This weblog awards contest has few people up in arms because WUWT is currently leading. Lucia points out some of the dynamics of silliness that go on related to it.
My take on it: it’s all simply fun, and the outcome affects nothing, heck there’s not even a prize except for a sidebar badge. But in the spirit of that fun, I thought I’d share some of my favs:
- Best Blog – I’m going with Huffington Post, for having the courage to run Harold Ambler’s essay on Al Gore
- Best Online Community – Our friend Jennifer Marohasy is in the running, she needs a little help
- Best Liberal Blog – I note that BigCityLib is not present, so I have no pick. Though given Wonkette’s lead, choice is irrelevant
- Best Conservative Blog – This is a tough one, as many of these have befriended WUWT. But I think I have no truer friend than Kate over at Small Dead Animals
- Best Celebrity Blogger – Hands down, Wil Wheaton, the rest are just noise
- Best Technology Blog – I like Engadget for this.
- Best European Blog – Not only for content, but for widgets, Luboš Motl and The Reference Frame
- Best Science Blog – Take your pick
Here are some categories that didn’t make it this year and my nominees:
Best tongue in cheek commenter: Steve Mosher
Best blog that is my inspiration: Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit
Best cheerleader: Gosh, there are so many. Roger Pielke Sr. has been stalwart as has been Joe D’Aleo. Evan Jones and John Goetz come to mind. So do Russ Steele and Gary Boden, and Leon B. and ‘jeez’, tough choices. But given all these choices….I think perhaps ‘smokey’ might be the winner here though.
Best angry blogger not nominated: Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to be the clear winner, though Tamino is worthy of note
Best troll: TCO aka TCOisbanned
Best reason for me to stop blogging: my family that doesn’t get enough attention from me as it is
Best label from a detractor who is now belly up: “Reverend Anthony’s Screeching Mercury Monkeys” …from editor Tom Gascoyne of the Chico Beat, now history.
Best Silly Logo: Gary Boden’s rendition above
Best Orange Wiener Dog in a sidebar: Lucia’s the Blackboard
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“I agree, but WUWT is more readily understandable even by those of us with technical degrees.”
And Anthony is more tolerant of warts and feral upbringing, more personable and friendly.
PearlandAggie (08:40:55) :
lucia (08:22:48) :
You are nothing but a paid shill for Big Oil!
This response always cracks me up…if only it were true, the we’d at least receive a little financial benefit for engaging the eco-wacko lunatics! LOL
It also shows little understanding of the politics of oil… the Big Oil guys are now tepidly endorsing the AGW agenda since it will force their major competitor, Big Coal, to produce the volumes of CO2 that the oil companies need to get enhanced oil recovery from old oil fields.
Nothing like getting your competitors to pay you to take a product you desperately need… Big Oil will be laughing all the way to the bank over carbon sequestration… bet they can even get carbon credits for it too!
I agree, TomVonk, and it appears that most others do, too: Lubos’ site is in the lead.
And thanx for helping out, old construction worker: (22:06:51)
It’s perfectly legitimate to vote once every 24 hours. It’s easy, too: click
Every vote for this site gets a plenary indulgence, and 100,000 free carbon offsets.
But wait, there’s more! The first 50 people who vote get 200,000 offsets. The economy is down, so we’re having a 2 for 1 sale! Operators are standing by.
Stefan (16:27:45) :
If all it took to solve problems was to get lots of bright minds together, form committees, gain unanimous support from institutions, make policies, and make computer models, we’d have cured cancer a long time ago.
Hey, it worked fine for all the financial engineering that went into mortgage derivative products!!! And now it’s working even better for the bailout!
/sarkoff>
Every vote for this site gets a plenary indulgence, and 100,000 free carbon offsets.
Alas, CarbonCreditKillers is no more…
You had to donate money to that site, but in return they would sell you Carbon DEBITS. That meant they would CUT A TREE DOWN for every 5$ or so. It’s true – they really would! Furthermore, they would cut trees down even if you didn’t pay….They are no longer on the net, but you can see their pages on the WayBack machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070719140340/http://www.carboncreditkillers.com/
Dodgy Geezer (02:47:15) :
I will, however, switch to CA if it looks as if RC are going to beat it. That would indicate that the RC crowd have given up on pushing Pharangula(?) and gone back to the easier task of overhauling a site we are not voting for, in order to retrieve some bragging rights.
