The residents of Minnesota are now officially over-represented on Scienceblogs: Greg Laden has joined the fray.

All right, I won this once already, crushing the starry-eyed vacuum-head before, but I see he’s trying to be competitive in the polls again. Doesn’t he realize that I need merely reach out with a single tentacle to effortlessly nullify his efforts?

This year, I think I’ll rest on my laurels and instead urge everyone to vote for the Invasive Species Weblog. We need to encourage wider attention to many good science blogs, not just the ones sitting on the top of the heap. If you’ve been voting for me, give your daily vote to Jennifer instead. If you’ve been voting for Bad Astronomer, give your vote to Jennifer instead. Diversify!

I’m surprised to see Pharyngula has been nominated for Best Science Blog in The 2007 Weblog Awards — I hadn’t been paying attention at all. I am a bit disturbed by the company I’m keeping over there, though: I’m in the running with a couple of conservative junk science blogs. Go vote for one of the other people: I like In the Pipeline, Invasive Species is terrific, bootstrap analysis ought to do well, and they’ve even got that space-case, Bad Astronomy in there…sure, you can give him one or two votes (this is the one where you get to vote every day).

There’s also this odd blog called “Paryngula” — I’m pretty sure that’s me.

The World’s Fair has a new meme: find the terms that return your blog as the first hit. Here is the overview:

I’d like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we’ll take the other country specific ones if need be), you’ll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

This is easy.

• PZ

• pharyngula

• godless evilutionist

• cephalopod sex

• spider kama sutra

I like the first one. Nobody can spell “Pharyngula” and most have a hard time pronouncing it, so I just tell people to google the two letters “PZ”, and there I am.

The second is obvious.

The third is a little surprising: it returns very few links. I thought it would be a much more common term.

The fourth and fifth…I just looked at the common search terms that bring people here.

As Janet suggests, your search results may vary.

Yowza — Afarensis got put in charge of maintaining the links page at the Panda’s Thumb, and he has put together a huge collection of various resources for the evo-creo wars. It even includes pseudoscience links — you’ve got to appreciate a cataloging scheme that lumps Uncommon Descent and the Intelligent Design Network with Time Cube and the Raelians.

Someone compiled a list of the most popular Minnesota blogs. Pharyngula is number two. That would be OK, except that number one is that awful exercise in Bush sycophancy, Powerline.

I’m sorry to have to put this burden on you, but you’re going to have to read this site twice as often, and you’re going to have to show your grandma how to subscribe to it, because, really, Powerline is so creakingly archaic. We need to pass them by.

At least they don’t bring up evolution any more, since the last time they got spanked.

(via #4)

This one won’t cost you a thing: vote for Shelley Batts to win a scholarship. She’s a freethinking neuroscientist — she’s on of us. Give her a click, that’s all we ask.

Yes, it’s true: we have now absorbed Laelaps. Update your links and feeds.

It’s like some ravenous chthonic entity, isn’t it? Got a blog? We’ll devour it. But it’s a good thing, and I like being part of an all-consuming juggernaut of science.