Just when you may have thought Technorati was approaching normal behaviour, this happens:

I would say it is getting repetitive but that is, surely, stating the obvious. Despite there being a positive number of blog posts each day (chart) of the last 30 days, Technorati claims to have no posts. It is doing this an awful lot at the moment.

Before this blog creates the impression it just doesn’t like Technorati (which is close to the truth now), I just want to highlight the importance of an “open standard” for things like this. People writing blog posts have no real way of knowing if their comments are getting picked up by Technorati – and if you don’t appear in the three posts listed on that page, people are very unlikely to ever read your posts. Even Google is more open and honest about how it indexes pages.

On it’s own this would be bad enough but it could be argued that blog creators will blog no matter who reads it. The bigger problem is for people searching with Technorati. The results you get from a search are almost randomly arbitrary. When you search, you have no idea if you are getting the latest posts, most relevant posts or anything. It is madness.

Now I actually don’t want the likes of Google to take over as the Blog search engine of choice (it has just as many flaws but different ones), however as Technorati seems to be spectacularly dropping the ball this may be inevitable.

So much for the weblogs being the “great publishing revolution” that allows the masses to become journalists. Unless you get millions of links you wont show up on Google, and your chances of showing up on Technorati seem to depend on you having a MySpace blog or some other covert whim.  Does this need new software to solve it? Are search engines like IceRocket better? At the moment I dont think so, but times change…

It is hard to go more than a day or two without coming across some nonsense where an ID/Creationism proponent tries to pretend they have even the slightest clue about Evolution – no matter how little they actually know and how little scientific education they may have had.

Today’s chart topper is from Pat Boone, that well known student of the scientific method, evolutionary biology and other scientific disciplines. From a quick web search it seems his background on the topic is being apparently descended from American frontier hero Daniel Boone and being a devout born-again Christian (he was raised in the conservative Church of Christ – Wikipedia). All good reasons why he should have a privileged insight into the validity of Evolution…

Anyway, on a WorldNetDaily page titled “Charles Darwin’s unfunny joke“, Mr Boone feels he can deconstruct Darwinian evolution. The post is funny, although maybe not in the way Pat Boone hopes. It is funny that he thinks what he is writing is logical, sensible or in any way refutes evolution. It really is bad science at best.

Take this from one of the early paragraphs:

“But it’s science,” you say. No, not really. Certainly, not yet, if it ever will be. It’s a theory, an extremely farfetched, unproven theory and – at its base, its fundamental core – terribly unscientific!

The mind boggles. Not only does he show he has no idea about evolution, here he shows no understanding of science. He hasn’t even bothered to research the basics. He says “It’s a theory” as if that means it is something “less” than other science. He obviously feels the Theory of Relativity is far fetched, the Theory of Electromagentism is flawed and Quantum theory is unscientific.

I actually thought ID / Creationists had realised their mistake with attacking the terminology of “Theory” or “law” but obviously not. There follows a paragraph with more logical fallacies than I care to highlight at this time. (Emphasis mine)

But this unfunny joke has been taken very seriously by a host of scientists, and now most educators, and it has been universally accepted as “fact” by most universities and school systems. And woe to the teacher, from grade school through college, who dares to question this improbable, unproven theory. If he or she dares to suggest or present the alternative theory of Intelligent Design – the vastly more plausible notion that this incredible universe and all living things point logically to a Creator with an intelligence far beyond our feeble comprehension (no matter how many Ph.D. degrees we might have among us) – lawsuits and intimidation will surely follow that teacher.

Amazing. I nearly choked on my drink when I read that. It is even funnier when you read it in the context of Pat Boone being a man without a PhD (who is this mysterious “us” he talks about..?) and his earlier denigration of the term “theory.” One the very remote off-chance anyone still thought he had the slightest idea what he was talking about, he writes this:

Had you thought about that? If all life on this planet were actually in a process of “evolution,” would every species evolve in lock step, regardless of different environments? Or wouldn’t there be all the intermediate steps still in evidence, at various places around the globe? Wouldn’t there be plenty of evolving apes, tending toward homo sapiens, in the jungles and rain forests, possibly developing verbal skills and capable of elementary math and reasoning?

Great isn’t it. He really has no idea what evolution involves and predicts, but he still feels able to ridicule the theory. The fact he is ridiculing a theory he has made up for the sole purpose of his ridicule (classic strawman for the spotters) seems to go right over his head. He really is a funny guy. One day he may realise where the true joke is.