I’m #3? Of what?

There’s this new service, Wikio, that is trying to rank various blogs. It’s very pretty, but I have to say that ranking is entirely the wrong approach — it simply perpetuates a falsely hierarchical view of the web and acts as a positive feedback system to reinforce popularity; blogs are promoted as popular because they are popular, making them more popular. It’s nerds with computers realizing that gosh, traffic and links are easy to measure, so let’s provide a pigeonholing service that sorts by the simplest, most basic tool we can invent.

This one at least tries to add a qualitative estimate of content by grouping the blogs into categories, like “science” and “sports” and “health”, but too often these are arbitrary and irrelevant, and rife with omissions. The blog listed just below mine is a car blog, for instance; Sandwalk is left out, and Wilkins is included. None of these are bad blogs, but I think it does no one a service to be jumbled up and stacked according to a number that is a sloppy proxy for the quality of the content.

You know what I’ve come to like? Tag clouds. At a glance, you can tell quickly what subjects have come to the fore on a blog that uses them, and you can spot blogs that might address subjects of interest. As for whether it is a good blog on those subjects, I determine that by actually reading a few entries.

Going caroling this year?

Amadan wrote this amusing Gilbert and Sullivan parody, I Am the Very Model of a C-Design-Proponentsist. Now you can actually hear it sung by Karl Mogel! (by the way, Karl, you know you’re a science nerd when you think the best way to tell people what the tune is is to mention that it’s the same as Tom Lehrer’s Elements song.)

I think this is one of those carols that is best sung drunk, I’m afraid; I’m picturing hordes of godless atheists and happy secularists stumbling into midnight mass on Christmas Eve and disrupting the services by trying to pronounce c-designproponents-ists very fast.

Another shovelful on Behe’s grave

It’s a strange thing to read another review of Behe’s Edge of Evolution. This one is by David Levin, and it strongly highlights the compromises and the irrelevancy of the book.

In the end, the most irritating aspect of this book is Behe’s selective use of the ever-expanding base of scientific knowledge as a soapbox from which to shout his embrace of perpetual ignorance. The better our understanding of the intricate details of complex biological systems, the stronger is his belief that they must have been designed and that science will never unravel how they came to be. This is a trend for him. As Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs at the Dover trial, observed of Behe’s claim that the immune system is irreducibly complex, “Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system … Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire “intelligent design” movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother.” Scientists have never listened to him. But with so many concessions to evolution mixed with his new message of God-as-mutagen, will anyone?

It’s a good review, but does anyone care anymore? His thesis is rejected by biologists and ignored by creationists, and the man is on his way to well-deserved obscurity.