Blue Collar Scientist

Facebook informs me that PZ Myers’ birthday is today, and so is Sean Mannion’s.

I’ve heard that PZ has a blog, or something. And Sean is working on some graphic designs for this blog.

Happy birthday, guys.

The Dinosaurs and the Bible blog is holding a contest to commemorate its upcoming 100,000th hit - the winner can walk away with a copy of The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth (1993 edition) by Stephen Jay Gould and a framed set of dinosaur stamps painted by Dinotopia author James Gurney.

Go over there and enter!

In response to several peoples’ suggestions, I’ve changed the “About the BCS” page to better reflect my professional background and current interest in science education and outreach. If you need some light reading to put yourself to sleep, check it out.

Edited to add: Also, BCS is on Facebook. Please friend me. Give me a reason to stay on the site. I hate Facebook, so I need to be shown what I’m missing.

Well, we’ve had quite a day here at BCS. Someone well known and well-followed on StumbleUpon added “Is Intelligent Design Creationism Pro-Infanticide?” to the site, and we’ve had zillions¹ of people hitting that page. (The page is in Digg, too, but hasn’t hit the big-time.) So a big thank-you goes out there to Clickmonkey, whoever you are.

In addition to the traffic from StumbleUpon, I’ve had about three times that much traffic to the posting without a referrer. I’m not quite sure what is up with that. Maybe it is Stumble users who have disabled referring? Maybe it is from some other aggregator? Who knows.

Lessons learned:

1. If you use Wordpress, run a plug-in called WP Super Cache. Although most of the time it wasn’t needed, at peak times the request rate was so high it had to have made the difference between serving the page and just timing out the request.
2. The way to get attention is to write something provocative.
3. The way to get attention is to write something that incorporates hyperbole.
4. The way to get attention is to write something that includes a serious message.
5. Definitely participate in Blogging on Pseudo-Scientific Douchebags.
6. You will get hate mail.
7. Don’t let it bother you. These people hate you anyway; the only difference is, now they are telling you.
8. They won’t “get” your hyperbole, even though you’ve categorized it as such.
9. You will get well-meaning mail from science-types who are slightly concerned that perhaps you are a little over the top in this case.
10. They won’t get the hyperbole either.
11. Maybe this means your writing style is dry and wry.
12. Oddly, you won’t get much in the way of comments.
13. Despite the difficulty with the hyperbole, the serious part of your message will definitely get heard.
14. StumbleUpon works - it thought I might like the entry and sent me there to read it when I hit my Stumble! button.
15. At least people are reading this stuff.

If I’m to top this, I think my next post had better be about intercourse with a pig.

1. I’m an astronomer, so I have a license to use big numbers. [↩]