Hey, does anybody know what’s happened with The Inoculated Mind? They’re scheduled to be the next host for the Tangled Bank, and the site seems to be down.
If that’s your weblog, get in touch with me soon.
Yikes…while all these new people are reading here, I should be sending them off to other good science sites. Quick, here are a few links:
The gang at Scienceblogs.com—lots of sciencey stuff there.
A few more: De Rerum Natura, Evolving Thoughts, Evolution 101, Thoughts from Kansas, The Austringer, Deep-Sea News, FrinkTank, Good Math, Bad Math.
More! I know, the more I mention, the more I dilute the effect, and I feel like I ought to dump the whole humongous blogroll here. Try Mike the Mad Biologist, Red State Rabble, The Lancelet, Muton, Newton’s Binomium, Dharma Bums, Science And Politics, Creek Running North.
That’s some of that real world, science-style stuff. If you’re here for the sex, I don’t have much: there’s One Good Thing and Diablo Cody.
Move along, move along. There’s lots more good reading out there.
OK, Phil wants your eyeballs, too. There are more I could add…my blogroll is obscenely large.
Oh, and Gary Farber! No one pays enough attention to Gary!
My wife is one of those statistical people who analyzes data for a local college, and she spends much more time poking around figuring out website traffic than I do. I just kind of wing it and follow my urges, she casts a calculating eye on the whole thing. So the other day, she tells me I ought to bring back that old Sex in the MRI article; it will be hot, she says, it’ll draw in a lot of new traffic. So specifically at her urging, I did.
I’m getting about 20,000 visits per hour right now.
It feels a bit eery, being married to a prophetess…although I suppose anyone could tell you that sex is always a draw. I just found it striking that I obey her this once on the weblog thing, and boom, she’s dramatically correct. Fortunately, I’m not doing this for the big traffic numbers, or I’d have to be her slave forevermore.
If any big time corporate types are looking to hire a skilled web prognosticator and analyzer and statistician, she’ll settle for nothing less than $100K/year, and she must be able to work from home (OK, that last bit is my requirement; she might be willing to negotiate that).
It’s the most irresistibly linkable blog post in the world.
Oh, wait. Not that one.
I guess we’re still looking for it.
Maybe this is it. I found it compelling, at least.
Andy is looking for donations to a good cause. I lost a good friend to colon cancer several years ago myself, so I’ve kicked in a few dollars.
I’m getting a flood of google searches from Korea, from people looking for images of anencephaly. Anybody know what’s prompting this? I know there was some news on the practice of infanticide in North Korea last week…otherwise, it’s a mystery.
Everyone is going to be there now—Duncan Black is going, so are the Firedoglakers, and oh, yeah, me. Not yet in the press releases is the fact that the lovely Dr. Mrs. Gjerness Myers will also be attending. It’s going to be quite a crowd at the Yearly Kos. Anyone else joining the gang?
There will be so many of us, I don’t think we’ll need to worry too much about the blustering wingnuts showing up with ax handles (by the way, don’t these right wing kooks ever consider the meaning of their words? Or is it intentional?)
Now if only it were being held in an interesting place. At least there is one spectacle I’m going to have to try to make time to see.
Gosh, and skippy, too.
It’s a universal phenomenon: squid love.
Here’s an optimistic idea:
Personally, I have a great deal of hope that this is going to start to change in the near future. Indeed, this is one area where the blogosphere could actually prove quite powerful. Ten years ago, I’m not sure there was anywhere that your average Christian American was exposed to openly atheistic viewpoints. These days, I’m constantly amazed how many prominent bloggers profess their atheism on a daily basis. On the list, with the help of The Raving Atheist: Daily Kos, Washington Monthly, The Volokh Conspiracy (Jim Lindgren), Pharyngula, Daily Pundit, onegoodmove, Matthew Yglesias, Vodkapundit, and of course many others, including me. Notably, many of these have substantial conservative readership.
Of course, the average American still may not tune in to these atheist blogs, but a lot of people do. A lot more than used to face proud, open, secularism a few years ago. And since most of the hostility toward atheists, in my view, is based in the fact that so few people feel they know any, this could well start to have a dramatic effect. The informal nature of blogs, revealing much of a blogger’s character and personality, has the potential to be quite powerful in this regard.
Unfortunately, I read that just after reading about the absurd War on Christians, and just before Nic mentioned an article on Pensacola Christian College (that’s the Chronicle of Higher Ed…I’m not sure if the link will work for machines without an institutional subscription) to me. We godless have a long way to go when we live in a culture in which many people can accept these absurdities:
Oh, no—the Frinksters (<–dead link) have been kicked out of the scienceblogs stable. This is somewhat disturbing, since I think they were a real plus for the group—science is supposed to be fun and profane and weird, after all—but I am assured that they were not evicted for content, but solely because the authors insisted on maintaining anonymity, which meant that all liability devolved on Seed Media rather than the authors. That does mean we can still make dick jokes (good), but it also says that anonymity here is not supported (bad). I guess that’s the price we’re paying for free hosting.
I think we also now have a great reason to make lots of lawyer jokes.*
Let me just say that the old/new location for the FrinkTank is still in my blogroll and will be staying there, even if they are drunk with power now and are going to be proudly flaunting their dangerous iconoclastic status. And even if they’ve forgotten to re-enable commenting on their blog.