My thinking too. I’m not usually a tactical voting kinda bloke, but since I have this many to play with…
“..I’m not usually a tactical voting kinda bloke, but since I have this many to play with…”
On a straight vote for ‘which blog does the best science?’, I would vote for Steve every time. He is doing top-level science, and deserves a Nobel for supporting the scientific principle, in my view.
But this is for ‘the best science blog’. I’m not sure what that is, but popularity probably enters into it, and then we have the tactics. If you look around, all the categories have blogs which ‘drop out’ and then ask their supporters tio vote for some other blog. It’s simple game theory applied to multiple-preference voting. The tactics can either be positive – “I’m not going to win, but my friend might..” or negative – “I’m not going to win, but I’ll sure as hell stop …”.
RC supporters are going to push Pharangula – a good anti-intelligent-design site, because it looks like having the best chance of unseating WUWT. If it falters, and another one grows, they will switch their allegiance to that. I suspect that if WUWT looks unbeatable, they will go back to voting for RC, and try to push it past CA, so I am watching for such a move, and will adopt my voting accordingly.
Fun tactics might involve RC switching back to voting RC for a while to draw people into supporting CA, then plunging on Pharangula in the last few days. It’s simple game theory.
Jennifer Marohasy (17:01:49) :
“Hey Anthony,
Much thanks for suggesting my blog is worthy of a vote or two – and yes I am currently trailing by rather a large margin!
And, yes, if any of your readers would like to support a blog that tries to take an evidence-based approach to environmental issues in this fun popularity contest then they can vote for me here:
http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-online-community/
PS Congratulations on your huge lead in the Science section – in my opinion well deserved!”
Jeniffer,
I’ve visited your blog on a regular basis.
Love your work and I’m voting for you too.
Hope more WUWT readers and posters find the way to your blog and vote as well.
Keep up the good work
Anthony, gonna withdraw your vote for Huffington post. Seems she wouldn’t have posted Harold Ambler’s post. Don’t know if link will work , I’m bad with linking stuff.
http://newsbusters.org/user/26
Brent in Calgary
Arianna: Hey, sorry for publishing material that was skeptical about global warming
OT but amusing…
The ticker WTS brings up Watts Industries, Inc
They are a maker of valves, water control systems, filtration and code compliance products. I have no opinion on them. Just find it fun that there is a Watts Industries at all… Any relation? (They are on the other coast…)
You both care about making things work right, filtering out the crud, getting the sewage gone, and compliance with accepted standards 😉
No relation
Smokey (05:13:42)
Thanks for the link.
That gave me a series of quiet chuckles.
I went and had a look at the competition, Pharyngula:
A sore throat for sure, but science?
Here are the categories of the first page:
Kooks (1)
creationism(4)
weirdness (3)
Godlessness(2)
Books(1)
Humor(2)
Religion(1)
Politics(1)
Is it considered science because it is on the web page scienceblogs.com?
@Anna V
Umm… I think that Pharyngula is primarily an anti-Intelligent Design site. And hence in the business of ‘exposing kooks’ of all kinds.
Since I tend to believe in evolution rather than science as specified by the Bible, I would tend to support Pharyngula’s aim, but I don’t think they actually DO very much science. That’s not a knocking statement – there’s no reason why they should – but if you’re used to CA or WUWT you will have a rather sophisticated idea of what a science blog is.
I must admit, my idea of a good evolution/intelligent design site is http://www.evcforum.net/ . Take a look at the ‘Dates and Dating’ section there, and learn what a Uranium Halo is all about….
I found this blog through ” weblog awards contest”.
Surely they made mistake for the category. This is conservative blog against liberal conspiracies.
Welcome aboard, Fido.
Actually, this site simply asks questions that some folks [eg: UN/IPCC, GISS, NOAA, etc.] seem very reluctant to answer. Despite that reluctance, we’re getting some answers here, as the 7+ million hits and numerous comments attest.
If you have questions, this is the place to ask them.
WUWT has a two thousand vote lead over second place… yahoo! And Climate Audit has a nearly 3:1 lead over RealClimate… double yahoo!!
