Oh, that's a low blow. Aren't the young given a pass? Even if they are, that is some pretty shitty homework. 
When reading Kierkegaard today, I found the Danish phrase "den literaire Foragtelighed" which would be translated today as "tabloid". Somehow the thought of journalists foraging is quite a nice one.
Ian Forrester and Rachel Clarke have writeups (and pictures) of the London Wiki Wednesday.
There's an excellent article in the Guardian talking about Oxford's new "work hard" contract. Lectures suck. They're a hold over from medieval times used to make students actually think they're getting value.
If ID has no problem with common descent, I wonder where that leaves poor Paul Nelson? He's a self-admitted creationist, did his Ph.D on common descent and has a monograph which was mentioned in the Wedge Document but has still not been published. I guess, since the ID movement has no problem with common descent, then why is Nelson on the list of CSC fellows? His bio page actually still lists his "upcoming monograph" that "critically evaluates the theory of common descent" (cf. usual wording regarding 'critical evalution'). Is this oversight design or disingenuity? Perhaps someone could run it through the Explanatory Filter and see if it has Specified Complexity? 
P. Z. Myers has an entry talking about the Lehigh forum where Behe got pwned.
Eric Rothschild and team got the Clarence Darrow Award. The Kitzmiller legal team almost make up for the moral malfunctions that flow over the profession. Lawyers, it's thanks to this that you aren't scumbags. (And Lessig, of course!)
Free Range Librarian has a great post on improving your writing.
Bloggy Tips 
Kent Newsome has five pieces of advice on how to blog, including a nice compliment. I'm not sure what advice I can give in return. But let's have a go.
Never use a hundred words when ten will do. I say this having, today, just shouldered the burden of writing 20,000 words in the next month on topics of varying interest and disinterest (for university) as opposed to having to do exams. While I have to conjure up magic to meet arbitrary word limits in academia, I can write as much or as little as I want on my blog.
That is my main complaint about what Dave Winer described as Title, Link, Description blogging (TLD for short) and seemed to grok in his most recent Morning Coffee Notes [mp3]. TLD blogging, as opposed to titleless, short-form blogging has it's uses, but needs to be tempered. Part of the problem with what some cynics have described as "blog noise" is simply bloggers spending five pages on what should be five lines.
For instance, "Microsoft have just released an updated beta version for their Internet Explorer browser" can simply become "Microsoft release new IE beta". If you have difficulty with this, pay more attention to headlines. On blogs, we don't need headlines for stories which are headlines in themselves. And for stories which aren't headlines (like this meandering 'meta' post), it can have a fun title.
Second, rigorously refine and refine. I am subscribed to 300 feeds. Every morning I then delete about 80% of everything in one swoop - more for the general sites like Boing Boing and MetaFilter than the specialist blogs and blogs run by friends and acquaintances. From this new list of headlines, refine and refine again. I post a lot of links, but they're a tiny fraction of the headlines I read, and certainly with things like the ID links, they are coming from someone (and I'll risk breaking Kent's third point) whose read pretty much most of what's been written about ID by both it's proponents and it's far more sensible detractors. The tittle-tattle of what the New York Times is writing is less important than the stuff which goes on beneath the surface.
With technology, don't microdocument unless you are interested. For instance, I read a Microsoft blog which describes the minutiae of Internet Explorer development. Now, I use Safari and Firefox. I read this feed which I never really link to anything as a result of, nor read with any great interest. But, it's doing the microdocumentation for me (as Lisa Williams is for us OPMLers), and I can then pick out the interesting things. I didn't link to all the stuff about Internet Explorer's RSS functions. It's cool, but also totally expected. They announced it at Gnomedex.
State your opinion when it's necessary. I don't state my opinion all the time, because the facts speak for themselves more often than not.
Learn to Google to within an inch of your life. The "site:" and "inurl:" features are particularly useful. Google Blog Search is also my favourite blog search engine. It's more reliable than Technorati, and it's less bandwidth intensive (which is important when you're on GPRS).
Finally, and this is the most important thing - critically evaluate every single component on your blog to see whether it's appropriate, and fashion it to your needs. The big ones are comments and trackbacks. If you're an OPMLer, that's no problem. If you're using, say, Wordpress, have a browse through the plugins directories to see if any of the plugin functionality would extend your comments functionality in an interesting way. If it doesn't serve your purpose, or there's a better way, you don't have to have it just because everybody else does. Except RSS, of course!
