Sorry for the sudden silence on the blog. My computer died on me yesterday, and so I’ve been rather cut off. I’m in the process of setting up my gorgeous brand new MacBookPro, and things should be getting back to normal pretty quickly, except that I lost a couple of prepared posts in the crash, so this week might be a bit slow around here.
Yes, it appears that I have won the great ScienceBlogs nerdoff/geekoff. [Janet announced the results yesterday][geekoff], and despite [much][orac-whines] [whining][pz-whines], I’m proud to say that I was the winner. There was some stiff competition, particularly from Orac, but in the end, no one could quite exceed my pathetic level of geekiness.
In answer to a question I’ve heard a couple of times: Janet called it a “Nerd-Off”, but I’ve preferred to call it a “Geek-Off”. I consider them roughly equivalent. Depending on where you are, geographically, I’ve found that the differences between the two vary by location. Growing up, I always heard “nerd” used as a sort-of-positive thing (Nerds were smart people with odd interests, etc.); and “geek” was purely pejorative (geeks were obnoxious twits with no social skills). When I went to grad school, everyone there used the two words in exactly the opposite fashion: Geeks were the good ones, and Nerds were the obnoxious ones. So why do I like geek better? Because my wife has an “I love my geek” shirt that she likes to wear. And hey, if you’re a total geek like me, and by some incredibly strange stroke of luck, you somehow wind up meeting and marrying an amazing, brilliant, gorgeous, brilliant woman, you pretty much do whatever she prefers. (and yes, I repeated brilliant on purpose; she’s just that smart.)
Anyway; I think that my winning had something to do with the slide rules… so, as an award for myself, I ordered a brand-new slide rule – the Pickett whose simulated image I used for the slide rule posts last week. I’ll need a second one at some point anyway, since I have two kids, and I want them each to have a rule to learn on.
[geekoff]: http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/09/and_the_nerdiest_is.php
[orac-whines]: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/09/i_was_robbed.php
[pz-whines]: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/09/it_was_rigged.php
A few of my recent posts here appear to have struck some nerves, and I’ve been
getting lots of annoying email containing the same questions, over and over again. So rather than reply individually, I’m going to answer them here in the hope that either (a) people will see the answers before send the question to me, and therefore not bother me; or (b) conclude that I’m an obnoxious asshole who isn’t worth the trouble of writining to, and therefore not bother me. I suspect that (b) is more likely than (a), but hey, whatever works.
Answers beneath the fold.
I’m leaving on vacation today. I’ll be away for a week, with intermittent internet access. And even when I have access, I doubt I’ll have much time to do blog-related stuff. I’ve scheduled a bunch of reposts of some of my favorite posts from the early days of _Goodmath, Badmath_ back when it lived on Blogger, so there’ll be some fun stuff continuing to appear here even while I’m away.
Have a nice week!
The category theory series is finally winding down; I’ve got one topic I’d like to write about, and then I’ll have had my fill of category theory for a while. I don’t want to dive right in to another really deep topic like topology, so I’m looking for some subjects that people are interested in that can be covered in one or two posts. I could come up with some by myself (and probably will), but there are a lot of things like the zero article which so many people seemed to enjoy which I could write about, but probably wouldn’t think of on my own.
So, what would you like to see one or two posts on?
Just so folks know:
ScienceBlogs is experimenting with some new anti-spam stuff, which should do away with the need
for typekey. I’ve disabled typekey for Goodmath/Badmath, and we’ll how it goes. If you’ve got cookies or cached data for the site, you might have a bit of trouble with comments for a day or two; if you do, please drop me an email (see the contact tab), and I’ll see what I can do.
I’m also trying to figure out the right settings for the spam filter on the blog; if you post a comment and it doesn’t appear immediately, it’s probably because I don’t have the settings right. Don’t worry; it just means your message is sitting in the moderation queue until I get around to releasing it.
As you can see, there’s a new site banner.
