Meta

As lots of folks around SB have been commenting today, Nature magazine has come up with a list of the top 50 science blogs, based on technorati ratings. According to them, GM/BM is the number 45 science blog in the world. Even if it is a screwy way of figuring out what science blogs are most widely read, it's still just astounding that by any measure, this blog is ranked that high. I've only been doing this blogging thing since March. And when I started, I really expected that I'd be lucky to get a dozen readers a day, if that. I thought I'd probably wind up giving up and folding within the…
As you may have noticed, there's a site banner up there now. I only received one submission back when I requested people to submit banners. , and it just didn't quite work for me. (Bit too dark, and I didn't like the hint of a blurring effect on the letters.) Since no one else sent me anything, I finally broke down and threw something together myself. It's OK, but I'm not wild about it. So I'm repeating my request: Someone with artistic talent, *please* make me a banner. The requirements: The size should be roughly 760x90. Subdued colors; not glaringly bright. No hot pink. I tend to like…
PZ Myers writes Time's former "Blog of the Year," the execrable PowerLine blog with which I share a state, has done it again: said something so stupid and so palpably false that I'm feeling a bit embarrassed about ragging on Oklahoma in my previous post--I should feel ashamed by association at being a Minnesotan. Check out Deltoid: down is up in the world of the Hindrocket. I feel PZ's pain. I share a state with Tim Blair, who has now made exactly the same blunder as Hindrocket: "Gore's chilling effect reduces movie audiences". We'll see a correction from Blair sometime around never. Not…
Here at SB, we use Google analytics for getting info about how many people are reading our blogs, and how they get here. I also have a SiteMeter monitor on GM/BM. One thing that I get a kick out of is taking a look at my hits, and seeing what kinds of interesting connections come up. Sometimes it's funny; sometimes it's informative, sometimes it's just depressing. So last night, I was unwinding after putting my kids to bed, and was taking a look. The interesting/amusing connections I found: 1. The number one search term leading people to Good Math, Bad Math? "pharyngula". PZ, I hate you! (…
The Australian's Higher Education supplement has a couple of articles on academic blogging. Andrew Leigh says that you should try it (and plugs this blog), while Bernard Lane tells us that the University of Sydney now provides blog hosting for all staff and students.
The new ScienceBlogs homepage just went up, and all of my fellow new SBers are now public. There's a lot of great new stuff.
The ScienceBlogs empire has expanded, with twenty-odd blogs joining us here. There is a new look home page which has channels like "Planet Earth" to help organise all the posts across all the blogs. The "Last 24 hours" channel is the equivalent of the old home page with all the posts in all blogs. Coturnix has a post introducing all the new bloggers. Go, read.
As I mentioned here, back on the old home of goodmath, I was taking a poll of what good math topic to cover next. In that poll, graph theory and topology were far away the most popular topics, tying for most votes (8 each), compared to no more than 2 votes for any other subject. So, the next topic I'm going to talk about is: category theory. There is actually a reason for that. I'm not just ignoring what people voted for. Based on the poll, I was planning on writing about topology, so I started doing some background reading on toplogy. What came up in the first chapter of the book I…
A lot of people have said that they'd be willing to try making a banner for the site, but that they'd like me to provide a bit more info on what I'd like. Relatively subdued colors; no hot pink. My color preferences generally run towards blues and purples, but pretty much anything that it's flourescent is fine. Headers here run roughly 760 by 90 or so, so roughly that size. Easy to read text, including the name of the blog, and the subtitle that are currently there. I'd rather not have funny fonts mixed into the title. Something in the background that suggests the kind of math I do.…
If you take a look around scienceblogs, a lot of the folks here have really beautiful banners for their blogs. Like, for example: Aetiology (my personal favorite banner, and one of my favorite blogs) Afarensis Living the Scientific Life Unfortunately, while I'm a good math geek and a passable musician, I'm a really horrible artists. So I'm putting a request out to you guys, the readers. Can someone out there with some artistic ability try making a cool goodmath/badmath banner for me?
Welcome to the new home of Good Math, Bad Math. I thought I'd take the opportunity of moving to this lovely new home to introduce myself. I'm Mark Chu-Carroll, a math geek with a PhD in Computer Science. I work in a corporate research lab, which has asked me not to explicitly mention them here, so they shall remain nameless. I started blogging just a few months ago, largely inspired by my fellow SB'er, Orac. Orac had posted an entry about a really bad study of autism rates by a "mercury causes autism" proponent. I joined in on the comments; and it struck me that while I knew about tons of…
Tim Blair is incensed at my conclusion that Steyn had stolen from a blogger. He calls me "the Lambot" and "a thief", searches for something to attack me with ... and comes up with an incorrect comment I made on another blog. I guess I'm in good shape if that's the best he can come with. Especially since since it's the fourth time he has ranted about that comment. And he has yet again linked to his post that contains uncorrected errors of his own. (Lockitch's article was not published in the Age, and the quote was not part paraphrase.)
Since everyone else here was putting up banners, I created a banner for my blog. The text and figure come from Chapter 8 (The Deltoid) of EH Lockwood's A Book of Curves (1961). It was on sale for $1 at a book sale, so I snapped it up. A deltoid is the concave triangular curve formed when a small circle rolls around the inside of a circle three times as big. Eric Weisstein's Mathworld has a nice animation as well as a description of its properties. If you've ever played with Spirograph you might have drawn a deltoid. Under the fold is a spirograph applet (courtesy of Anu Garg) that…
Science has published an article urging more environmental scientists to take up blogging. Nick Anthis has a summary. The article gives examples of "excellent, informative sites": Mark Lynas, RealClimate, Climate Science, James' Empty Blog, DeSmogBlog, Prometheus, Science At Stake, ScienceBlogs, Scientist on ice, and Climate change conference weblog. A pretty good list, even if I do so say so myself.
Online Journalism has an article about ScienceBlogs. I get quoted a couple of times.
In a Financial Times discussion in new and old media Trevor Butterworth says: Second, the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of "niche experts" blogging away (or ready and willing to blog) lacks empirical evidence. I'm very impressed with scienceblogs.com - read the surgeon/scientist "respectful insolence" and you get a real sense of how the mainstream need to upgrade their medical reporting. And yet at the same time, I see scienceblogs.com as a sort of rearguard action against a blitzkrieg of rubbish on the net rather than the vanguard of an expert army. The "collective…
Voting has started for the Koufax awards. I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.
Welcome William Connolley's Stoat to the ScienceBlogs federation. He's not in the combined feed yet, but I imagine that will be fixed soon.
I've been nominated for a Koufax award for Best Single Issue Blog and for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Voting hasn't started yet, but there all kinds of interesting blogs on those lists, so here's a chance to find an interesting blog that you haven't seen before.
Since 99% of the trackbacks I have been getting were spam, I have turned them off. If you link to one of my posts, just leave a comment linking back to your post. Sorry for the inconvenience.