Looks like a fun new science blog.

Via Kevin Drum, an interesting study using network analysis of political blogs – who links to what, and what they talk about.

One of the most interesting findings is that the liberal bloggers are more likely to talk about Donald Rumsfeld, and the conservatives are more likely to talk about Michael Moore. In other words, a big part of the discourse in one’s political tribe involves complaining about the other tribe.

This seems to me to be a less than healthy mode of discourse. Listen to Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh and you’ll see what I mean.

My Hans Bethe moment

Spirit has made it to Larry’s lookout. (The “Larry” is Larry Crumpler, Albuquerque’s man on Mars, in a manner of speaking.)

I don’t know about reliable statistics, but here’s my anecdote: the top three user agents requesting files from inkstain this month self-report as bots:

The bots seem to account for at least 30 percent of the file requests received by inkstain. I’m getting an average of 95 hits per day on my robots.txt file.

I’m not complaining here. Many of the bot requests are coming from RSS aggregators, which means there are human readers on the other end of the process. And I adore the way the search engines have made the web so much more usable. Just more of an observation.

From the Guardian:

I’m not sure I’m fully in sync with this Friday bird blogging thing, in part because I’m not much of a birder, or much of a photographer. And also, it’s not Friday.

courtesy National Park Service, White Sands National Monument

There’s a family of roadrunners (Geococcyx californianus) living in a bamboo patch behind some apartments up along the bike trail I ride in the mornings. This is high-grade urban nature – the bamboo sorta got loose from the back patios of the apartments, I’m thinking, crept under the back fence and established itself on the patch of dirt between the fence and the bike trail. And the roadrunners have made it their home. It’s not uncommon to see them, but this year they’ve been looking especially fat and happy.

I had this friend years ago in South Pasadena, an old Catholic Italian-American woman. We were walking in the neighborhood, and I commented on the tenacity of a baby palm tree growing over between the sidewalk and the railroad tracks. These palms were amazing, the way they poked up through the gravel on the roadbed by the tracks. “The life force is strong,” my friend said. She was right.