The talkorigins domain has been inaccessible for some time now…but no more. All the problems have been resolved and you can now find all the content back online at talkorigins.org.
One of our Seed blogs, Chaotic Utopia, is experiencing one of the normal stages in the life cycle of a blog: she is closing it down and moving on to other projects. Stop by and wish her the best.
Maybe one of the new projects will get mentioned here sometime in the future, too — keep in touch, Karmen!
I don’t know. People keep telling me to turn out the vote for the 2008 Weblog Awards, but given that it’s a race between me and two truly awful pseudoscientific denialist blogs, it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm. It was much more fun when it was a competition between me and Phil Plait, where at least I felt like it was legitimate contest, and any winner would have brought some credit to the award.
So go ahead and punch a button if you feel like it. But I will remind you: no cheating of any kind. The people who run this award have some weird rules, but they aren’t dummies, and they do scrutinize sources and voting patterns very carefully, and will throw out votes that have a hint of illegitimacy. The only thing more embarrassing than winning this contest might be losing it because a large number of votes for me were discarded.
For an even worse example of inappropriate nominations, take a look at the Best Middle East or Africa blog list. It’s a swarm of ignorant neo-cons up against an actual scholar of the Middle East, Juan Cole of Informed Comment. And the ignoramuses are winning!
You know you’re looking at a right-leaning site when the consistently awful comic strip, Day By Day, is doing well. But the Best Comic Strip category in the 2008 Weblog Awards does have two great entries: Jesus and Mo, and xkcd. If there is any justice in the universe, one of those two must win!
Deja vu — I’m up for one of those Weblog Awards again, and once again, there’s Phil Plait, and once again, there’s the awful faux science blog, Climate Audit. I think we’ve been here before.
One strange thing: in the list of nominees, all of them are listed by the blog name alone, except mine: it’s “Pharyngula (PZ Myers)”, but not Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait) or Neurologica (Steven Novella) or Greg Laden (Greg Laden). What’s with that? Is there some other Pharyngula blog out there, run by someone with a different name, so they wanted to dispel the confusion?
Voting begins at midnight, and this is the weird one where you get to vote every day.
We had a new addition recently: check out Culture Dish. It’s a biology blog! We need more of those around here.
Here’s an interesting new blog, Moneduloides, that seems to have an emphasis on human evolution, if you’re into that sort of thing, and it currently has a short list of good texts for Christmas presents. <moan> I’ve done absolutely no Christmas shopping at all this year, so if the economy tanks and my family hates me, it is all my fault. I just have to get out from under this stack of grading first.
Everyone is wondering what happened to the TalkOrigins Archive — it’s currently inaccessible. Don’t panic! The commercial host juggled servers around a little bit, it got its IP address changed, and those who run the show are are scrambling to update the IP with the domain name registrar. It shall return soon. You can use a backup domain at toarchive.org until everything is realigned.
If you haven’t been following the New Humanist advent podcast, where each day someone picks a scientist/philosopher they’d like to see honored for the holidays, you’ve missed Robin Ince (he likes Carl Sagan), Christina Martin (a Russian father of soil science, or several others), Alexei Sayle (Albert Ellis), Dave Gorman (Paul Erdos), and Natalie Hynes (Seneca). You’d better go catch up.
Well…3D Science News recently ran an article on Harun Yahya and the Turkish censorship of Richard Dawkins’ site, and what happens? Turkish hackers wipe out the news site (turn your speakers down if you visit — they’ve got it playing some obnoxious music now).
