Comments

  1. Fred says

    That should give him a few more hits!

    PZ, you did not reply to the Senate Majority leader?
    Just curious…

  2. says

    That’s a lot of money to pay for a W-warmer. They are very easy to knit. That one is particularly cute with squid like features. Hmmm, I was looking for a new knitting project. Let me see what I can conjure up!

  3. says

    PZ – thanks for the Apparently Irresistible Link to The Most Irresistibly Linkable Blog Post in the World (Which Isn’t). And for the squid thing. That’ll look great on my Louis XIV salon couches.

  4. says

    I have the same problem with traffic, but for a different reason: my blog isn’t that good most of the time.

    I submit that writing about how bad pseudoscience movies like “What the bleep do we know” makes for a fairly irresistable blog post. I got links from here, Shakespeare’s Sister and Washington Monthly, and approximately 20 times my average daily traffic. What can I say – people just like making fun of 35,000 year old Atlantean warriors!

    Thanks for the link, PZ!

  5. Jason Powers says

    Friend (as much as anyone can be a freind via internet) and economist Clay Shirky actually dealt with the problem that Phronesisaical describes.

    http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

    Basically, popularity contests organize results the same way every time, and as the total available popularity increases, they increase their resistance to change over time, until they become so popular and so resistant to change that only smaller sections of them are likely to still be “popularity contests.” As more people read blogs, “Best Blog” gains more weight, but also more “popularity inertia”, and subcategories like “Best Science Blog” and “Best Blog by a Pack of Yapping Fundie Jackals” distribute as their own power laws.

    Seems to me there are other systems that work that way, too.

  6. says

    I got here following the term “zappa” around Google, and just saw that great video…
    He was more than just a “character”…
    He was one of rock’s greatest musicians, and he really didn’t give a f*ck if you knew it or not!
    His albums — And there dozens, if not hundreds, contain some of the greatest vocals, arrangements, instrumental soloes, and guitar playing there ever was, or ever has been to date.
    No single album was ever a masterpiece, because unlike today’s spoiled brats, he didn’t take two years to put out an album that the label hyped like it was a cure for syphillus, so it sold 2 million copies, and then “the star” went into hibernation, except for an appearance on “Cribs” or TRL, for another two years.
    Zappa was churning out albums like newspaper columnns, for cripessakes! A few a year!
    And, he only did one or two concept or theme albums…
    Most of his albums sounded like he was going to say, at the end of Side 2, “Is that 30 minutes? Can we go home now?”
    I recommend “Hot Rats”, any of the “Joe’s Garage” series (I think there’s three), and, if you’re a real guitar fan, then you must hear “Shut up and play your Guitar”