Weblogs
pharyngula | July 7, 2010My post about women's issues in skepticism/atheism got a lot of comments, and now those comments have been analyzed…so if you didn't want to read them all, now you can get the numerical breakdown.
One thing surprised me: only a third of the comments were people arguing with each other! When did we become so nice? Also, only a quarter of the arguing comments were by men telling women what they should do, which is a huge improvement over what I expected.
pharyngula | July 7, 2010Speaking of the untrustworthiness of corporate drones, the decision by Blizzard to end online anonymity is already having consequences. Protests have gotten so hot that they are banning complainers and shutting down threads, and people are unsubscribing from the game in protest (impossible to tell if there are enough numbers there to make a dent in their obscene profits, though). There have already been instances of people revealing their own names, only to have a horde of prickly adolescent gamers descend in force on their facebook pages and email, and doing the unimaginative trick of…
pharyngula | July 6, 2010Blizzard, which makes a couple of extremely popular computer games like Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, also maintains a gigantic set of forums with an overwhelming volume of posts appearing non-stop. I've never dug into them — way too much stuff, and it's scary how ferocious the debates can get over a change in a magic spell in a game — but they've announced a major, radical change:
The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID -- that is, their real-life first and last…
pharyngula | July 6, 2010Blame Ed Yong. He started this business of asking readers to speak up, and now it's all over the place, so I guess I need to join in .
In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What's your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?
You need some music to listen to while you're composing your answers.
There are a couple of lines there that are so appropriate here:
I staggered back to the underground
And the breeze blew…
pharyngula | July 1, 2010Christina Pikas is a zombie doing reference searches.
Sharon Astyk is a zombie wondering about zombie infrastructure.
Greg Laden has always been a zombie, but now he's a zombie with bugs on his brain.
Grrlscientist has discovered that zombies like turtles.
Vince LiCata has determined that university administrators are zombies. Come back when you have something new to report, Vince.
The zombie PalMD has a surprising ally in Jenny McCarthy — she's fighting efforts to end the zombie pandemic. The obvious McCarthy joke has already been made.
Coturnix warns us that zombies are arrhythmic, so…
pharyngula | June 27, 2010A strange little blog has been carping at various atheists blogs for a while now. Called "You're Not Helping", it pretended to have the goal of keeping internet atheists honest and holding them to a higher standard. It wasn't very interesting — it's main claim to fame was a tone that combined self-righteousness with whining — but it has just flamed out spectacularly. The author has admitted to committing flagrant sockpuppetry, with four identities ("yourenothelping", "Polly-O", "Brandon", and "Patricia") who were active commenters there, all reinforcing the same views and sometimes…
pharyngula | June 26, 2010I had a moment's concern when Butterflies & Wheels suddenly stopped loading for me — it turns out that a prior arrangement to have butterfliesandwheels.com redirect to butterfliesandwheels.org has ended, so if you're using the old .com address, you are bereft. Change it to .org and the world will resume its rotation.
pharyngula | June 22, 2010Well, hello, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Weizmann Institute! And soon CERN, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the SETI Institute will also be establishing blogs on this platform. It will be interesting to see if they can catch up with us non-institutionalized individuals here.
pharyngula | June 9, 2010Scott Hatfield, a fellow who comments here from time to time, is planning to do coursework in the Galapagos — for the good of the students, of course, he couldn't possibly enjoy spending time on some exotic islands in the Pacific. You'll have to stop by and see what he's up to, and if you can, donate to help him meet the expenses. For the students.
pharyngula | June 3, 2010The Guardian is asking for recommendations, but they've also got a good list of their favorite science blogs that is a good starting point for anyone.
pharyngula | May 17, 2010This is terrible news: one of the very best blogs on Scienceblogs, or anywhere, Effect Measure, is shutting down. It's a sad day; it was one of the blogs I turned to every day, and especially on Sundays for the Freethinker Sermonette. Revere has made a personal decision to move on to other ventures, which is good for him but deprives me of some good writing.
He has passed the public health torch to another blog, The Pump Handle, which is good…and also cruel. He set the bar very high with good writing, humanity, and progressive values, and now this new blog on Sb will have to try to meet those…
pharyngula | April 13, 2010Then you'll like the new addition to Scienceblogs, Myrmecos.
I have to say, Needs More Squid, but then that's true of all of the scienceblogs. I guess arthropods are almost as cool, though, so I'll give the blog my blessing.
pharyngula | April 12, 2010Another mobile element has been slotted into the SciBorg matrix: everyone say hello to The Thoughtful Animal, a blog on animal cognition. So far, Needs More Squid, but it could be interesting.
pharyngula | February 24, 2010I run a blog, not an open forum, and I'm reminded once again why I prefer the former.
The Richard Dawkins site is revising their forum. This substantial change is causing a great deal of unwarranted anxiety — people are unhappy (which is fair enough) and complaining, and many are flocking to a new open forum, which is also just fine. They're also complaining to me, which is odd. So I'll say a few words.
First and foremost, it is not my site, and it is not your site. It is Richard Dawkins' site. People have lost sight of the fact that Dawkins has his own views on how the site should function…
pharyngula | February 9, 2010The Times Online has posted a list of science blogs of various sorts, which I was inclined to endorse since they did include me, and also some blogs I hadn't seen before — I am enchanted by 2d goggles, and want to spend the rest of the day reading the archives — but then I got to the end of the list and … Anthony Watts? Crank weatherman and climate change denialist? That's an anti-science blog, sorry. Now I'm a little embarrassed to be on it.
I note that the commenters on that site are similarly dismayed at the lack of discrimination in their final choice.
pharyngula | February 1, 2010I'm not going to get into the ongoing civility wars. They were prompted by the announcement that the Nature Network has passed the landmark of 50,000 comments — congratulations, and that's very good — and various comments within that thread, combined with Greg Laden's helpful addition of more incindiary agents, has blown up nicely into an interesting and sometimes acrimonious discussion.
I'll just point out, though, that it's silly to use comment numbers as an indicator of success of social networking. The endless thread alone, which is almost entirely free-form chit-chat and unabashed social…
pharyngula | January 25, 2010That's what I must conclude from his recent post which is the outline for my entire damned blog. I may have to mockingly and provocatively respond, followed by promises of escalation of further actions of an obnoxious nature, culminating in outrageous climax that will trigger denunciations and many letters to the editor.
pharyngula | January 13, 2010Brent Rasmussen is shutting down Unscrewing the Inscrutable. This is sad; Pharyngula is a lowly newbie to the atheist blogosphere, and when I set up shop way back in 2003 the godless blogs I followed included the Raving Atheist (which switched sides with the conversion of its owner years ago), World Wide Rant (which shut down a while back), UTI (which was hanging in there until now), and Stupid Evil Bastard, which is still plugging away. This is simply the nature of the blogging beast, which tends to be tied to the personality of the owner, and if someone decides there's something else they'd…
pharyngula | December 8, 2009Brad DeLong has renamed his blog, formerly "J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands," to "J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles". This is excellent: the conversion process has begun, and the teuthid clan still outnumber him by two.
Other blog makeovers to anticipate: I Can Has Cheezburger will be renamed to "I Can Has Crustacean" and will go to an all-cute-invertebrate format, BoingBoing will revamp as "SquishSquish," and Perez Hilton will focus on the most garish chromatophore displays by celebrity cephalopods.
There is much to look forward to in our…