The folks at Cosmic Variance are taking part in the 2008 DonorsChoose Blogger challenge, in which various blogs pick worthy school projects to list, and invite their readers to fund them:
It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.
We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.
Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.
Of course, the US/LHC blogs can’t possibly take an official side in such a competition, or be any kind of “affiliate” — we’d have to get a dozen bloggers to agree, and for all I know mail some kind of form in triplicate to NSF and DOE as well. (Ok, the latter probably isn’t true.) But if you want my personal opinion, you should give money through Cosmic Variance’s page, because (a) I like an underdog, and (b) I took a course in General Relativity with Sean Carroll a few years back, and it was pretty good.
But no matter which side of the great divide between between Cosmic Variance and Science Blogs you happen to be on — or even, dare I say it, which side of the upcoming presidential election — we can all agree that it’s a good thing to send a bit of money to motivated teachers who want to give their students a little something extra. Take a look!
