Everyone go say hello to Thoughts from Kansas and The Scientific Indian, two new provinces in the vast and expanding Scienceblogs Empire. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
People, people, people. There is far too much attention being paid to a pair of obnoxious trolls in the comments. Ignore them. Do not call them out. Do not pester them with questions. Just let ’em rot.
I’m going to have to start disemvoweling the stuff from Bres Mac Elatha/Robert O’Brien and Jason, as well as the posts that refer to them, if you can’t leave them be. I get cranky when I have to start hacking up annoying comments, you know.
New Kid on the Hallway tried to give up on blogging, but now she’s back…with an interesting set of excuses for why she needed to resume. See, if you’ve been carrying on an internal dialog about you’d get so much more done if weblogs would disappear, it isn’t true.
How can I be tagged with the Random Quotes meme? I’ve had this set of random quotes set up to appear on my site for years—it seems redundant to ask me to go through someone else’s quote file and pull out five that I like. Since Janet did it, though, I’ll go along…only I’m going to insist on using my own file, and just giving you the first five that pop up.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
Stephen Jay Gould
Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
Tim O’Neill, on the JW’s anti-evolution book
The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H.L. Mencken
From now on in America, any man lucky enough to get a BJ knows to pull the shade; for there is probably a Republican outside peeking in the window.
…anyone who writes about “Darwin’s theory of evolution” in the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
Ernst Mayr
Here, I’ll make it easy for you. Click here to get 5 random quotes from my file. Now you can do it, too.
Well, there I am again, mentioned in an article in Nature (Nature Reviews Genetics, actually), but I have to agree with RPM: it’s an awfully thin article that draws unwarranted and hasty conclusions from a tiny sample. It would have been better to actually talk to some of the people blogging about genes and genetics—we tend to be a voluble bunch, I think, and would have given her plenty of material to work with—rather than glancing at a few sites and trying to draw grand generalizations from them.
Skipper M (2006) Would Mendel have been a blogger? Nature Reviews Genetics 7:664.
Palaeos is gone! There is a brief note about being unable to support it any longer, and then poof, it’s offline. Martin Brazeau has a comment on it’s value; you can still see fragments of this great resource in google’s cache, but even that will fade too soon.
This is troubling, and it’s one of the worrisome aspects of using the net—there’s no sense of permanence. It would be good if someone were to step forward and at least archive all of the pages, but the essential feature of the Palaeos site was that it was continually maintained and updated to reflect current information, and that’s not something that can be supported without the dedication of much time and effort by someone knowledgeable in the subject.
The Invasive Species Weblog is running a contest to come up with an appropriately punalicious title for an entry…and Jenn is awarding real prizes.
She’s written up her experiences at BlogHer. It’s also a good guide to where all the women are at in the blogosphere.
If you want continuously updated content, the place to go today is Stupid Evil Bastard’s joint. He’s engaged in a blogathon to raise money for Americans United for Separation of Church and State —so go read, and if you’re willing, sponsor him!
As Shelley says, if we aim to make this place the place for the biggest conversation about science, we can’t be shy. Scienceblogs has cracked the Technorati Top 100, and we’re aiming higher, so it would be nice to get more links to that page. Pharyngula isn’t on the Top 100, but I figure all the squid pics will eventually allow me to destroy Cute Overload (oh, wait, nooooo…that’s another link contributing to the dominion of cute furry immature felines!).
Technorati also keeps a list of the Top 100 Favorited Blogs, so you can help us out there, too, by adding Pharyngula to your Technorati Favorites or
adding Scienceblogs to your Technorati Favorites, if you happen to have a technorati account.
As a special bonus, I’ll be programming my undead cyborg squid-human hybrids to avoid eating the brains of anyone with Pharyngula in their technorati favorites.
