A Century of Posting

This is post number 101, if one only considers actual content, rather than blog housekeeping. Blogger's tracking system calls this number 116, for example, but that counts everything, including "I added stuff to my profile" and unpublished "draft" posts such as my ideas file.

So, somewhat in the fashion established by Artieri (2006), here's a brief retrospective of this blog.

This blog started as a non-blog, a bit of administrative red tape constructed for the sole purpose of gaining the ability to berate and ridicule (er, I mean constructively critique) Carlo on his blog. He'd set his commenting rules to "must have Blogger account", severly restricting his potentially interacting audience. Since that time, I have discovered that it is technically possible to have a Blogger account without having a blog at all.

Eventually, probably after I posted one too many pedantic little grammar-Nazi comments, Carlo called me out, stating "Why don't you try creating something!" (or something to that effect, the search feature on Blogger won't let me search comments). So I did, and resurrected this blog from red tape limbo.

Without further ado, on to some *classic* BrummellBlog posts...

---

Anniversary: Chernobyl

20 years ago today, 10 time zones ahead of where I am, reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown.

And so I tried to express an interest in the outside world. This was my first content post, although it had little in it, and no editorialising (ie, it's pretty much opinion-free). At that point, I didn't want to piss anyone off (too much).

---

Purple Lightsaber: Excellent for Slicing Students

This was something of a response to Carlo's excellent "Lightsabers" post, and my first online, blogable quiz. The formatting sucks, so I buried this fairly quickly off the front page. Since then I've done a couple more online quizzes, but most of them suck, so I haven't posted them. One of the things in my ideas file is to write my own quiz. Perhaps one day I will.

---

Monday Rant: Macintosh computers suck

One of my early rants, and still I think my favourite. Macs really do suck "pile after pile of severed cock" (Wong, 2005), and I'm still happy with the wording and formatting of this classic rant.

---

Causes of Phenotypic Variation

A post that's actually about what I do in meatspace. These are actually pretty rare around here, perhaps I view my activities as somewhat boring. Perhaps this contributes to the fact I have three regular reader/commenters.

I'm still waiting to hear back from the gnomes, should be within the next couple of weeks.

---

What do you call yourself?

Serious musings on an aspect of the Cretinist-Evolutionist "debate". Since I wrote this, I've seen several serious evolutionary biologists refer to themselves as either Darwinists or Evolutionists. Despite the implicit argument from authority and argument from popularity, I'm more or less satisfied by now that these are acceptable terms for both professional biologists and intelligent non-specialists.

---

Indian Traditional Medicine

A foray into the world of skepticism. Not much, but a start. I'd like to think that someday I'll be able to submit a blog post here to a blog carnival, like the Skeptic's Circle or Carnival of the Godless. This also intersects a rant I plan to post sooner or later, about misused words that I lack a functional definition for. Bronzedog kinda beat me to it, though.

---

Teaching Biology...

This post is something of a thought experiment, wherein I test a hypothesis (Darwin is the shit, man!) using Wikipedia as a data-source. Academic rigour may not be fully present, but I found the experience enlightening.

---

I've also started numerous running, irregular topics, and I plan on posting continuations of these (my M.Sc. thesis work, books and games I own, etc). I also have two weekly features (though I'm often late): Monday Rant and Friday Fish, which I have no plans to discontinue.

Thanks for reading (and commenting! please comment! my ego needs your commentary!), I'm looking forward to another 100 posts.