Weblogs
pharyngula | June 29, 2007The ScienceBlogs buzz today is on Atheism and Civil Rights, and the opening blurb gets it wrong.
Richard Dawkins and other contemporary atheists have argued recently that America's faithless are subject to discrimination akin to that faced by women, racial minorities, and homosexuals. But is atheism better understood as a civil rights issue, or a public image problem?
Nisbet has successfully "framed" Richard Dawkins in the old sense of the word. He has not made that claim. I haven't made that claim, unless you're taking "akin" in the weakest, most meaningless sense of the word. So ignore the…
pharyngula | June 25, 2007Watch out, because now your ISP will have the power to insert their own ads into the html streaming through their pipes.
Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD's technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD's platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don't benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware…
pharyngula | June 16, 2007There's a minor contretemps going on at scienceblogs — a few of our Original Content Providers are a bit peeved at certain abysmally uncreative sites that think they can get rich by collecting rss feeds and putting them on a site with google ads, while adding no original content of their own. I don't mind the rss parasites trying that at all — if it's in my syndication, it's out there and you can jiggle it around however you want — but it's such a stupid, mindless strategy. Who's going to regularly read a site that just repackages other people's work, when the originals are easily and freely…
pharyngula | June 3, 2007After a long hiatus, the Koufax Awards site is chugging back to work, and is accepting nominations. No voting yet; this is just the time to let them know who you think is most deserving in various categories.
pharyngula | May 31, 2007People keep keep interviewing me for articles on academic blogging. I'm always giving the same answers. I've got to start getting more creative—next time, I'm going to have to say something about cults, groupies, and pie.
pharyngula | May 30, 2007I can almost understand plagiarizing Glenn Greenwald, but what is beyond comprehension is building a blog that seems to be entirely a mass of unattributed, plagiarized content. He's got sections in the sidebar for "Recent Posts" and "The Latest from Mark Mitchell", and I thought for a moment that maybe the latter would be his original content, but no, those are plagiarized, too. It's as if Chauncey Gardiner were to write a blog—a completely empty, uncreative mind is just shuffling scraps from the internet and calling it his work.
And there's almost no quality control at all — he's parroting…
pharyngula | May 28, 2007I seem to have sort of accidentally won the Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards, in the category of Best Non-European Weblog. I really have got to be more careful when I sling my readership around—next time, I might put someone's eye out. It's gratifying to know the Europeans think I'm not bad for a non-European, even if (especially if?) it means Sadly, No! is going to have to impotently shake their fist at me.
Now I have to work on winning the Best non-Asian, Best non-Australian, Best non-South American, Best non-Antarctican, and Best non-African weblog awards before I move to an abandoned oil…
pharyngula | May 25, 2007I have just been informed that those sneaky Europeans at AFOE are having a poll, and I'm on it in the category of "Best Non-European Weblog", and I'm losing badly. This wouldn't be so bad if losing meant I got the title of "Best European Weblog", but apparently trivial geographic and cultural differences will be used as an excuse to disqualify me there. Somehow, though, Sadly, No is winning in a landslide. I don't understand how that can happen, and can only attribute it to the fact that a bunch of foreigners are voting, and they can't read the title as an injunction to not vote for them.…
pharyngula | May 24, 2007Don't forget, after you've congratulated him, to remind him to finish his dissertation.
Yeah, my appointed role at the triumph is to play the guy who whispers "Respice post te, hominem te memento" into the conqueror's ear.
pharyngula | May 23, 2007Sheril Kirshenbaum is guest-blogging at The Intersection while Chris Mooney is away, and she is bravely planning on discussing…dare I say it…framing. It's a subject that gives me the heebie-jeebies, the flibbertigibbits, and a bad case of the surly snarls, but let's see if maybe Sheril can give it a new perspective—maybe she can do a better job of framing framing.
pharyngula | May 14, 2007I cower away from the horror that is MySpace, and I scarcely know what to do with facebook; I'm all at sea on this social networking buzz. Now I've gone and signed up for another one, the Nature Network, a social networking site for scientists. I'm still lost. Maybe if I encourage a bunch of you other scientists out there to sign up, some comprehension will begin to gel for me.
Attila Csordas has a nice writeup of the whole magilla which helps. I'm giving it a shot, anyway.
I already notice it lacks those bosomy young ladies in skimpy clothing that always greet me on MySpace, and the…
pharyngula | May 8, 2007There's something about this new blog that tells me I'm going to be a regular reader, but I can't quite put my finger on why.
pharyngula | May 3, 2007Larry Moran has already mentioned this recent article in Cell on this strange new fad of science blogging. He was interviewed along with many others of us, including me. I don't know about this bit:
The rock star of scientist bloggers is Paul Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, who writes Pharyngula. With about 20,000 visitors per day, Pharyngula is currently the most popular science blog according to Technorati. Myers started writing about 4 years ago. "It was a casual decision. One summer I had some free time and started typing away. And people started…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007And who can blame them? Technorati, if you're unfamiliar with it, is one of those services that watches activity on the web, and then puts up metrics and ranks and scores, and tries to distill the flux into something simpler and more comprehensible, which often reduces to telling you how many people are trying to find pictures of a naked Paris Hilton. When the mob votes, it always seems to lead to the lowest common denominator. The We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party is trying to subvert all that with a campaign to push the WAAGNFNP into the upper ranks of Technorati's odd WTF…
pharyngula | May 2, 2007Oh, I hate these difficult questions.
If you're a professor and you want to change the world, what do you do? In 1993--quit and become an activist. In 2007—start a blog.
Or so it seems. PZ Myers blogging at Pharyngula is probably doing more for evolution than PZ Myers publishing papers in scientific journals. Is that true PZ?
No.
Hmmm, I guess it wasn't so difficult after all!
Just to expand a little bit, though: it's definitely not true that I'm now doing a better job of increasing the scientific understanding of evolution. I'm not discovering anything new (well, except that I do have an…
pharyngula | April 30, 2007A colleague just let me know that I'm mentioned in the "Best of the Web" section of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. Yay! It's a positive review!
It's in the April 15 issue for all you subscribers.
pharyngula | April 30, 2007This worked fairly well last time around, so let's try it again. If you'd like to have your blog on the Pharyngula blogroll, here's what you should do:
Examine your blog with a critical eye. If you are espousing creationism, Intelligent Design creationism, the beauty of unthinking acceptance of your Lord and Master Jesus Christ or Mohammed or L. Ron Hubbard, or have a Bush in '08 badge on your site, don't bother. Really, you don't want to draw my attention to you. You probably don't like me, anyway.
There is a technical limitation. I manage my blogroll with my newsreader, so I can only…
pharyngula | April 30, 2007But if you're gullible enough to believe Hoofnagles actually exist, I suppose you could go say hello to them at their new Denialism blog.
I will point out, though, that if one Hoofnagle is improbable, the chances of two Hoofnagles spontaneously assembling themselves at a single place and time is so unlikely as to be absurd. In the face of such ludicrous improbabilities, there isn't even any point to bringing up evidence—my mind is made up.