2 June 2010
Vote for Me in the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Poll!
Posted by Ryan Anderson
So, remember a while back when I wrote that article about MSL: Mars Action Hero? Well, I didn’t end up winning the ScientificBlogging contest, but someone must have liked it because I just found out that it has been nominated for the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Prize! First place is $1000, and is chosen by Richard Dawkins after the finalists have been chosen through voting:
As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EDT on May 31, 2010. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Richard.
Needless to say, it’s a nice surprise to even be nominated, and it would be awesome to win! So please head over to 3 Quarks Daily and vote for me! The list of choices is long, so the easiest thing to do is probably to just search for the post title “MSL: Mars Action Hero“. While you’re at it, check out the other posts, but make sure you remember to vote for mine!
For the record, I nominated the Mars Action Hero article, which I would have originally read via the Carnival of Space. Here’s how that came about.
When I learned that nominations were open, I decided to look through my archives of interesting links for something that I could nominate. By that point, some of my favourite articles had already been nominated by others, but I wanted to find some article worthy of consideration that nobody had picked yet.
On my blog, I publish collections of interesting links twice a month, so I browsed these collections in search of a suitable candidate.
Now, in order to get into my twice-monthly collections, an article generally has to be interesting – it has to tell me something that I didn’t know and that I value. Whereas in order to be a good candidate for the 3QD prize, an article ought to present science in a novel and well-thought-out way. So I was looking for well-presented articles from a collection that had already been selected for interest. Mars Action Hero is what I came up with.
Now that it’s been named as one of the nine finalists, I’d say it has a reasonable chance of winning a prize. The question is: what will Richard Dawkins think? I think it’s one of only two finalists that have nothing to do with biology, and perhaps Dawkins, as a biologist, will think it best to award at least one prize to a non-biological article to show solidarity with the whole of science. Would Dawkins do that? I don’t know.
Thanks very much for nominating my article! I’m glad you found it interesting and informative, and I’m extremely flattered that you nominated it and that it is doing well so far.
Thanks again! 🙂