Bora has put together a history of science blogging, and there I am, one of the grizzled old pioneers, chewin’ tobaccy and slapping mules around. There’s also mention of my old Tangled Bank carnival, which isn’t totally gone — I’ve got the archive stashed on my lab computer, and someday I have to figure out how to extract and resurrect an old Expression Engine blog.
Larry Moran also talks about the crucible of talk.origins, and how a lot of the early science bloggers got their start on usenet (myself included). A lot of the feisty, confrontational style comes straight out of a history of prolonged combat with idiots.
A cherished lifetime goal at last come true! Immortality as a museum exhibit! (Will there be little stuffed PZ dolls available in the gift shop?)
No, but real PZ gizzard stones and coprolites will be available at a reasonable price!
Luckily, thanks to those early pioneers of last century, we don’t have to go through any of prolonged combats with idiots these days.
Sounds like a really shitty gift shop.
The stuffed dolls could come with a set of pins.
In the interests of Teaching The Controversy, the creationists wish to install a plaque claiming you’ve only been blogging for four seconds.
Unfortunately Genesis has been apparently rewritten to say “be fruit and multiply, go among the infidels and infest any available internet comment boards with your ceaseless blather” causing a new generation to have to develop that same feisty confrontational style. Repetition ad nauseam.
The banana comes to mind. Much abused by he whom I will not mention. Also, the variety most often handled by USAian Creationists is the product of cloning. Which is to say, human controlled asexual propagation.
Other interpretations of ‘fruit’ will be left to others.
Oggie:
…
Go stand in the corner.
The flip side of this is, how many talk.origins creationists are still active, on blogs or even comments? I haven’t heard from Ted Holden, Kalki Dasa, or any of the rest for a long time.
PZ, I was just shown an ad for a homophobic xian dating site. I know you’ve said in the past that you don’t have any control over the ads displayed on FTB, but I think you should at least try to ensure that the ads don’t end up serving bigtory.
I have fond memories of talk.origins….but I doubt any of the regulars would remember me.
Talk.origins is still useful to point to for anyone who thinks some blog or forum post is “impolite”.
pramod:
Why do you request PZ do what you acknowledge he’s said he cannot to?
Some of the best back and forth arguments I ever read were on talk.origins back in the day (between the heavyweight regulars, I mean, not the actual creationists)…I would print pages and pages of them to read throughout the day…those were good times.
PZ:
If you had a stuffed doll in the likeness of your gravatar, I’d so buy that!
banana…banana…where have I heard that word before?
Oh yeah!
The banana is proof of God, innit?
3rd party advertisers…
@pramod Think of it this way: how likely is the audience here to actually be taken in by that sort of ad? It seems to me they’ll sway approximately no one. So in a sense you could think of their ad money as an unwitting donation to FTB.
Same with the creationists, snake oil peddlers and other assorted nonsense. Does FTB get more money on a clickthrough? That might make me more likely to investigate some of these sites.
So teh Poopyhead is going into the relic biz?
Will their be fragments of the One True Cracker®?
Gather ’round, youngins, while Ol’ PZ tells you stories about how it were in the Bad Old Days when he had a coal-fired computer and the only folks on da internet was him, the folks at DARPA, and Charles Babbage.
Coal-fired computers? Luxury. We had to post to Usenet by carving on a cave wall.
I too am writing a History of Shit that Just Happened.
I’d buy a PZ plushie.
Stuffed and mounted? Next to Jeremy Bentham, perhaps?
Lotta stuffing and mounting taking place lately.
Memories.
I was hanging out on usenet, including talk.origins, some 20 years ago.
Ask Jeffrey Rowland for one.
It might be possible to write a script to extract Expression Engine content and port to something else. Looks like it’s based on PHP and MySQL.
@John Morales
Clearly he *can* do something (for instance just turn off ads). I assume what he means by “cannot” is “will not because I don’t think it’s worth it.” If that is case, I’m asking him reconsider.
I too am old enough to remember browsing through talk.origins as an undergraduate.
My favorite creationist argument from that time (and still one of the all time best) was Ted Holden claiming that because of “solar wind” (at least, that’s how I remember the argument) the sun must be powered by electricity.
pramod:
Your ad hoc justification is feeble; clearly you weren’t asking him to turn off the ads, but rather you acknowledged them and wished for him to be selective:
(High bandwidth servers don’t pay for themselves, you know)
@John Morales
I suggested one way of dealing with the problem. There are obviously many others. Are you suggesting this is an intractable problem?
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/
Let us not forget the Evolution/Creationism forum of (the late lamented) Internet Infidels Discussion Board, where PZ and a number of current science bloggers were active in the late 1990s and early 2000s. PZ was even a moderator of E/C until 2004.