Chris Clarke has a new banner on Creek Running North, so of course he has to give us a grand tour of the Pleistocene. It’s a Carl Buell original, you know — it’s becoming quite the coup to get some Buell art on your blog.
Maybe this is the truth. At least that’s the experiment.
Scienceblogs are being reviewed by Some Guy, and Orac criticizes the critic. My disagreement with the clueless critic comes from a fundamental flaw in his approach: he’s basically coming along and announcing that Blog X should be about Y, and if it isn’t Y-ish enough for his taste, he pans it. He, apparently, is the Content Dictator of the Blogosphere.
One thing everybody needs to understand about blogs is that they aren’t about what you think they’re about. Good blogs are about the author, not your perception of what the subject should be.
Check out The Happy Tortoise. An undergraduate at a liberal arts college writing about science…what’s not to like?
You may recall a ferociously hardfought battle between myself and the Bad Astronomer over the Weblog Awards a while back—a battle I won easily, of course, by the overwhelming majority of approximately 1%—and that we had bet each other various horrendous penalties if the other was the victor. Phil has begun to pay up with a new article on astrobiology, and this coming weekend he’ll be singing my praises at The Amazing Meeting (anyone else here planning to attend? Make sure he does a good paean, and report back to me).
What is it with this weekend? I’m attending ConFusion, Phil will be at The Amazing Meeting, and the science blogging conference is going on at the same time. Is there something magical about this particular weekend that everybody had to schedule something for it?
One of the lesser diaries on Daily Kos is calling for a boycott of Scienceblogs and is asking readers to email the gang at Seedmedia and tell them to spank one of our colleagues here. All this because Dr Charles thinks John Edwards is a piss-poor presidential candidate. Now I happen to disagree on Edwards worth as a candidate, but I do agree with some of the criticisms: Edwards sure is awfully rich, and good lawyerly arguments are often very, very bad scientific arguments. But anyone who had actually read much of Charles’ site would know that he’s a liberal humanist who actually wants Barack Obama for president, a candidate I detest about as much as he does Edwards. Will I be censured by dKos for that? I guess I can kiss my chances of being invited to speak at YearlyKos ever again goodbye.
One of the paradoxes of this medium, too, is that now that dKos has linked to Dr Charles, and I and the Mungers are chiming in, he’s probably going to get a little surge of traffic today. It would be a good idea for him to open that article to commenting, because he’d probably get a lot of vociferous arguments that might win more repeat traffic. I have the impression, though, that Dr Charles really isn’t into long, loud wrangles, which is probably why he didn’t open comments on it in the first place.
By the way, pestering the nice people at Seed about us is ineffectual and counterproductive. None of us were selected for our political views, and any liberal bias here is entirely a side-effect of the representation of conservative thought in America by a rather nasty know-nothing party of anti-science ignoramuses, which does tend to alienate people who favor science. If we were a country of Rockefeller Republicans and Shirley MacLaine Democrats, we’d have more blogs railing at the Democratic party (and if in continued political evolution, the two parties transformed themselves in that direction, I’d be among those railers.)
Also, think about it: if the management were malleable by the flow of complaints from people who were offended by some of the things we bloggers write, who do you think would be #1 on the chopping block? Not Dr Charles, that’s for sure; I think it would be a blog with a name that starts with a “ph” and ends with an “ula”, and “phlyctenula” is an icky subject name, and the “phylum Sipuncula” is poorly represented here.
Janet says it is National Delurking Week 2007— if you’ve been reading Pharyngula but haven’t been making comments, this is the thread where you’re supposed to make your existence known and say hello. The rest of you chatterboxes should sit back and let someone else have a turn saying something.
Greg Laden makes a simple analysis of what triggers comments on Pharyngula: it turns out the least interesting subject is me (my self-esteem is being battered lately), with science close on my heels, but that you love to chatter about creationists and godlessness.
Now I wonder how strong the response will be if I say this post is about none of those things: it’s about you.
Chris Clarke (whose blog sure is a lot prettier all of a sudden) has revealed that the Koufax award nominations are now open. Go nominate your favoritest blogs!
I do not want anyone to nominate Pharyngula, and if nominated in any category I’ll ask to be removed. You see, I’ve already got one. It’s a nice honor, but I don’t need any more, and I’d rather see the glory spread around. So this year I’m planning to campaign for someone else; I’m not sure who, yet, but we’ll see what kind of exciting science-oriented blogs show up in the list this time around.
Everyone should go say “Howdy” to Developing Intelligence, the latest addition to the Seed stable.
