Administrative
evolvingthoughts | May 2, 2007
For the next few days, my beloved Mac 12" Powerbook is going in for intestinal surgery - it seems to have lost connection with its wireless, DVD/RW and microphone, which indicates Major Problems (although I do recall a desktop that had dust gathered on a particular point and shorted it out once, so who knows?). Hence I will be stuck with (I can hardly bring myself to say it) Windows XP (quick, nurse! The soap!). So I won't be configured to post, or read mail, or do work, so I may as well go for a walk or exercise or eat chocolate. This probably means I'm offline until Tuesday or Wednesday…
jrosenhouse | May 1, 2007The all-encompassing, all-devouring, Science Blogs combine has assimilated another member. Be sure to say hello to the brothers Hoofnagle (if that's really their name) who write the denialism blog. Only a few posts so far but all of them worth reading.
And I notice one of the Hoofnagles is a graduate student at the University of Virginia. Always nice to have a Virginia academic on the team!
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
I'll be in London (the one in the UK, not any American knockoff) on Sunday 22nd and Monday 23rd July. I'm meeting someone at University College London, but I'll be free in the evenings if anyone wants to meet up (and offer a couch I can sleep on, if possible).
There's a conference in Exeter afterwards, which is why I'm passing through...
evolvingthoughts | April 24, 2007
Chris Mooney, who is too damned young and handsome, was in Sydney yesterday (well for a few days before that) so I decided the decent thing was to fly down from Brisbane to meet him, given that he travelled across some small bit of water to get here. The astonishing thing was how much he found out about the best drinking spots in Sydney after only three days on his own! He probably knows the night spots of Melbourne better than I do, even though I grew up there. Anyway, Tim Lambert also dropped by, as did a friend of mine, Chris Ho-Stuart, who only had to come 2.5 hours by train from…
evolvingthoughts | April 18, 2007
By the end of today, we will have over 200,000 visits to Evolving Thoughts. That's in not quite two years, ever since PZ Myers outed me back in June 2004. On average around 5000 visits and 8000 page reads a week. Assuming nobody visits more than once a day, that's a thousand readers. PZ might sneer at such low figures, but then I don't try to earn a second income from blogging, and besides, I try to steer clear of politics, which is where the audience is. So to you faithful 1000, thanks! Most philosophers would kill for an audience of that size.
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
For some reason I am finding it harder to get published as I go on, not easier. I suspect I am getting dumber as I age. However, I just had a paper published in Biology and Philosophy:
Wilkins, John S. 2007. The dimensions, modes and definitions of species and speciation. Biology and Philosophy 22 (2):247 - 266.Download here for subscribers.
pharyngula | April 2, 2007A lot of people (really, a lot—I've got a stack of emails on this subject) have been complaining that their browsers routinely crash on loading this site, and a few have been telling me about other peculiarities. The epidemic struck about the time we added the new video ads.
As an experiment, those ads have been at least temporarily pulled from this site. Now we need some important feedback from those of you who have been having problems.
If your browser was formerly crashing and now everything is smooth and sweet and easy, let us know in a comment. That means it was the ads, and we've found…
pharyngula | March 20, 2007I've finally had it with my mail software. I need advice on what I can do.
Here's the situation: Mac OS X (that's not going to change), the standard Mac Mail program, everything up-to-date with the latest versions. I've got about 20 folders set up in Mail, with filters to automatically redirect incoming mail to sensible places — student email gets top priority, for instance, a couple of listservs get their mail shuffled off to a convenient holding pen, mail from family members gets its own place, etc. Spam is currently not a problem; I've set up all my email accounts to forward through gmail…
pharyngula | March 20, 2007In order to help pay for the tremendous amounts of bandwidth Pharyngula and its Sciblings are sucking off the internet, there are new video ads inserted below the first article on each page. They are a kind of visual noise, but they aren't supposed to slow down access—they should only load significant quantities of data if you click on them. If you are experiencing technical difficulties, leave a message here and I'll pass the word on to the tech people.
In case you've got got ad blocking software installed, I'll mention that it is a movie for Dupont fire retardants that features a very…
pharyngula | March 18, 2007Once again, in the nomination thread for the Molly award, two names came up over and over again, and since this isn't the kind of thing where we should nit-pick, I'll put up two winners once more:
Date
Winners
Sample comments
March 2007
Blake Stacey
He's a smart feller.whenever I'm reading a comment and thinking "Right on, man" I come to the end and there's his name.
Hank Fox
He's funny and always includes a thought provoking statement with clarity and logic.Very bright guy who comes up with the greatest metaphors to make his points.
