Miscellanea

  • Jeremy Ahouse points me to a small reason for pride in our profession: an interview in the New Yorker wth the woman who wrote their (print-only) piece on the Dover trial, in which she points out that the real predictor of attitudes towards intelligent design was whether people got their opinons from newspapers or from television:

“One consistent division I noticed, and that I wrote about, was between people who read and trusted the very good local newspapers (nearby York has two, which is pretty unusual for a small American city these days) and those who just didn’t trust them. The plaintiffs were the newspaper readers; the pro-intelligent-design school-board people were the newspaper rejecters.”

  • In the meantime, I am fascinated by the map of where readers come from — and in fact shall move it up the page later today. I’m pretty certain I recognise a Hammersley or two in Florence, David Weman in Stockholm, HE in San Diego. But who is the reader in Armenia? Who is in Alice Springs? And, strangest of all, who is the blob on the left-hand side of Hudson’s Bay?
  • I have to write about Resumé with Monsters this morning, then go to a lunch party. But this evening I hope to do the last 600 words of the latest troll story. The more I do of those, the more I come to believe that I should go back when they are finished, and rewrite the whole thing into a much free-er translation, possibly a complete retelling.
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4 Responses to Miscellanea

  1. rupertg says:

    Talking of professional newspapermen, there’s an interesting story concerning Piers Morgan and Matthew Freud’s new toy and how it might be approaching the interesting world of public service journalism.

    R

  2. Dan Kelley says:

    Regarding the Cluster Map, I think you’ve got to include their tag in your HTML, so that the count will work. Otherwise, I think it only counts folks who have visited your link, not your page. I’m not sure of this, but I can’t see how they can otherwise know who has visited your site, unless you call up their remote image.

  3. robert says:

    I think the whole “intelligent design” debate is a religious debate. The religion of Science verus the religion of creation. But Science is Science you scream, but Creation is Creation too. They both have their assumptions and neither can be proven (whatever proven really means).

    It’s also funny how the thought that read the ‘good’ news papers were on one side while those that rejected the good news papers were on the other side. Are the papers good because they ‘lead’ people one way and the TV bad (not good) because it leads people the other. Maybe the papers aren’t good at all, and only biased?

  4. acb says:

    Dan: I can’t see how the cluster map doesn’t work. It would appear to show pissed off Guardian readers from every continent now.

    Robert: the objection to televison is that it makes people stupid, shallow, and unable to follow an argument. Q rather ED.

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