture,” says Moran. “I think the younger people who are blogging now are likely to be doing it when they are 60.”
The age barrier is not the only thing keeping more scientists from blogging. The biggest impediment is probably lack of time. According to most bloggers, posts can take 30 minutes to a couple of hours to research and compose. That may not seem like much, except that a critical factor for a blog’s success is that posts are updated frequently, ideally at least once a day. “If I ever stop doing this, it is because of time commitment,” says Moran.
In general, scientists who blog say the benefits outweigh the problems. Most believe they have become better communicators and have gained a broader appreciation of different scientific issues. So why aren’t more scientists blogging? Even among scientists who are interested in communicating about science, many are uncomfortable with the nature of blogging itself. Speaking at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference (http://wiki.blogtogether.org/blogtogether) held in January 2007 in Chapel Hill, Huntington Willard, director of Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, said that blogging is “antithetical” to how scientists–at least those of his generation–have been trained. “I am a scientist and my opinion actually does not matter a bit. It is the data that matters and my interpretation of the data,” he said to his audience. “To scientists [blogging] is a tough jump to make and yet one that hopefully an increasing number of scientists will make in order to share our educated viewpoint on some science issue and have that be one of several mechanisms we use to try to engage the public.”
“Most scientists are not comfortable with blogging,” says Myers. “The training we get is to separate opinion from evidence, but blogs blur the difference.” Myers says on occasion colleagues have criticized him for “taking something objective and turning it into something personal.”
Blogging to Talk Shop
Alex Palazzo’s blog The Daily Transcript (http://scienceblogs.com/transcript) is a mix of musings about research and the ups and downs of postdoc life. A postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School, Palazzo suspects that 95% of his readers are other scientists, many working on RNA or in related fields. Although he always gives priority to his bench research over blogging, Palazzo says blogging helps him to think about his work more clearly. “One time I posted a question about energetics of cells and one of my readers pointed out an article published in the 1990s that turned out to be very insightful.” He also gets useful information by reading other blogs. “A lot of bloggers are bioinformatics scientists and computational biologists. Their blogs often talk about Web-based analysis tools,” says Palazzo. “I find it useful to sift through those posts to find potential resources.”
Although some of his posts are very “science heavy,” Palazzo, like most scientist bloggers, does not talk about his unpublished research, or that of his colleagues. “Sometimes I will go to a talk and will be very excited about something I heard, but I hold back on writing about it,” he says. For bench scientists, such openness might cost them a publication or cause them to get scooped. But there are exceptions. Jean-Claude Bradley and his students at Drexel University are experimenting with a live open lab notebook on his blog Useful Chemistry (http://usefulchem.blogspot.com) and wiki (http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com). The blog discusses and analyzes results, with links to the raw data on the wiki.
Bradley’s group writes down the experimental plan, the results as raw data, observations, then conclusions–every detail a scientist would include in a lab notebook except that the information is available on the Web for everyone to see and comment on. “We don’t just put things that work but also failed experiments. We thought that if we cannot use the data maybe others will find a use for them,” says Bradley. People have come to Useful Chemistry looking for the boiling point of a given compound or a chemical reaction. “It is encouraging to see that,” says Bradley. “Part of what we wanted to do was put small bits of information out there that might be useful.” He has not yet tried to publish any of the data on his blog but says he will soon be in a position to do so. He is well aware that most top-tier journals have guidelines precluding publication of anything that has already been reported, regardless of its format.
There is one case (The Scientist 21, 21, 2007) where a scientist blogger ended up becoming a coauthor on a paper thanks to his blog. Back in 2005, Reed Cartwright, a Ph.D. student in genetics at the University of Georgia, wrote an alternative interpretation of published findings about the mutant hothead gene of Arabidopsis (Nature 434, 505, 2005) in his blog De Rerum Natura. Several months later, Luca Comai at the University of California, Davis was publishing a similar interpretation in the journal Plant Cell. When he found out that Cartwright had already “published” the idea in a blog, he offered to make Cartwright a coauthor on the Plant Cell paper (17, 2856, 2005).
Communities of Bloggers
Because scientist bloggers are few in number, they risk getting lost in the vastness of the blogosphere. A few websites identify science blogs and cluster them for readers. For example, Pharyngula, Aetiology, The Daily Transcript, and Framing Science are among the 60 or so blogs on http://scienceblogs.com. This website, created by the Seed Media Group (publishers of Seed magazine), serves as a one-stop shop for science blogs written by both scientists and science communicators. Currently the site contains 32,089 posts on science topics and ten times as many comments from readers. According to the website, bloggers were selected based on their “originality, insight and talent and how they would contribute to the discussion on scienceblogs.com.”
