Weblogs
pharyngula | December 9, 2007Then you might want to read this—it looks like it was a trojan horse for a spammer. I notice that some of the more web-savvy bloggers edited out the sneaky code when posting it, but the rest of you might want to look back at the code.
(hat tip to Coturnix)
pharyngula | December 3, 2007It's time for the blogosphere's favorite intramural charity, Gary Farber Pledge Drive Week. If you appreciate the long-running efforts of one of the fixtures of the net, help him out.
pharyngula | November 11, 2007Rumor has it that it is John Wilkins' eleventeenth birthday. He's on the other side of the planet, though, where it's tomorrow already, so I'm not sure if his birthday was yesterday which is today or tomorrow which might be today or what. Go wish him a happy celebration anyway and tell him to explain the date to us.
pharyngula | November 8, 2007Hey, everyone, I said I was going to be in Washington DC this weekend, with the notorious Phil Plait. We've compared notes and figured out our schedules, and are ready to announce a time and place for a general meetup: 9pm, Saturday, 10 November at the Senators Sports Bar at Holiday Inn on the Hill (here's a map). There may be some other infamous bloggers on hand, too — we'll invite them, but well, you know, this is going to be a gathering of High Nerddom, and it may be a bit intimidating to normal people.
Now go vote for Bad Astronomy for Best Science Blog. He's behind that front for…
pharyngula | November 7, 2007You can vote today, and you can vote tomorrow, and then the polls close…so get out there and vote for Bad Astronomy for best science blog. The forces of stupidity have been motivated and are pushing a denialist blog up in the rankings, and it would be good to consolidate our votes and make sure a decent blog wins. Tim Lambert agrees, and also informs us that Steve Milloy has endorsed the Climate Audit blog—any doubt that it was an undeserving mouthpiece for right-wing hackery has now ended.
Besides, I'm rooming with Phil this weekend in Washington DC, and I really don't want to have to put…
pharyngula | November 5, 2007As long as we don't have to respect his authority or consider him infallible, we can say hello to The Quantum Pontiff.
Although…computer science? What do we need their kind for? Shouldn't we be getting more biologists here?
pharyngula | November 5, 2007Sandwalk has been up and running for a year — stop by and say congratulations!
pharyngula | November 5, 2007Go vote! These are my choices, and you all should follow your own consciences.
Best individual blogger: I vote for Lindsay.
Best blog: I vote for Raw Story (yeesh, but this category is stocked with some really awful right wing crap).
Best comic strip: I vote for xkcd, of course.
Best online community: LGF must be destroyed, so I vote for Daily Kos.
Best liberal blog: These are all good, so this time I vote for Hullabaloo, but I'll probably rotate my daily vote among all the others.
Best LGBT blog: I'm torn between it and Pam's House Blend, but I vote for Susie Bright.
Best…
pharyngula | November 5, 2007The residents of Minnesota are now officially over-represented on Scienceblogs: Greg Laden has joined the fray.
pharyngula | November 3, 2007All right, I won this once already, crushing the starry-eyed vacuum-head before, but I see he's trying to be competitive in the polls again. Doesn't he realize that I need merely reach out with a single tentacle to effortlessly nullify his efforts?
This year, I think I'll rest on my laurels and instead urge everyone to vote for the Invasive Species Weblog. We need to encourage wider attention to many good science blogs, not just the ones sitting on the top of the heap. If you've been voting for me, give your daily vote to Jennifer instead. If you've been voting for Bad Astronomer, give your…
pharyngula | November 2, 2007I'm surprised to see Pharyngula has been nominated for Best Science Blog in The 2007 Weblog Awards — I hadn't been paying attention at all. I am a bit disturbed by the company I'm keeping over there, though: I'm in the running with a couple of conservative junk science blogs. Go vote for one of the other people: I like In the Pipeline, Invasive Species is terrific, bootstrap analysis ought to do well, and they've even got that space-case, Bad Astronomy in there…sure, you can give him one or two votes (this is the one where you get to vote every day).
There's also this odd blog called "…
pharyngula | October 24, 2007The World's Fair has a new meme: find the terms that return your blog as the first hit. Here is the overview:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This is easy.
PZ
pharyngula
godless evilutionist
cephalopod sex
spider kama sutra
I like the first one. Nobody can spell "Pharyngula" and most have a hard time pronouncing it, so I just tell…
pharyngula | October 16, 2007Yowza — Afarensis got put in charge of maintaining the links page at the Panda's Thumb, and he has put together a huge collection of various resources for the evo-creo wars. It even includes pseudoscience links — you've got to appreciate a cataloging scheme that lumps Uncommon Descent and the Intelligent Design Network with Time Cube and the Raelians.
pharyngula | October 16, 2007Someone compiled a list of the most popular Minnesota blogs. Pharyngula is number two. That would be OK, except that number one is that awful exercise in Bush sycophancy, Powerline.
I'm sorry to have to put this burden on you, but you're going to have to read this site twice as often, and you're going to have to show your grandma how to subscribe to it, because, really, Powerline is so creakingly archaic. We need to pass them by.
At least they don't bring up evolution any more, since the last time they got spanked.
(via #4)
pharyngula | October 13, 2007This one won't cost you a thing: vote for Shelley Batts to win a scholarship. She's a freethinking neuroscientist — she's on of us. Give her a click, that's all we ask.
pharyngula | October 10, 2007When you think of Uncommon Descent (something I'm sure we all avoid as much as possible), the weblog of Bill Dembski and friends, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe Intelligent Design advocacy is near the top, but their pyrrhic censorship policies have also got to be up there. At least the reverse is true: if you think about blogs with bad policies on comments, on transparency, on maintenance, with capricious administration and a ruthless dedication to silencing any critics, UD is the premier instance.
Well, somebody had to vent about it. I think it's fine, actually: it's great…
pharyngula | October 8, 2007Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle is up for scholarship for bloggers, and she needs your vote. You must vote for Shelley. She once gave me a special cookie in her bed. None of the others have ever given me or you a cookie of any kind, and we aren't going to get anywhere near their beds, so the choice is clear.
Vote Shelley Batts. The one with the cookies. And the parrot. And the nice blog about neuroscience.
pharyngula | October 8, 2007Yes, it's true: we have now absorbed Laelaps. Update your links and feeds.
It's like some ravenous chthonic entity, isn't it? Got a blog? We'll devour it. But it's a good thing, and I like being part of an all-consuming juggernaut of science.
pharyngula | October 5, 2007Did you know that the Nobel Foundation has an RSS feed now? It's almost as good as getting that phone call — you'll be alerted to the prize winners the instant they're announced.
(Thanks to Abel for noticing this.)