I just want to give my ~3 semi-regular readers a little update concerning the decreasing frequency of entries here.  Part of the problem is certainly real life getting in the way of blogging, which is especially problematic in the summer when it's nice outside and sweltering in front of my computer.  However, I'd be lying if I said the "Why Bother?" issue that probably kills most people's blogs wasn't a factor.

I had no delusions of grandeur when I started blogging again.  I saw it as a personal outlet for a variety of things: my desire to write, my frustration upon hearing or reading silly assertions, my fondness for looking up random crap on the internet, and even scratching the pedagogical itch I sometimes have now that I'm done TAing.  I always view any feedback I receive as gravy.  (Delicious, well-appreciated gravy that I'm very thankful for, of course.)

That having been said, I do put a fair amount of time writing and researching these entries, and it does sting a bit to see some of them slide unread into my blog's lonely corner of the internet.  I see this happen on extremely popular science-y blogs, as well.  PZ Myers (Pharyngula) gets hundreds of comments per hour when he posts a picture of himself riding a saddled plastic dinosaur at the Creation "Museum," but his detailed and insightful posts about single research papers struggle to attract ten comments.  Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy) posts amazing Hubble images and people go bonkers, but they largely ignore all the text explaining the images.  Orac (Respectful Insolence) bombastically tears into quacks to a chorus of cheers and boos, while Steve Novella's (Neurologica) measured and meticulous takedowns of the same affronts to medicine tend to generate a fraction of the response.  I'm guessing these guys sometimes feel the same frustration I do.

I thought I'd found a good solution to this problem when I heard about a new skepticism website launching.  It was a bunch of regular folks coming together to write skeptical articles and organize them into a user-friendly website.  This seemed pretty ideal to me, since I could have my blog as-is and submit the cleaned-up entries there to alleviate this buried post problem.  Unfortunately, the site seems to have died before it even started, and that bummer definitely played a role in the entry situation here.  Indeed, at one point Entry 01a was to be the announcement of my first article over there.  So it goes.

So, where do we go from here?  I don't want to stop blogging, because I do enjoy it.  Probably the major factor stopping me from starting new entries is the time I invest, so I'm going to once again attempt to dial back the written length and required effort of these posts.  Let's hope that the quality won't suffer a corresponding decline.  Actually, maybe such a decline would help matters.  If I start screwing things up, perhaps my visitors might experience a touch of the SIWOTI syndrome and leave some replies correcting me.  And, after all, I keep on saying you need to be just as skeptical of me as you should be with the talking heads on TV ...

Anyways, I think you can expect more frequent entries in the near future.  In particular, I've been hankering to flesh out some thoughts about Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, Peter Singer's opinions on vegetarianism and charity, and Bruce Hood's Supersense.  These topics nicely highlight my problem, though.  Each of these four entries would be a response to an entire book that I haven't even read (I listened to the audiobook version of In Defense of Food and caught a few interviews of Singer and Hood), and that makes writing a thorough discussion of the topics pretty tough.  But, I need to realize that I'm writing blog entries a couple of my buddies and my parents occasionally read, not formal book reviews for Science or the New York Times.

I'm getting there.  And, when I do, I'll get those entries up here.  I'll also continue pestering that website I mentioned, and let you know when (or if) it's finally launched.