I’m currently setting up a student writing project (more on this soon, I hope). It’s inspired, in part, by frustration at the sheer badness of much of the information that floats around on the public web. I’m sure you know from personal frustration what I’m talking about.
The stone-cold assertion that the Japanese city of Kokura was hit by an atomic bomb, for instance, is one I first spotted a year ago (on a different site: clearly it’s a factoid with legs). This was just about trumped, however, by a Yahoo answers page on the old legend of Charles Darwin’s missing knighthood: the author of the most sensible explanation is deemed, for his pains, to be “on drugs or something.”
A bit of digging, though, reavealed that taking the question seriously gives us a useful window into debates on the status of nineteenth-century science. Last week I blogged the results at Whewell’s Ghost, under the title “What more do you want? A knighthood?“