Oooh, shiny

The 2006 Weblog Awards

I get a badge!

There’s a bit of chagrin involved in being nominated for one of these Weblog Awards, since if you look at the finalists in “Best Blog”, you’ll see Malkin, LGF, Power Line, InstaPundit, and The Corner listed…you have to figure, whoa, standards are awfully low here.

However, I am not nominated for Best Blog! I am in the Best Science Blog category. This makes me feel much better, because my fellow nominees are all a fine bunch of deserving people.

Pharyngula
John Hawks Anthropology Weblog
RealClimate
Deltoid
Good Math, Bad Math
Mixing Memory
The Panda’s Thumb
In the Pipeline
Bad Astronomy Blog
SciGuy

The next hurdle is the voting, which starts tomorrow. They’ve got a strange voting scheme over there, in which you get to vote every day or something, so it may still end up weird, and who knows, Michelle Malkin might win my category anyway.

This is an experiment

Acephalous is trying to measure the rate of propagation of links across the net. He’s asking everyone to link to his post (so this may just be shameless blog-whoring under the guise of doing science), exhort our readers to do likewise, and he’s going to be monitoring its movement through Technorati, and will report the results at the MLA meetings.

So you heard me. Get on your blog, link to http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html, and let’s see how quickly we can saturate the blogosphere.

(via Bitch Ph.D)

The daughter goes her own way

So Skatje is setting up a new weblog, and she’s looking for suggestions for a new name. Make a suggestion! Just to make it interesting, let’s make it a contest: whoever comes up with a wonderful idea that Skatje accepts will receive a fabulous prize plucked from my collection of biology textbooks, and including some spectacularly cheap plastic cocktail squid.

You might also drop a hint that she really ought to have her father’s blog on her blogroll. I’m feeling rebuked.

Categorization

It’s all very nice that Elayne Riggs refers to me as an A-list blogger, but it’s not true. We weird scienceblog types have to be placed on a completely different alphabet, and I have decided that I want to be on the ζ-list. Mainly because I like the squiggle.

Update your blogrolls appropriately, please.

Also via Elayne, I had to try this site that lets you figure out where you’d end up if you dug a hole through the center of the earth. I have discovered that there is a place more remote, empty, and isolated than Morris, Minnesota: it’s the center of the Indian Ocean. Although it probably does have cephalopods, so it’s a bit of a toss-up.

i-3421d55ea136fca893202255ecdeb631-other_side_of_the_world.jpg

The Koufaxes are much more respectable

I see that Phil and I are going to be in competition: we’ve both been nominated in the new Best Science Blog category of the Weblog Awards. This is one of those awards I don’t quite get: apparently, the organizers will just choose a subset of the nominated blogs in some way or another, and I seem to recall that voting is weird, too—you get to vote once a day in each category. It’s also run by a very conservative group blog that I’ve only interacted with because there is a loud-mouthed putz of a creationist in the group…I will be very surprised if a certain cranky liberal evolutionist gets his name pulled out of that hat.

Larry Moran has a blog

Check out the Sandwalk: Strolling with a skeptical biochemist. I’m dismayed that it’s been up for a whole week before I noticed.

I’ve already learned something important: Tim Horton is the god-equivalent in Canada. If coffee and donuts inspire similar levels of sexual obsession and freaky legislation in Canada as does religion in the USA, I don’t think I want to hear about it. Too, too kinky.