Academics Andre's Research Biocuriosities Books Graduate School History of Science Hot off the Press Igor's Research Interdisciplinarity Molecule of the Month Open Access Philip's Research Philosophy of Science Physics Physicsworld.com
Backreaction Ceclia's Blog at PHD Comics Cocktail Party Physics Cosmic Variance The Daily Transcript Easternblot Everyday Scientist The Evilutionary Biologist Freelancing Science The Futile Cycle Good Math, Bad Math iMechanica in singulo Incoherently Scattered Ponderings Juniorprof Klara Stefflova Life of a Lab Rat The Loom Metadatta Mixed States Morning Coffee Physics Not Even Wrong Notes from the biomass Notional Slurry OpenScience Project Pharyngula PLoS Blog Ponderings of a fool Recombinants The Sandwalk SciAm Observations ScienceBlogs Scientific Clearing House Shtetl-Optimized Three-toed Sloth Uncertain Principles What's New by Bob Park
It seems that amazon.com may be run by cranks. Lubos Motl recently initiated a challenge to post a one-star review for a crackpot book called The Final Theory on amazon.com and have it remain on the site for one week. You can read Lubos’ account here and Brian Powell’s here.
I tried to post a tongue-in-cheek four-star review that I thought might be subtle enough to get by the moderators,* alas it was deleted within an hour. I urge you to join the challenge and post your own review. Comments on your experiences are welcome!
*I wonder if all of the comments are actually read by people. Clearly in some cases they are since Brian got human-generated responses to his queries, but it seems to me like a (unreasonably?) huge expense to have a horde of moderators reading all of the comments posted to amazon. I was thinking perhaps they have some kind of spam filter that does the job, but bad reviews they don’t like are harder to detect than most spam which is itself notoriously hard to detect. Does anyone know for sure?
Hot off the Press: Allosteric Control through Mechanical Tension Is Common Sense too Uncommon in Science? (no)
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
