I won a Quarkie!

I am pleased and a bit surprised to learn that a blog post from Bad Astronomy was awarded third place in the 3 Quarks Daily science blog contest! A couple of my posts were submitted, but there were a lot of really good essays entered from other blogs (I spent a couple of hours reading that I should have spent on other things, but man, there was a lot of interesting stuff there) and I didn't expect to win. But Steven Pinker chose my Ten Things You Don't Know About Hubble post as third place, with the first and second place spots going to Bands of Iron at Daylight Atheism (a beautifully-written piece on life and the ancient Earth) and The Ecological Disaster That Is Dolphin Safe Tuna (an interesting take on saving one species versus many) at Southern Fried Science. As promised when I mentioned this contest a few weeks ago, I am donating the $200 prize money to the James Randi Educational Foundation (of which, in the interest of full disclosure, I am President). Besides being a fine non-profit charity dedicated to bringing the light of science and reason to the world, this also will ease any residual guilt I might have for plugging a contest for which I was a candidate. And, hint hint: the JREF does accept donations through the web. I hope all my BABloggees out there will go over to 3QD and the other contestants' sites and add them to your feed reader. There are a vast, vast number of good science blogs out there. Those are great places to start. My thanks to everyone for this, especially to whoever submitted the Hubble post, and of course to Steven Pinker and 3 Quarks Daily.