Everyone was wondering why the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise pulled all the Pianka stories.
Well, none of us guessed and in hindsight it was rather obvious. At least it should have been obvious for me. The traffic generated by the stories was overwhelming the Gazette’s server. As of this minute two followup Pianka stories that weren’t linked by Drudge et al are back online. Forrest Mims explains it here.
Update: Panda’s Thumb was informed by someone in the main office outside Seguin, as no one in Seguin would tell them anything, that the articles were removed in an unlikely accident. Forrest Mims on the other hand lives in Seguin, is a columnist for the local paper, and undoubtedly knows everyone there, says it didn’t go down (pun intended) that way.
Says Mims (from the link above):
The newspaper is part of a chain across Texas, and all their servers crashed, leaving only the TCS article available.
You can read Jamie’s story here if the servers are not crashing from her follow up stories.
So we have big stories with photographs getting hit so hard the newspaper chain’s servers are crashing which any IT guy would remedy by removing the big article causing the problem, or the story about the articles getting removed by accident. Yeah, right. Accident. Everything’s an accident to Darwin zealots. Nothing is by design. 🙄