Skeptical? Or not skeptical enough?
I stole the above cartoon from a dKos Diary. The Diarist reprinted it
with permission from this wonderful site: http://www.nearingzero.net/
I know this is old, but for those who are new to the Creationism
controversy and have a problem with teaching evolution, read the
following article:
The Creation/Evolution Continuum
by Eugenie C. Scott
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/1593_the_creationevolution_c
ontinu_12_7_2000.asp
That article (with an even niftier look of the graph) was reprinted in
Skeptic, Vo.10, No.4, 2004.
If you still have a tin-foil hat on, read this for a sobering thought:
The Truth is Out There...Way Out There
by George Case
http://skeptic.com/eskeptic12-30-04.html
...and if you are still skeptical of Lakoff, read this wonderful
series:
Lakoff - I. Who is George Lakoff?
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-i-who-is-george-lakof
f.html
Lakoff - II: Preliminaries
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-ii-preliminaries.html
Lakoff - III: Embodied concepts
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-iii-embodied-concepts
.html
Lakoff - IV: Complex metaphors
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-iv-complex-metaphors.
html
Lakoff - V: Setting the stage
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-v-setting-stage.html
...and, if you want to see everything connected to science that was
posted on Daily Kos over the previous week, check this meta-Diary:
Nerd Network News
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/2/212349/5039
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Meta-Blogging
Some blogs have thousands of daily visitors because they were there
first. It is like carbonated drinks. Even if you make a drink that is
much better than Coke or Pepsi, you are doomed to bankrupcy because
they pre-empted you. And sure, even in the early days there was
competition, and people like Kos, Atrios, Billmon, Drum, Marshall etc.
were probably better than their competition, thus they are now
deservedly the stars of the blogosphere. That does not mean they have
managed to retain the high quality of writing that perhaps
characterized their early years. Being at the helm of such a big blog
gives the owner a sense of responsibility to his/her audience to
produce something every day. It is also interesting how small the
blogrolls are of the "Big Blogs" - they tend to only link to each
other. It also appears they also read just each other, and have quit
commenting on other people's blogs (if they ever did it). Thus, a knot
in the network appeared, formed out of about a dozen or so Big Old
Blogs that only link and refer to each other. This is the blog
aristocracy.
Some blogs have thousands of daily visitors because the owner was
famous before even starting a blog. Journalists like Adam Nagourney,
Matt Yglesias, and Keith Olberman were immediate hits as soon as they
started blogging. Sci-fi writers, like William Gibson, Greg Bear and
David Brin would never have the kind of audience-size as they do if
they were not famous to begin with. People with real expertise, who
can do more than provide links to NYT and a couple of lines of
personal opinion are also magnets for traffic. For questions about
law, you go to Juan Cole or the new Posner blog. Science? Carl Zimmer,
PZMyers, Saun Carrol and David Appel have made their names in science
circles way before they started their blogs. Philosophy? How about
Brain Leiter or Sahotra Sarkar? I am glad to see more and more experts
blogging and attracting large audiences. It is important for
widespread dissemination of information that it occasionaly gets
"vetted" by people who are trained to evaulate a particular type of
information.
New blogs have a harder time. It is New Coke. It takes some really
good writing, a dose of rare expertise, and a novel way of thinking
for a new blog to start penetrating the blogospheric consciousness.
That is why Legal Fiction and Total Information Awareness are, for
instance, gaining more and more readers as the time goes by. I have
received quite a lot of nice e-mails recently, incidentally more for
my mini-"expertise" on Lakoff's scheme and logical continuation of it,
than for my real-world expertise in circadian biology. But it took a
lot of shameless blogwhoring in the beginning to get off the ground at
first.
While old Big Blogs are themselves centers of the Universe from which
all opinion radiates, small blogs have a different strategy. Large
blogrolls, lots of blogwhoring, commenting on each others blogs,
linking to each others post - those are all strategies to gain one's
visibility, with a consequence of new knots forming. These new knots
are much larger than knots of Big blogs. Several dozens of blogs in
each knot keep linking to each other all the time, and the knots get
bigger and bigger, connecting to each other, forming a really
extensive web which only tangentially includes the Big Old Ones.
Joining group blogs and blog alliances is another way the knots (or
nodes, if you prefer that term) expand, each individual blog vying for
increased visibility in ever greater competition. One new way of
spreading the knots are Blog Carnivals. The original is The Bonfire of
the Vanities
(http://wizbangblog.com/archives/cat_bonfire_of_the_vanities.php). My
personal favourite, of course, is Tangled Bank
(http://www.tangledbank.net/), collecting posts about biology, nature
and medicine (if you have a post like that, submit it to me until
January 11th:
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/call-for-submissions.html)
. Blog Tower is a collection of some of the best writing of the
"small" blogosphere (http://mysite.verizon.net/vze7rlxx/bthome/).
There is a medical carnival
(http://izzy.typepad.com/undisclosedlocation/2004/10/grand_rounds_ar.h
tml), a philosophers carnival
(http://philosophycarnival.blogspot.com/), a Christian Carnival
(http://mediasoul.typepad.com/mediasoul/2004/12/christian_carni_2.html
), an "early modern history" Carnivallesque
(http://worldupsidedown.blogspot.com/) and many others, including a
carnival of erotic stories
(http://www.nyhotties.com/archives/2004/12/carnival_of_sin_8.html).
Apart from Blog Tower, all the carnivals tend to bring together
bloggers interested in a particular field, including the experts in
that field. Is that going to result in "Departmentalization" of the
blogosphere? Or is it just a natural process of organizing a complex
system, so everyone knows where to go for what kind of information. It
is useful to have all of your liver in one place and all of your
pancreas in another - that way the nervous, immune and endocrine
systems know what to do and where to send their signals. In the same
vein it may be useful to be able to find all the philosophers in
roughly one place, all lawyers in another, all biologists in yet
another place, and all meta-bloggers (blogs about blogging) in
another.
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