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evolvingthoughts | July 6, 2007
We have to do this, apparently, or the chain will be broken and ill fortune will follow...
First, the Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
Nothing about mentioning Fight Club...
So:
1. I am soppy and…
pharyngula | June 30, 2007
Yes, I am away for this week — I'm off wearing flannel, listening to grunge, and drinking coffee as I chop down trees in the rain (did I miss any stereotypes?). Updates to Pharyngula will still happen, though, so don't abandon me completely. They will be more sporadic, but when they do happen, they will be pungent with the tang of Puget Sound, soaring like the majestic Cascades, and as affectionate and cuddly as the banana slug. Or not. Check below to see if anything new trickles in.
And if the content sucks, tough. I'm having fun!
pharyngula | June 26, 2007And this month's winner of the coveted and prestigious Molly award is … Ichthyic. He handily beat out the inanimate carbon rod, fortunately.
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2007
OK, so while the vandals are playing some weird game on another thread, I suppose I better tell the rest of you what's happening.
1. I'm applying for a real job, and another postdoc.
2. I have two conference papers to prepare and deliver, and travel to and from (including what looks like a very wet and cold motorbike ride to Armidale NSW this Friday).
3. I'm preparing to teach cognitive science to undergraduates. The poor wee bastards...
4. I'm responding to reviewers' comments on a grant application.
5. I'm writing other stuff.
Simultaneously. As I am by nature Very Lazy, this…
pharyngula | June 22, 2007I've been getting complaints that images aren't showing up at all to some readers. This is strange, because there isn't anything at all special about the html we're using to display images. Anyway, just to rule out some possibilities, here are a few random images. If you've been having problems viewing images, and if you can see any of these, let me know in the comments which ones. If you haven't had any problems, just ignore this post.
Please note that images #4 and #5 should be on the far right side.
#1:
#2:
#3:
#4:
#5:
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2007
... as I attend to a bunch of administrative, career and professional duties. Please be patient. Your thoughts are important to us, and the next trained monkeyoperator will attend as soon as possible...
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2007From tomorrow through next Wednesday I will be on the road. First up: A trip to the big creationism museum. Then, a visit to a friend and collaborator who live in Bowling Green, KY to talk about math and whatever else it occurs to us to discuss.
Alas, I will be away from a computer for most of this time, so I won't be responding to comments. See you when I get back!
pharyngula | June 14, 2007
It's mid-month, and all you regulars know what that means: it's time to poll you guys for the winners of the Molly award for June. It's easy: just leave a comment with the name of the person you most enjoy stumbling across in the comment threads, I count 'em up, the winner gets the grand prize of getting his or her name entered on the Molly roll call. You might want to review that list before casting your vote, so you don't nominate someone who has already won one.
If you've been wondering who the grand prize winner for last month was, it was a tie between Kseniya and BronzeDog. That means…
pharyngula | June 12, 2007I haven't been monitoring the comments too closely lately, so I hadn't taken a closer look at this latest trollin' fool, "Peanut Gallery". When I saw that his latest comment seemed awfully familiar, though, I did a quick search and … whoops, what do you know. It was our old pal, the Kansas troll. Oh, and "Critical Thinker"? Same guy. The same person was also posting as Sophie, Your Dad, Yoshi, Piece of Advice, and many others. Those comments have all been obliterated now, so my apologies if the various comment threads that moron derailed now have lots of dangling references. See, this is…
evolvingthoughts | June 9, 2007
Everyone else is noting the pulse of migration to the SEED stable that occurred here a year ago. Oddly, my ecto links tell me I first posted here on the 25th of June, not the 9th, but who cares. Below the fold is my first post at Science Blogs. How'm I doing?
Welcome to the new Evolving Thoughts.
As you all know, change is inevitbre, inevatible, unavoidable. So when I was asked to join this growing resource, I agreed, so long as the under the counter payments were large enough. To avoid tax problems, they gave me shares in some American company named Enron, which I'm told are worth a lot.…
pharyngula | June 2, 2007It's nothing personal. For much of this morning, they're going to be moving the database to a new server, and they're going to shut off write access to it. That means you won't be able to write comments on any of the articles on scienceblogs for about 3 hours, from 9-12ET today.
Don't panic.
