The whole Pepsi maneno is over, and we are moving on. But I thought you’d like to see this site just because it is so unbelievably ugly. Be careful. The first time I opened this web page up on one of those old fashioned CRT monitors, the glass broke.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
MY EYES!
Damn you, Laden …
What, is this loon a member of the John Birch Society?
Thank you for your comment about Lobus Motl’s blog. I actually love its design. Aside from the top beef, a hilarious mixture of advanced science and passion, the layour and the neat gadgets are why I voted for it in 2008.
http://2008.weblogawards.org/
At the end, Motl’s blog was voted the best European blog on the Internet.
I posted the following comment. Since he has comment moderation I’m posting a copy here in case it doesn’t get approved:
There’s a legitimate argument that the Pepsi matter was overblown. Indeed, the legitimate parts of your argument have actually been made by some ScienceBloggers such as ERV: http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/07/sciblogs_caves_to_hysterics.php
Note that ERV has pretty left-wing politics which doesn’t fit with your narrative at all.
There are other problems with your post. For example, your attempt to show that ScienceBlogs has nothing to do with science fails. It is true that there’s political content and that that content is generally more often what is considered liberal or progressive than what is considered conservative. But your argument of pointing to the five most active articles ignores that highly active comment threads are almost always going to occur more frequently in things like politics than science issues. This is true in many websites, not just scienceblogs. See for example Slashdot. One can just look at the front page of scienceblogs.com to see that the vast majority of content being produced by ScienceBloggers is science, not politics.
Wow. He really doesn’t get the distiction between advertorial and science blogging. I notice that A. Watts also climbed on the nothing wrong with a little corporate advertising *pretending* to be a science blog bandwagon.
What neither of them appear to have ‘gotten’ was that no one AFAIK expressed any opposition to Pepsi being a sponsor of ScienceBlogs.
What they objected to was Pepsi buying an ad and PR spot and presenting it on Sb as just another Sb science blog.
It is as if you had press releases written by Pepsi-Co but bylined as just another columnist for a newspaper.
It is deceptive, lowers the perceived value of the other Sb bloggers, and raises questions of their independence from ‘corporate messaging’.
I finally realized what the whole Pepsi-Co thing most resembles: Payola.
Jesus Invisible Haploid Zombie Christ. That is the single ugliest blog on the web, and it’s run by either a great Poe or one really stupid human being.
As for “Science blog readers” up above, I’ve got a buck that says that the commenter is either the blog author himself or his incestuous mother.
You weren’t joking. It’s like a brightly colored plastic tablecloth draped over a puddle of vomit.
Aaargh! The goggles, they do nothing!
Something is seriously warped regarding Mr. Motl’s perception – and that concerns shapes, colors, and political reality.
Re Lon FCD
Actually, Dr. Motl has a PhD in physics and, at least in the past, worked in string theory so he is in no way, shape, form, or regard a really stupid human being. Really stupid human beings don’t get PhDs in physics.
On the other hand, Dr. Motl is a nutcase believing in all manner of far right wing notions, such as climate change denial. It just goes to show that being a smart guy doesn’t prevent one from being a whackjob (e.g. Linus Pauling, William Shockley, Peter Duesberg, J. Allan Hynek, and Brian Josephson).
I’m so tempted to post ‘reality has a left-wing bias’ on that thread, but I don’t want to feed the troll. He’s a troll who just happens to run that blog.
What amuses me about his criticism is that there’s nothing more free-market than a strike or boycott. People are voting with their dollars, and it seemed to be the only effective way to get Seed’s attention. He’s right about profit being a strong motivator, and the bloggers here used that motivator to influence Seed.
I seem to be unable to get through to the page, for some reason my virus software won’t let me. Apparently it is ugly enough that my virus software is trying to protect my eyes.
That blog is run by LuboÅ¡ Motl. He is apparently quite bright, but, to quote David Gerard, he was hired as an assistant professor by Harvard “through competence and talent, and lost it by being a raging asshole”.
His politics are heavily right wing, and he insults anyone (via his blog) that is even slightly critical of string theory.
Did you read the P.S.?
Wait, so liberals are hypocrites because we “worship people of color?” WTF? How did he start on Pepsigate and end up on affirmative action? I guess it shows that virulent racism lurks just under the surface with most of these right wing nut cases.
I remember that episode. We had a “blogger suggestions” thread on the old backchannel. One day overlords simply asked “what do you think of Lubos Motl?”. We collectively laughed. We never heard anything about it again, but obviously he was not added to our roster (not invited, or uninvited, I don’t know the details). That simple. No censorhip, no instance of PZ throwing his weight around. Seed sent a trial balloon, and it burst spectacularly.
I have seen other people like Lubos, who grew up wonderful little communists in Eastern Europe, and once communism became unfashionable there, switched to the opposite extreme while retaining the same habits of mind and an undeveloped moral compass.
Re Coturnix @ #15
I have seen other people like Lubos, who grew up wonderful little communists in Eastern Europe, and once communism became unfashionable there, switched to the opposite extreme while retaining the same habits of mind and an undeveloped moral compass.
Not only in Eastern Europe. Many of the neocons and right wing nutcases in the US started out as Trotskyites (e.g. Irving Kristol, father of Bill, and David Horowitz).
Incidentally, Mr. Coturnixs’ link still points to his former Scienceblogs’ blog.
Coturnixs is now at:
http://coturnix.wordpress.com/
Let’s just say that the influence of the Cold War on American politics is hardly any less than Eastern Europe’s.
Quite funny: I open up Motl’s blog after following the link from this blog entry, and the first thing I see is the Google Ads section that runs an ad for eye laser surgery!