There are several ways of evaluating a blog’s place in the food chain. The one we’ve always paid the most attention to is Technorati, a search and ranking site that indexes well over 850,000 blogs. If you’re interested in learning more about how Technorati operates, you can review this overview at DollarShower.com.

Anyway, as of this morning, Scholars & Rogues has, for the first time in our history, crashed into the Top 1,000. We’ve been flirting with the 1K mark for a couple of weeks now, and at the moment we’re ranked #969. Needless to say, we’re pretty darned proud of ourselves. Full story »

Yes and no. Real athletes have speed and quickness and strength. Some of the people competing at Ironman events are real athletes. I am not.

You can complete an IM because you are an athlete, or because you are simply too pigheaded to quit. Not everyone can hit a curveball or run a sub-3 marathon, but everyone can force themselves to keep going for 16 hours when the bottom of their foot feels like someone has dropped a white-hot charcoal briquette into their shoe. It doesn’t take talent, just a stubborn refusal to give in. To win an Ironman, you need to be an athlete. To finish an Ironman, you simply need Ironwill. Full story »

“A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy…. It must enjoy the protection of the constitution so that it can protect our rights as citizens. It is only such a free press that can temper the appetite of any government to amass power at the expense of the citizen …. It is only such a free press that can have the capacity to relentlessly expose excesses and corruption on the part of the government, state officials and other institutions that hold power …”.

These are wise words, passionately expressed.  But the sentiments are being aggressively eroded.  Freedom of speech, and of media in particular, are under threat like never before.

From Saudi Arabia and the UAE where governments unable to “control” Blackberry emails and so are banning them outright, to China’s promotion of its firewall software to block Internet activity in its sphere of influence, to South Africa where a new censorship bill is being pushed through parliament. Full story »

We leave alternate Americas and possible futures and return to the here and now with Wake, the first volume of Robert W. Sawyer’s planned trilogy about an emerging consciousness on the World Wide Web. Just to make sure we get it, Sawyer is titling the subsequent volumes Watch and Wonder. Well, this might not be so bad if this had been a better book. But it left me feeling pretty unimpressed, sadly, for all the interest that this concept might generate. Because as Sawyer points out (in the press release accompanying the book’s publication), the web will soon have as many connections as there are neural connections in the human brain. This does raise a tantalizing prospect, one that science fiction writers have been exploring since Arthur C. Clarke in the 1960s—an emergent artificial intelligence.

Sawyer deliberately takes a route contrary to the cyberpunk ethos initially forged by William Gibson in Neuromancer. Where cyberpunk is dark, gloomy and, yes, punky, Sawyer has us approach the concept through the persona of 15-year-old Caitlin Decter, blind from birth but who has her sight restored to her. Caitlin is, purely by coincidence, a math genius and a whiz programmer, Full story »