In the continuing wake of the Pepsigate scandal at Scienceblogs (it made a splash, and then seemed to die away, but suddenly there have been 18 departures) a writer at the Guardian takes that community to task for being insular.

With an opening sentence like that, you know you are in for a good post.    Back in the day, Scienceblogs was first populated by fairly militant people (politically, culturally) and the group had traffic but little credibility - yet success breeds success so if you have not followed them over the past year, they got serious legitimacy too, acquiring writers like Deborah Blum and Maryn McKenna, among others, and that boosted their profile among serious readers.    But now you may know that, during the same period, Scienceblogs also seemed intent on self-destruction, and now they have squandered that goodwill away, along with writers old and new.

Scienceblogs.com stalwart Bora Zivkovic has bid farewell to that site, the latest in a series of defections they hyper-dramatize as a 'diaspora' due to recent events, but he says it isn't about Pepsigate, just a general change in the overall climate.

He'll certainly be missed there.   He is (was) their cultural junkyard dog, taking on anyone who dared to write non-corporate-media science on the Internet and implementing their Borg mentality toward bloggers.

Making the rounds today is a utility written by Coding Robots that analyzes your prose and then matches it with famous (note: not necessarily someone you like) authors.

Among the blogosphere outside Science 2.0 I have seen 4 Margaret Atwoods, 3 Dan Browns, 2 Stephen Kings.  Only 1 Asimov but I bet his was all about robots or something.

Who did I get?   Dan Brown, which is sure to make my wife chuckle, since I read the first hundred pages of "The DaVinci Code" and had two notebook pages filled with blatant errors or inventions he made even with my limited grasp of religious history, and then gave up.  

How does a former math teacher in Texas keep winning the lottery?  Joan Ginther has hit four Texas Lottery jackpots and raked in $21 million since 1993 ($5.5 million, half of the Texas Lottery jackpot, that first time).  The last time she won was two years ago ($3 million prize from a scratch ticket).  And then two years before that ($2 million scratch ticket again).  And now $10 million in the $140 million Extreme Payout with a scratch ticket (errr ... again).