Blogs
drorzel | October 26, 2006Lots 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 died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the…
drorzel | October 26, 2006Our 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 said something really regrettable to a Dawkins fan by now.
However, I'm giving an exam at 9:00, and Kate's out of town, so I have to deal with Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna myself, which means I don't have time to post, well, much of anything. So, amuse yourselves with the archives, or this sory about the Barber…
drorzel | October 25, 2006Eugene 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 the blogspace. I'm not sure exactly what I expected Knowing and Doing to be like back then, but I never intended to write that sort of blog and made great effort to write only something that seemed worth my time to think about -- and any…
drorzel | October 25, 2006Every 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 a country I can't even pronounce.
Google identifies visits from 61 different contries (well, 60 countries, plus "Satellite Provider"). Just over 75% are from the US, and adding Canada, the UK, and Australia accounts for better than 90% of them. But that still leaves an amazing number…
drorzel | October 25, 2006The 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 I'm posting the link here as much so I can find it again if I need it as because you really ought to read it.
drorzel | October 22, 2006The "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 names you entered were found in our database, neither was common enough to make it likely that someone in the U.S. has that name.
There's also nobody in the US named "Kate Nepveu." In fact, they don't register anyone at all with the surname "Nepveu" (there are apparently 570 Orzels, many of them my cousins...). What are…
drorzel | October 11, 2006So, 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 than the average for the two weeks before we got slashdotted-- 26,103 versus 1,380. That's why the log plot is the appropriate graph-- on a linear scale, you can't even see the weekly variation in traffic. Look below the fold if you don't believe me:
See what I mean?
As it stands, even if I don't get…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Having 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 her auction for the John M. Ford Memorial Endowment for the Minneapolis public library. She's got lots of nice things on offer, and it's a far nobler cause than watching me snap at string theorists, so go take a look, and send them some money, OK?
drorzel | October 1, 2006That BaconCat guy has two interesting posts this weekend on the detailed workings of blogdom. The first is a closer look at the blogs on Technorati's Top 100, and the second is a look at Big Posts and how they affect traffic. I have a few responses to these, which probably aren't terribly interesting to anyone who isn't already a blog obsessive, but that's why I'm posting this on a Sunday...
Two things strike me as interesting about John's look at the Top 25. The first is just how much movement there is in the Top 100-- when I first followed that link, the ScienceBlogs front page was #26.…
drorzel | September 25, 2006I've updated the sidebar links to reflect the fact that John Horgan has moved his blog, and to add Tales from the Learning Curve. I'm sure I'm missing something, though, so tell me what it is.
What are the best blogs out there that I'm not linking to? (Bearing in mind that I'm not enthusiastic about political punditry at the moment...) If you think there's some blog I should be reading and linking to that you don't see represented here, leave a link in the comments, and I'll take a look.
(It would probably be a good idea to leave a link to a specific post that you found worthwhile, or a short…
drorzel | September 22, 2006Via Jo Walton, Russ Allbery has a wonderful piece on the glory that was Usenet:
I've strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I haven't really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed, whether Usenet has died a little for me. But I'm sitting here, trying to capture how I feel about newsgroups and the communities in them, how I feel when I post, what threads I participate in, and... there's That Hierarchy, there's a sense of attachment to the technology and to a bunch of technical…
drorzel | September 21, 2006So, the Blogger SAT Challenge has officially run its course, and Dave has posted the question to Cognitive Daily. I'll reproduce it below the fold, and make some general comments.
What were the results like? We had 500 people at least look at the survey question, and Dave gives the breakdown:
The survey required participants to enter at least their name before moving on to answer the essay question. The most popular name was "asdf," but no one claiming the name asdf actually wrote an essay. Clearly plenty of participants only "participated" in order to see the question (you'll see it soon…
drorzel | September 21, 2006One of the bloggers quoted in Simon Owens's demographics post states flat-out that "I basically don't give a crap about the non-political blogosphere." I found this interesting, because I used to read almost exclusively political blogs, but my opinion has shifted to be almost exactly the opposite of this: I really find it hard to give a crap about most political blogging these days.