Now I know there are a few complaints about this being a…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
Many people think we silverbacks are kind of dumb - interested only in sex and repelling competing males. Of course, these are important, but so is philosophy. Most of you just don't get it. But a correspondent has sent me this evidence that they get it in Copenhagen...
Apparently, according to my informant, Søren Delövenbo Kongstad, this is part of the local Libraries trying to pique people's interests in books by juxtaposing oxymoronic image and idea. Well they truly screwed up in this case, didn't they? Thanks to Søren and his wife who took this pic on her mobile.
pharyngula | March 7, 2007Here's an interesting opportunity: Lynn Margulis, the controversial scientist, is going on a 'blog tour' to promote her new imprint of science books called Sciencewriters Books. What does that mean? She's going to hang out for a little while on a few blogs and chat and answer questions. If you've wanted to have a conversation with the author of the endosymbiont theory and critic of neo-Darwinian theory, here's your chance.
The tour will kick off on Monday, 12 March, at Pharyngula. She'll be sending me a short article that I'll post that morning, and we'll collect comments and questions. Later…
evolvingthoughts | March 5, 2007
I received the following from someone who refers to herself only as Fran K, which, given my recent experiences with university adminstration, has the right Kafakesque overtones. I publish it in the hope that others may learn from our joint experiences... someday.
Dear John Wilkins,
I quite appreciated your commentary on the Procrastination Principle, not to mention your Lazy Manager Theory and ballistic defense system of staff.
The procrastination principle, however, has been in practice since long before 1995, when codified for the academic community by John Perry.
Many years ago (maybe…
evolvingthoughts | March 3, 2007You Got 79% Right!
Very very nice. You've got the basic classics down cold, and a few of the less mainstream ones as well. You get a gold star for brightness!Famous First Lines QuizQuiz Created on GoToQuiz
So it's a while since I read any fiction (Pratchett and Neal Stephenson don't count)...
pharyngula | February 28, 2007Whoa, people…I expected I'd be adding 10 or 20 new blogs to the blogroll with my open enrollment day, not 125. I've added them all (and I've also made it easier to find the complete listing with a link on the sidebar), but right now I feel a bit bloated, like a tick who was aiming for a tasty capillary and managed to tap into the carotid instead.
Don't be disappointed if I have to shed a few next month—there's tons of good stuff there, but the volume is a little bit on the side of indigestible. I'll have to reduce it a bit if I hope to have another of these open enrollment days in the future.
pharyngula | February 27, 2007Since the blogroll amnesty day earlier this month was such a flop, I thought I'd reframe it. Today is Blogroll Open Enrollment day! What that means is that this is your opportunity to get onto the Pharyngula blogroll, after you jump through some hoops.
There are a few absolute requirements.
For technical reasons, your weblog must have some kind of syndication. I browse other blogs through a newsreader, and my blogroll is compiled from my newsreader's OPML file, so that's the only way I can put you there.
You should check the current complete blogroll first—it's so embarrassing to ask to be…
jrosenhouse | February 19, 2007I'm afraid I'm going to have to extend my blog vacation a bit longer. Too many deadlines this week. Sorry about that. Try to solider on without me!
pharyngula | February 18, 2007…annoyingly hard to pick. You people just named almost everyone, and some of you seemed to name everyone in a single comment. It's not like there was a runaway leader; it's more like there's this huge base of commenters that everyone likes. This is a good situation for the blog as a whole, but doesn't make it easy to single out anyone.
So this time I've compromised and picked the top two, secure in the knowledge that there are many more from the Pharyngula pool who will be acknowledged in the future. They are:
Kristine Harley, who is widely appreciated for general good humor, pithy comments…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2007
At last, my grant application is in. I reckon there's about the same amount of work in a grant application as in a good size novel paper, which is to say a paper on a topic you haven't published before. To add to that, I finalised a paper for final submission - which I hope meets the exacting standards of the editors.
So I am able now to work on other stuff, which includes more on Darwin and species concepts. When I began this, I hadn't read David Stamos' Darwin And the Nature of Species, in which most of the source material is covered. Stamos, like me, thinks Darwin was a species realist…
pharyngula | February 15, 2007This is meta, if you'd rather skip it.
I think we've got a good community of commenters here, and in order to encourage a more perfect expression of interactivity, I'm going to implement a few new things.
First, the stick. I'm posting the Pharyngula filter file contents in that Dungeon tab at the top of the page. Now you can see a list of everyone who has been banned from commenting at this site, with some short comments about why. Try to avoid joining them, OK?
Second, the carrot. I know most of you probably have favorite commenters here—people whose names you look forward to seeing in the…