Hey guys,
Please move this back up to the top.
@Lubos Motl
Re: ‘Reference Frame’ as Best European Blog
You’ve already received my daily vote and will continue to do so until voting is closed. You have a well-grounded perspective on both the political as well as the scientific issues of the day. Well done, and I wish you continued success, health, and clear thinking. You are an asset to planet earth, sir!
Dodgy Geezer (09:59:19) :
@Anna V
Umm… I think that Pharyngula is primarily an anti-Intelligent Design site. And hence in the business of ‘exposing kooks’ of all kinds.
Since I tend to believe in evolution rather than science as specified by the Bible, I would tend to support Pharyngula’s aim, but I don’t think they actually DO very much science.
I’m not so keen on the ‘anti-intelligent design’ folks for the same reason that I’m not keen on the AGW folks. They refuse to consider that they might have missed something. (Please, hold the rock throwing till the end!) ANY disagreement with them is met with immediate ridicule. Not exactly science-like in my book.
I’m not a religious person (basically I’m a hard core science nut), and doubt that ‘God’, whatever they are (if anything) created me. At the same time, the intelligent design basic thesis says maybe something with brains had a hand in it all. To me, this would include, oh, space aliens. While I think seeing UFO’s mostly means you ought to get a better brand of hooch, I can’t rule out ‘visitations’ over the last few billion years. It’s a big universe.
There are some fascinating oddities in our history that fit the ‘space aliens made us’ thesis (including a written history from mesopotamia in [a lot] BC that specifically references the ‘goddess’ from space that did the genetic manipulation.) If we forbid even asking the question, then we can never get the answer to “Is there anything to it?” and we risk not really understanding our history. Yes, it’s probably just a myth, but can’t I at least ask the question without ridicule?
One other minor point. Somewhere I have a fascinating book by a guy who manages to reconcile the Genesis account with known science in many ways. The most fascinating bit was he asked: What if we are looking at the clock from the wrong end? Time dilation has happened.
If we started at compressed time at the big bang, then golly, each big bang scale day matches the events in our known scientific view just dandy, from ‘let there be light’ to heaven and earth to creation of life. We have forgotten that 7 days of creation might be several billion of our present days, viewed from this end of dilated time… Both science and The Bible could be right and the folks who get 6k years by mumbo jumbo numerology wrong.
(I know I’m not doing this justice, but I loaned the book to someone so I can’t dig it out to get the proper description… nor title / author / ISBN. I think it may be this one: http://www.amazon.com/Genesis-Big-Bang-Discovery-Harmony/dp/0553354132 )
Can you really show that there was never a visitation from an E.T. doing a Ph.D. project on upgrading primitive critters on an uninteresting planet? Can you really say with certainty that Genesis isn’t just a garbled version of the science (we’ve now figured out) taught by a visiting E.T. Peace Corp Volunteer but mangled in transmission by a primitive understanding of things like time dilation, evolution, and nuclear physics? Do you forbid asking the questions?
My point? IMHO, Science is about being able to ask ANY question, and having an open mind about what the answer might be while searching for evidence. Religion is about believing your answer must be right and forbidding certain questions. By that measure the anti-I.D. folks and the Rabid Religious are cut from the same cloth. Neither is really science. Nor a science blog.
I must admit, my idea of a good evolution/intelligent design site is http://www.evcforum.net/ . Take a look at the ‘Dates and Dating’ section there, and learn what a Uranium Halo is all about….
Rather interesting. Though I must admit I had expected Dates and Dating to be a social meeting place or advice on whom to go out with 😉 Sometimes I’m a bit slow… I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was about geologic age determination. Chagrinned, but at least now I know that both science and religion have halos 8-0
Fido is an appropriate name for someone who holds to the AGW orthodoxy.
Fido is from the latin root for “faithful”.
Don’t be a lap dog for the AGW elite!
Notes on a post I just dropped on RC: (since you won’t see it there.)
“Maybe the votes for the “best science blog” are going through some sort of “RC moderation filter” – that might explain why half your votes aren’t showing up.
Kinda like why this comment won’t show up…”
People prefer WUWT ten to one over RealClimate!! 🙂