Some of this is just outrage fatigue, but I've been at least ambivalent about the whole blog punditry thing for years. This is a Classic Edition post originally from July 2002, barely a month after I started the…
drorzel | September 20, 2006Simon Owens of Bloggasm has conducted an unscientific survey of diversity in the blogosphere by emailing a bunch of bloggers to ask them demographic questions. He emailed 1,000 bloggers, and on that basis, has constructed a quick profile of the "blogosphere":
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native American: 1%
Make of that what you will.
The flaws in this study are many and obvious, and Simon is up front about them. Flaws aside, he deserves credit for even attempting to do this sort of thing. So…
drorzel | September 18, 2006As of this morning, the Blogger SAT Challenge has been looked at by 177 people. The number of completed essays is considerably smaller-- Dave estimates somewhere around 40-- and so far, everyone I've heard from has said that it was a lot harder than they thought it would be.
Even Kate thought it was tough, and she's way smarter than I am.
So, do you have what it takes to face the Challenge? It'll only take 21 minutes, and it'll give you a new perspective on education...
(Also, if you're an English composition type who would be willing to grade a few of these SAT style, email me at orzelc at…
drorzel | September 15, 2006As discussed last week, the comments about the perfect-scoring SAT essays published in the New York Times made me wonder whether bloggers could do any better. On the plus side, bloggers write all the time, of their own free will. On the minus side, they don't have to work under test conditions, with a tight time limit and a specific question to answer.
Because we're all about a rigorous scientific approach here at ScienceBlogs, we'll settle this the modern way: with an Internet contest. Thus, we now present the Blogger SAT Challenge.
("We" in this case is me and Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily…
drorzel | September 14, 2006The truly remarkable thing about the BaconCat incident is not that John Scalzi taped bacon to his cat (as you can tell from his wife's reaction), or that he got a bazillion hits from Fark for it (which is what the Internet is for, after all), or that he made a motivational poster about it (because, really, it takes firearms to keep Scalzi away from PhotoShop).
No, the remarkable thing is that the fake blog someone set up for John's cat currently has a Technorati rank in the top 1.6% of all blogs (848,635 out of 54 million, at this writing).
Really, there's just no way you could make this shit…
drorzel | September 14, 2006Over at Science and Reason, Charles Daney has launched a new blog carnival, focussing on physical science and technology issues. I rarely remember to participate in these things-- the deadlines just go whooshing by, like deadlines do-- but the general concept is pretty popular, and we need more physical science blogging on the Interweb. There are, what, nine different bio-themed blog carnivals? There should be at least one about physics...
And there's some good stuff in the first issue, now available: Philosophia Naturalis #1. So check it out, and if you have a better memory than I do, send…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Janet thinks she's scoring nerd points by posting a picture of her nerdy watch, but I can match her timepiece:
OK, there's nothing particularly nerdy about the watch itself-- the nerd part is the band, which in this case, is held together with a cable tie. The little loops that are supposed to keep the strap down broke off, so one day when I was in the lab, I grabbed a plastic cable tie, and made my own loop.
That was in December. I replaced the band about a week ago. I only replaced it because Kate was getting her watch fixed, and pointedly asked whether I needed anything done with mine. (…
drorzel | September 6, 2006Fed up with the hotness contest results, Janet has decreed a nerd-off, asking for:
your geekiest jokes, your nerdiest life-lessons, your testimonial to your favorite programing language (or tissue culture medium), what have you.
We've already had a local thread of funny physics jokes, but for sheer nerd value, it's hard to top the classics:
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An abelian grape.
or
Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a mountain climber?
A: You can't. A mountain climber is a scalar.
It just doesn't get nerdier than those...