Back to the blogs ...

My semester is almost wrapped up; on Saturday I finished most of my grading, and with any luck I'll formally turn in my grades on Tuesday. So, today I got to spend a few solid hours surfing blogs, with no work-related distractions. Amazing. Here's some posts of note:

• Scalzi explains why online piracy won't lead to the demise of writers in Writing in the Age of Piracy. He uses Penny Arcade, and his own site, as examples of how modern writers can make money in a world with pirates: both sites give away all of their content for free, yet end up making heaps of cash every year. The comments are an excellent read as well.
  
  
• Preposterous Universe has a graph of the national debt from 1945 to 2004, adjusted for inflation.
  
  
• Science and Sensibility has found a number of botany blogs.
  
  
• Angry Professor is looking for suggestions on how to teach a pre-statistics class to math-phobics.
  
  
• Bsag talked about CiteULike, a site that lets academics share links to journal articles they're currently reading (much like del.icio.us).
  
  
• Science and Politics posted the 16th Carnival of Education, and Organic Matter has put out a call for submissions for the next Tangled Bank.
  
  
• Tycho and Gabe (of Penny Arcade) have started posting some of their earlier works (for both links, scroll down to "The braying and neighing of barnyard animals follows"). Their exchange on May 27 (the first link) is hilarious.