Congrats, Phil

Congratulations to Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait for accepting the position of James Randi's intellectual heir, and the presidency of the JREF. This puts him at the head of one of the oldest and most dedicated organizations focused on stemming the tide against the world of pseudoscience, hokum, and self-delusion. They lead the fight in never giving an inch to creationists, global-warming deniers, and others who would reverse the flow of science for their own purposes.

I used to read of Randi's weekly column at randi.org regularly, and was familiar with his ongoing concern of not having any clear candidate for passing his torch on to. Recent shifts in my online newsreading habits led me to start reading Plait's stuff without getting around to re-subscribing to Randi, so learning about his new role was an unexpected but welcome surprise this morning.

Plait's explosive enthusiasm, which he's maintained over a solid decade of science (and anti-anti-science) blogging, makes for quite a counterpoint with Randi's grumpy curmudgeonliness. I look forward to seeing what emerges. (I don't know how much their age difference is a factor in their relative personalities, since I have only been familiar with the online writing of the elderly Randi. But based on what I know of his many decades of service to the skeptical cause, including his celebrated string of appearances on The Tonight Show during Carson's era, I suspect he's always rather been like this.)

Distributed whuffie

I noticed tonight while ego-surfing (via Technorati) that my Gameshelf post from a couple months ago about Space Giraffe, which was my personal return to that blog, and which I figured would get some good foo via its novel theme (colliding a controversial piece of contemporary literary theory with video game design), got linked from Kotaku and amassed a bunch of comments there - many more than the original post earned.

I really have to get around to intsalling Webalizer or some other referrer-log-checker, one of these days. No, sooner than that; it's an indispensable tool for any ego-driven blogger (ha ha redundancy yes), dammit.