Category: Blogs

Well, vote for a ScienceBlog, anyway. Shelley is a finalist for a student blogger scholarship. Weirdly, the outcome appears to be determined by a popular vote, which seems like it’s just asking for Internet Drama. But if you’re interested in student blogging, go read the nominees, and vote for one.

I got a comment to my recent “Classic Edition” post on peer review asking permission to translate the post into French, and put it on a French-language blog. Needless to say, I was kind of flattered that anybody would think it was worth that much work, so I agreed, and now it’s appeared. Cool stuff.… Continue reading Foreign Publication

Lots of people are jumping on Gregg Easterbrook for his remarks on the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. In particular, fellow ScienceBlogger Tim Lambert blasts him for saying: The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have… Continue reading Easterbrook on the Lancet

Our DSL was down for a good chunk of the evening, which means I didn’t get to pre-write any blog posts. It also means I haven’t been able to keep up with the comments on recent posts, which is actually probably a good thing, because given how tired I was last night, I probably would’ve… Continue reading No Blog For You!

Eugene Wallingford had a post last week about blogging, and popular misconceptions: When I first started writing this blog, several colleagues rolled their eyes. Another blog no one will read; another blogger wasting his time. They probably equated all blogging with the confessional, “what I ate for breakfast” diary-like journal that takes up most of… Continue reading This Is My Hobby

Every now and then, I start poking at the stats in Google Analytics, and I almost always find something interesting. For example, in the last week, this site has been visited twice by someone from Mauritius, four times by someone from Iran, and six times by someone from Kyrgyzstan. I’m being read by somebody in… Continue reading Where You’re At

The rant about “meme” being a stupid idea that I mentioned near the end of Monday’s Dawkins post turns out to be from Mike the Mad Biologist, who reposted it yesterday. Executive summary: The word doesn’t add much, obscures important phenomena, is imprecise, and is vitalistic. I’m sure you were dying to know this, but… Continue reading “Idea” is a Perfectly Good Word

The “How many people have your name?” thing has come across my RSS feed a dozen or so times already, most recently via the very common John Lynch. I was finally bored enough to put my name in, and here’s what I get: There are 0 people in the U.S. named Chad Orzel. While both… Continue reading I Am a Unique Flower

So, last week’s SAT Challenge rollout got picked up by Slashdot, which led to a great big spike in traffic. How big? Well, here’s a graph: “Big deal,” you say, “It’s not that big a spike.” Thing is, that’s a semi-log plot. The top of the spike represents almost a factor of twenty more visits… Continue reading This Is Your Blog on Slashdot

Having just posted an extremely cranky comment, I should compensate with something happy. So, , um… here: Jo Walton posted a poem about General MacArthur in Faerie. Because, as she puts it, “If the American Right think they own Churchill, I can definitely write about MacArthur in Faerieland.” The poem was commissioned as part of… Continue reading Le Morte de MacArthur