Equal time: good science

Also in Nature 6 July 2006: a listing of the top 5 science blogs based on Technorati ranking. Here are the links, along with a quick blurb on what’s happening on their blogs today.

Pharyngula

Per Nature: “Phil Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, puts his top rank down to “tapping into the broader areas of liberal politics and atheism” and a rich vein of “resentment against the reactionary religious nature of American culture”.

Today at Pharyngula: Myers warms slightly to Hillary Clinton for her reaming of Rummy, and Dr. Myers inadvertantly stars in a failed X-Files remake.

The Panda’s Thumb

TPT has a consistent focus on evolution and creationism. Today, contributor Andrea Bottaro (Panda’s Thumb is a group blog) writes about a refutation of a paper (by Hirotsune and colleagues) that provided great fodder to the Intelligent Design crowd. Love the snark:

I imagine that reading scientific journals is mostly a drag for ID advocates: all those papers highlighting evolutionary mechanisms, identifying transitional fossils, veryfing phylogenetic-based predictions must be really irritating.

RealClimate

Seriouser and seriouser. RealClimate is a group blog dealing with climate issues. From their intro page:

RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.

Today, contributor Gavin writes about the Amazonian drought. A number of recent posts counter the ever-present climate disinformation campaign.

Cosmic Variance

I expected Cosmic Variance to be a cosmology-centered blog. That, or a really narsty place where romance writers shared their orgasm-writing techniques. Instead, Cosmic Variance has a wide scope of interest, with recent posts concerning the game of Monopoly, and a report on Salon’s Literary Guide to the World.

I’d like to come back later to read what looks like a great essay on Ludwig Boltzmann, entropy, and time’s arrow.

The Scientific Activist

I want to know how many emailed proposals Nick Anthis gets. (On the other hand, I’m constantly being surprised by what women find cute vs. not, so y’all may take one look at Nick and say eeew. All I’m saying is, I’d rather be young and edgy-looking than old, short, and bald.)

(Nearly bald.)

(Aw, hell.  Old, short, and bald worked for Bilbo Baggins. Who am I to complain?)

From Nature: “During a political censorship row at NASA in February, Anthis was the first to reveal that a key official had lied about graduating from Texas A&M University.”

Hence The Scientific Activist’s rise to fame. Today’s post is Fantastical Fridays: Ready . . . or Not. Snip:

With a name like Ready.gov, the Department of Homeland Security’s emergency preparedness website isn’t particularly modest about its objectives. However, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) claims that the site isn’t living up to its mission. Instead of just complaining about it, though, FAS has put its money where its mouth is: it made its own site, ReallyReady.org.

Here’s the best part. Instead of spending millions of dollars and involving who knows how many people, ReallyReady.org was created by one FAS intern, Emily Hesaltine, as a summer project. Whoa.

Good stuff — go give him some love.

D.