This is one step they're taking to improve performance and make those annoying "internal server errors" and double-posts a thing of the past.
D'oh! Coturnix, who must be more aware of the time than I am, tells me that comments will be off from 9-12pm today. Never underestimate how late a programmer will…
pharyngula | May 29, 2007Seed and Honeywell are sponsoring a great opportunity for aspiring science writers: the Seed 2007 Science Writing Contest. All you have to do is write a 1200 word essay that answers these questions:
What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?
How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?
A mere 1200 words? 'Tis nothing. That's the length of my usual column in Seed magazine. You can crank that out in an evening's work, send it in, and get a shot at winning $2500 (…
pharyngula | May 27, 2007I'd planned to have that Creation Museum carnival done early this morning, but the response has been huge—I've culled it down to about 65 entries, and I'm busily trying to sort them out in some semblance of order, so it'll be a little longer. Have patience.
Boy, you guys really hate Ken Ham's Propaganda Palace. It warms me right down to the black, empty void at my heart, where I think the temperature might have risen to a whole tenth of a degree above absolute zero.
pharyngula | May 25, 2007I got about 5 times my usual traffic yesterday, which explains why there were some occasional slow-downs all across scienceblogs. I think the server held up fairly well, though, and I know the big guys here are planning some server upgrades to handle future growth.
Don't worry, it'll ease up. You can tell from the relatively small increase in page views vs. visits that most of these people zipped in to read one post and didn't hang around. The new creationists trying to argue weakly in that thread have been mildly amusing, though.
pharyngula | May 24, 2007The creationist science fair article got picked up by both Digg and Reddit, so we're experiencing a bit of a traffic spike. Watch out for slowdowns and more of those pesky "internal server errors" while we undergo a kind of stress test. Also watch out for the brand spankin' new, virginal creationist newbies who are showing up, and I will remind you all of the three comment rule: be patient, try to explain first, and only after they've said 3 stupid things, then can you whack them with a 2x4.
Oh, and if they post the same thing 3 times, that's the server acting up, and it only counts as one,…
pharyngula | May 17, 2007
While I'm off at this meeting, you all can nominate your favorite commenter for the Order of the Molly. I'll tally up the votes on Sunday, when I get back home.
pharyngula | May 11, 2007The server here is not working well—people are getting lots of "Internal Server Errors" when they try to post comments, and I'm seeing the same problem when I try to post articles. Despite the error message, though, the comments are usually going through. IGNORE THE ERRORS.
Here's the usual run of affairs. You type in a witty and insightful comment as you always do, and then click "Post". Usually, this goes smoothly, the comment gets sent, the server tucks it into its database, and the page is refreshed to show your sweet, beautiful words in the thread.
Lately, something is balking after the…
evolvingthoughts | May 10, 2007
All I did was get my beloved Powerbook 12" serviced, and what happens? The Interlub goes wild with great stuff. Or was it always, and I only noticed because I was unable to blog? So, here is a rough and ready roundup of interesting things.
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I had a wonderful time last night talking to the Philosophy Students Association about Dawkins' The God Delusion. You, my loyal readers, already know my views on this, so I won't rehearse them here. But Paul made a comment I had to think about overnight. He does that. It was basically about religious…
pharyngula | May 9, 2007There might be trouble. I've already seen a lump of coal with legs go running across the Pharyngula logo, and a frog (it is a nice frog) go hopping across the page. We have not had good luck with ads that try to escape from their cage in a box on the page — send me a note if you're experiencing annoying obstacles in reading the site.
As long as I'm mentioning site weirdness—we're also experiencing some slowdowns and annoyances in posting. If you get a "500 Internal Server Error", don't assume your comment failed — it was probably accepted, and then something in the server choked. You aren't…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007
First order of business, we have a new inductee into the Order of the Molly:
April 2007
Torbjörn Larsson
I, too, would like to cast a vote for Mr. Diacritical, Torbjorn Larsson, not for any one post but for the overall excellence of his contributions. And his wit. And his cool name. And his hair. I bet he has nice hair.
Having read some of his offerings, I have to say it would not surprise me in the slightest should TL turn out to have access to more than one mind at any given moment. He's, um, really smart.
Secondly, my latest blogroll open enrollment day harvested 88 90 new souls…