The 9th Carnival of Mathematics is live at JD2718, in a cleverly alphabetical form.

We’ve been having some problem with popups showing up on scienceblogs. It’s not deliberate: Seed does not accept popup ads. But it appears that one snuck in somehow, but no one is sure where it’s coming from.

If you see a popup on GM/BM, please do me a favor, and post a comment here telling me:

1. Who the popup was for,
2. What ads appeared on the page when the popup popped up.

The sooner we figure out where the popup is coming from, the sooner we can get rid of it.

Our corporate masters at Seed have added a new blog to ScienceBlogs, and it looks like a real winner. It’s called the Denialism Blog, and it’s off to a roaring great start with “The Unified Theory of the Crank. Go check it out!

(This issue came to a happy conclusion. After the uproar generated by this being publicized by so many blogs and websites, the publisher got in touch with Shelley, gave her permission to use the figures, apologized, and promised to do some internal legal education so that this won’t happen again.)

This doesn’t affect me personally, but my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Shelly Batts of
Retrospectacle has been threatened by
lawyers from the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, one of the Wiley group’s journals, for reproducing a part of one figure from an article that she was writing about.

In a sane world, this would be a clear case of “fair use”: Shelley was not stealing or taking credit for anyone’s work. She did not reprint the article. She did not write about the work without giving credit to the original authors: she provided a full and appropriate citation of the article. All she was doing is what many bloggers do regularly: she was writing about an interesting piece of research that had been published in her area. But her article doesn’t fit the spin that the authors/publishers wanted to put on it. So they resorted to legal threats to try to shut her down.

There’s really nothing bloggers like us can do to stop publishers from pulling obnoxious stunts like this, except to publicize it, so that they realize there is some cost to them associated with this kind of behavior. That’s why I’m writing this. Wiley needs to recognize that as a publisher of scientific journals, it’s absolutely unreasonable and unacceptable to threaten lawsuits against other scientists who reference their work.

This post is a quick moderation update, caused by recent crap going on in the comment threads involving George “First Scientific Proof of God” Shollenberger, combined with my recent change of employment.

Before changing jobs, my old employer was kind enough to allow me to write this blog, but they did not want me to ever do anything on the blog that allowed them to be identified as my employer. The idea was that since the blog was something I did on my own time, without any oversight from them, they wanted it to be clear that the blog had no connection with them. My new employer, Google, has a different attitude towards blogs. They still want me to be explicit that what I do and say here does not represent them in any way; but they don’t make me play the silly game of trying to obscure who I work for. I’m allowed to say that I work for Google – so long as I’m perfectly clear that I’m an employee, but that GM/BM has absolutely nothing to do with them. I don’t speak for them; I don’t represent them; I don’t write for the blog on company time; this blog is entirely my space, and has nothing to do with them.

Why bring all this up? Because I’ve banned George. I hate to ban people, even when they’re complete assholes. Up to now, the only person I’ve ever banned was John Davison, and he practically begged me to ban him. But George has started using our “debate” here in the comments of GM/BM to attack Google. And I’m not going to tolerate that.

Attacking me personally is entirely acceptable; it may make me angry, or frustrated, but given the kinds of things I write on this blog, I think it would be completely inappropriate, even hypocritical, for me to say that any kind of criticism or attack aimed at me personally was out of bounds.

But this blog is something I do in my free time – my own time. It has nothing to do with my employer; what I say here is said solely by me representing myself and my personal thoughts and opinions. Taking what I say here and using it to attack my employer is completely beyond the bounds of what I consider reasonable, or what I’m willing to tolerate.

George crossed that line. So he’s gone.

Fuck.

Ok. Now I’m seriously pissed off. What a miserable way to ruin god-damned april fools day.

I just realized that I’ve been writing this blog for a whole year! I managed to miss the actual
anniversary, which was on thursday. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing it for a full year.
When I started Good Math/Bad Math on Blogger, I honestly believed that I’d probably last a couple
of weeks; maybe a month at best. And I didn’t expect to find a lot of readers – my best guess was
that I’d be lucky if I got a couple of dozen readers a day. After all – what I write about is math – in particular, mostly extremely abstract math. Not exactly something that I expected a lot of people to be interested in.

And now, a year later, I’m part of the ScienceBlogs community. I’ve posted close to 500 articles since the blog started, and I’m averaging 3,000 pageviews per day. Absolutely unbelievable!

So I’d like to say thank you to all of you who’ve been reading and commenting. Writing GM/BM has been more fun and more rewarding than I could have imagined, and that’s mainly due to all of you who read, comment, and send links. Thanks for reading, and thanks for letting my share my love and enthusiasm for math with all of you.

I’d also like to say a particular thank you to my friend Orac. It was Respectful Insolence that inspired me to start my own blog, and Orac was the first blog to link to GM/BM, providing me with that first burst of readers that really got things rolling. So many, many thanks to you, Orac.

Here’s hoping that I can keep this going for many more years!

The third edition of the Carnival of Mathematics is out: this time around, it’s hosted at
Michi’s Place.

The next edition will be up in two weeks at my fellow ScienceBlogger Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog.

So as many other folks have been pointing out, the Koufax awards have come out with their “Best Expert Blog” nominations, and I’m incredibly pleased to say that GM/BM was nominated!

In case you’re not familiar, the Koufaxes are one of the really serious, prestigious web-awards, aimed primarily at the left-leaning blogosphere.

I realize that my chances of actually winning are pretty damned slim; on the other hand, since PZ is disqualified because he won last year, that means that the rest of us have a chance. Voting isn’t open yet, but when it is, I’ll mention it here. I would really like to make a good showing. The BlogAwards, where GM/BM came in fourth are a very sloppily run silly award; the Koufaxes mean something.

Thanks to whoever nominated me!

Many of my fellow ScienceBloggers have recently declared their membership in
Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique. I’ve been busy, so I haven’t been able to get around to signing up until now. That’s a shame, since some of the badges appear to have been designed specifically for me!

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