The organizer of this year’s NC Science Blogging Conference, Bora Zivkovic, says the initial motivation for the conference was to “meet in person a bunch of bloggers that I talk to online.” Applications arrived from all over the world and more than 170 people attended. The next conference will be held January 19, 2008, also in Chapel Hill. This conference brings together “scientists, science bloggers, science journalists, and science educators for a day of exchanging ideas and information,” says Zivkovic.
The blogosphere can be overwhelming. Efforts to cluster blogs written by experts should make it easier for scientists, and those interested in science, to find what they are looking for. Tangled Bank (http://tangledbank.net) provides a bi-weekly showcase of “good” blog writing focused on biology and evolution. Other so-called blog “carnivals” include Mendel’s Garden (http://mendels-garden.blogspot.com), a monthly collection of blog posts on genetics, and Gene Genie (http://scienceroll.com/2007/02/17/gene-genie-the-first-issue), which appears every two weeks and is dedicated to covering every gene in the human genome. For the uninitiated, The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006, for sale at Lulu.com, is a collection of 50 of the best science blog posts of 2006. “When people hear ‘blog’ they think of a personal journal with bad grammar or a highly biased angry political post,” says Zivkovic, who put together the anthology. “People who are more comfortable with a book will see that blogs provide high quality science online.”
*hits zohn with a rolled-up newspaper*
Kseniya:
Well, you see, it makes even more sense if Particle Man is symbolic of science, the scientific method, the scientific community, etc. With Triangle Man representative of religion, he seeks to establish and defend religious orthodoxy that contradicts science, and conflict results. Thus, Triangle Man is an authoritarian bully oppressing science (Particle Man) and humankind (Person Man) with equal vigor.
But does Triangle really win?
Well, the song SAYS he wins. But it just ends there, and TMBG have yet to release a sequel. Although there’s a new album on the way in July…
Kseniya and rrt:
Oy, what have I started?? before you dive deeper into this tangle, just keep in mind that you’re older than you’ve ever been…
…and now you’re even older…
…and now you’re even older…
…and now you’re even older….
8^)
Oh, gee, THANKS Bill. Now THAT’S gonna be stuck in my head all DAY.
Fucking hell Zohn.
You post a PART of the article and then a link…
That’s just annoying.
I refuse to read it now.
Sorry, Steve_C…the link is not accessible for free and so I posted the whole article…I wish there was a “edit” button so that I could go back and delete my earlier post.
Zohn, that was… unexpected… It takes 10 or 11 “page down” key-presses to get past it, and your intentions were good. In other words, no big deal. Just don’t make a habit of it. ;-)
~Kseniya (who has absolutely no authority here)
zohn – I didn’t have access to the article at the link so I’m glad you satisfied my curiosity. Interesting article.
David Byrne.
Well, you’re definitely not the Phil Collins of science blogging… that dubious honour would go to Mooney/Nisbet. More along the lines of Rob Tyner of MC5… or Iggy Pop of the Stooges, circa “Raw Power”.
I like the idea of PZ Myers and Phil Plait being John Lennon and Paul McCartney, respectively. This leaves open the question of who is Ringo. . . .
Don’t forget George. Who is the Quiet Blogger?
Maybe Dimebag Darrell?
You’re probably Dexter Holland. (See “personal life” section on Wikipedia)
Or maybe this one….
There is one good thing about Keith Richards though, he got to play the father of a pirate (while being drunk).
Thanks Kseniya for giving the details on Zappa. One can find his appearances on debates on CNN with the xian right and his testimony before the Senate on Youtube.
This guy, Neal Gladstone, is not a star, but he has an appropriate song, “I’m a Liberal”.
“If PZ is a rock star, does that mean that the idiot squad over at Uncommon Descent is The Polyphonic Spree?”
Yes! Absolutely.
But you guys have it all wrong – there’s one perfect and obvious choice for PZ:
WARREN ZEVON
Angry, intelligent, cool and kind.
To quote myself:
“WARREN ZEVON
Angry, intelligent, cool and kind.”
But I meant to add “funny” too.
What about the lead in Limozeen? After all, very public persons are often partially fictional, in a way.