Steal this post

There’s a minor contretemps going on at scienceblogs — a few of our Original Content Providers are a bit peeved at certain abysmally uncreative sites that think they can get rich by collecting rss feeds and putting them on a site with google ads, while adding no original content of their own. I don’t mind the rss parasites trying that at all — if it’s in my syndication, it’s out there and you can jiggle it around however you want — but it’s such a stupid, mindless strategy. Who’s going to regularly read a site that just repackages other people’s work, when the originals are easily and freely available? And if they stumble across something I wrote on another site, as long as it has a link back here, I really don’t care; it just means they’re doing some half-assed, clumsy advertising for me, for free.

So I’m not joining in the complaints. However, I do think this great comment from a Technorati rep at Bora’s is an optimal way to handle it.

Thanks for bringing that to our attention, ny articles won’t be getting indexed by us. We try to index only original sources and to avoid aggregator/planet sites; we definitely don’t want mechanical feedscrape-and-adsense sites.
cheers,
-Ian (from Technorati)

A parasitic clone-dump really represents minor damage, in the form of inefficiency, on the internet — it’s nice to see that it’s also seen that way by at least one of the network aggregating services, and that they are going to detour around it.

Now for the philosophical dilemma: are Technorati and Google also mechanical scrapers of the original content on the web? Should we be irritated that Google keeps copies of our web pages on its servers?

Rip-off artist catch-and-release

Here’s a nice story about a woman striking back at identity theft. She was robbed of $9,000 in 3 days (with even more long term grief) by a sleazoid who got financial information by breaking into her mail — and then she spotted the thief (recognized from a security camera photo) and got her arrested after chasing her on foot. A happy ending!

Happy, that is, until you learn the conclusion of the court trial. The thief was given probation. She’d perpetrated her crimes while on probation, so this seems like a particularly futile sentence.

It’s not an entirely pleasant prospect. Read the article for some common-sense suggestions at the end on how to avoid identity theft in the first place.

(via De Rerum Natura)

Show Phil some godless love

Don’t even try to tell me that science and religion are compatible — Phil has just encountered a perfect example of why they aren’t. He’s irritated that the jury at a trial used prayer to help them come to a decision, and he comes right out and says it: prayer doesn’t work. That’s an empirical and logical conclusion, and the efficacy of prayer is something that has constantly failed any test, and further, has been the subject of some egregiously bad testing. Prayer is an excellent example of religion trying to claim their metaphysic has real world consequences, and it has been consistently slapped down as nonsense.

Now the sad part: a number of his readers are very upset that he dared to criticize a religious concept (this is probably not the subset of readers we share; I drove those blitherers away screaming, long ago) and some are even saying they won’t read the Bad Astronomy blog any more. You know me, always kind and generous and helpful, and willing to encourage infidelity wherever I see it, so I’ll just step in and urge any of the readers here who aren’t regulars at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog to head on over there and fill in the gaps left by the few fleeing Christians. It’s worth it for the science, and no, Phil doesn’t impose any doctrinal demands on you, so you can read it if you’re a rational Christian too.

(Why do I feel a little bit like the Wicked Witch urging my minions to “fly, my pretties, fly!” as I do this?)

A Cincinnati local paper reacts to Ken Ham’s Folly

A Cincinnati news weekly, the City Beat, has weighed in on the Creation “Museum”. They don’t seem to like it.

Here are some of the good quotes from the article.

Gene Kritsky, biologist:

it’s almost like intellectual molestation.

Not only is it bad science, it is filled with bad religion, and it’s also bad sociology and bad history, too.

Lawrence Krauss, physicist:

This is an institution designed to mis-educate children.

This is nothing but an institutionalized lie and a scientific fraud.

Edwin Kagin, lawyer:

What they are doing is no less an attack on the very way that science and enlightened thought works to produce the modern world. They want to substitute mythology for knowledge. Ignorance is a form of terrorism.

The local paper, The Cincinnati Post:

Frankly, we wish the Genesis museum had been built somewhere else. We wish the 250,000 men, women and especially children expected to visit this year were getting a view of science that comports with what science really knows about the world. Why? Because Greater Cincinnati is trying so hard to market itself, nationally and internationally as a hospitable home for a knowledge economy.

At least, I get the impression it’s not a favorable review. Maybe I need to read between the lines a little more carefully.

Pirate economics?

Normally, I can’t be motivated to read economics—no offense, economists, but I think the economics part of my brain got left behind on one of my many moves around the country, and it was locked in to one particular latitude and longitude anyway—but maybe adding a little swashbuckling and really bad puns in the title would help. Hilzoy has found some interesting examples, anyway. Here’s the abstract to one:

This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively
organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation,
minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two
institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates
used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order.
Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or
England. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates
one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.

Maybe I should read that more carefully. If a group as anarchic as pirates could find a way to stably organize, maybe there are some hints for us atheists.

No, gang, boarding churches and looting them of their wealth probably isn’t a viable strategy to give us a unifying profit motive. We’re going to have to think about something more abstract. Although I do confess that a viking lifestyle does have some appeal…