I got about a dozen submissions this time. They were all terrific, but something about this one just really grabbed me; it was absolutely exactly what I wanted. It was designed by Josh Gemmel. So Josh gets immortalized in the “about” tab of the blog.
Any of you folks who submitted a banner, if there’s some topic you want me to write about, drop me a note. I’ll try to do articles for all of you.
Thanks everyone for your time and effort!
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 first month.
Instead, it’s been four months, and there are somewhere around a thousand people reading this blog each weekday. (Or a hell of a lot more than that on a day like today, when I’ve been linked by DarkSyde on DailyKos and by the USAToday. Thanks to both of you!)
Thanks folks. I’m really amazed at how well this blog has been received; and I’m happier than I can really express to find out that people are interested in the crazy stuff I write about.
Also, while I’m chattering away: the GM/BM DonorsChoose challenge raised $1400 towards supporting math education. Those of you who donated, thank you! SB as a whole raised over $30,000 towards math and science education. That’s going to make a real difference to a lot of kids.
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 rewards for the person whose banner I use:
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! (And yes, I’m deliberately not linking. 🙂 )
2. The number one persons name in searches that lead people to GM/BM? “Ken Ham”. Now *that* is depressing. Ken Ham, who I’ve never written about, directs more hits to my blog than my own name.
3. The strangest search term that led readers here: “butt propeller”. And not just once; three separate visits on three separate days got here via searches for “butt propeller”. I’m really not sure what to make of this one. Probably related to my post on Swinburne where I talked about monkeys flying out of my butt as a metaphor.
4. An interesting connection: I posted something yesterday about a [really bad probability argument][bad-prob] for Christianity. I got the link through email from a reader. It turns out that it’s on a fairly obscure site that [Orac][orac] had linked to in a friday post about Holocaust denial. The reader who sent me the link is definitely one of Orac’s readers as well; so the nasty probability argument was discovered through an unrelated subject on scienceblogs. I like the SB networking aspect of that; on the other hand, I wish I’d looked at the site hosting the wretched argument that I mocked; I’d rather not have given a bunch of asshole holocaust deniers the publicity.
5. Back on GM/BMs [old home][gmbm-blogger] on blogger, I did a couple of posts about a crackpot named Gary Osborne. Gary came to the blog to “defend” himself. (His idea of defending himself is call other people names, and then complain that their criticisms of him are ad hominems.) An interesting thing that I noticed was that every time he posted on the blog, I’d see referrals from a rather obscure british search engine with Gary’s name as the search keyword. After he stopped responding, the hits from that engine went away. Suddenly, I’m seeing a bunch of referrals from that engine, and I discovered that Gary has, once again, posted a [web-page][osborne-declares-victory] on a site without comments discussing his wonderful victory over me, and various GM/BM readers who joined the original discussion. Gotta love people who run away from debates and declare victory, eh?
6. Most disturbing search terms that found my blog?: “juniper lee cartoon porn”. I have no idea who Juniper Lee is. Frankly, I’m too scared to do the search and find out.
7. Unexpected linkages: 65 page views referred from [animalcules][animalcules]. Since I’ve never submitted any of my posts to that, and I didn’t know of anyone linking to me in articles in animalcules, I was surprised (in a good way) by that.
8. Another very surprising one: a search for “daily show” and “kurt vonnegut” led people to GM/BM twice.
9. A couple of frequent commenters here are frequent trollers on Panda’s Thumb. Since I frequently don’t pay a lot of attention to the names of commenters on other blogs, unless I get into a discussion with them, I hadn’t noticed the connection.
10. Three different people set up blogs specifically to respond to something I posted. Each has exactly one post.
[bad-prob]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/06/fundie_probability_even_worse.php
[orac]: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/06/who_perpetrated_the_holohoax.php
[gmbm-blogger]: http://goodmath.blogspot.com
[osborne-declares-victory]: http://www.gardinersworld.com/content/view/72/45/
[animalcules]: http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2006/02/announcing_new_blog_carnival_1.php