Administrative
evolvingthoughts | April 18, 2009I don't know if I'll be able to post while I'm en route, so here's a song to listen to while I'm gone, by the great Tom Waits.
laelaps | April 18, 2009I am moving to a new apartment in less than a month, and towards that end I have been going through my stuff to see if there is anything I don't want to take with me. I have listed the items I no longer need, primarily books and XBox games, on Half.com. I appreciate the help of anyone who makes a purchase.
pharyngula | April 18, 2009The churches open their doors to everyone who wants to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the central mythological event in their belief system…except clowns. No clowns allowed!
I have been moved by this tragic rejection, and while they are obnoxious and annoying, I can see where clowns have their place in the world. I have therefore re-enabled anonymous commenting on Pharyngula. Beep beep.
However, if you've figured out all that typekey stuff, you might as well keep using it — some of you have noticed that once the busy work is done, it actually simplifies commenting. I'm also going…
evolvingthoughts | April 16, 2009I am briefly back from internetless visits to family in Victoria (my home state), and shortly to fly out to Lisbon where I am to give two talks I have yet to finish writing (of course! Not to worry, I always do this). In the interim I must proof my book and do a thousand things. Once all this is done I promise to put some substance online here. Very possibly my talk on trees (yes, there's a slew more to come).
Meanwhile, talk amongst yourselves.
pharyngula | April 13, 2009I hated doing this, but it has become necessary. You now have to register with an off-site authentication service in order to leave a comment here. It's not hard; just follow the links at the Typekey page, and it should sail through and let you comment freely afterwards. (In theory, you should also be able to use OpenID authorization — I've toggled it on in the Pharyngula master control panel, let me know if it works).
In other news, you are a cruel bunch, and the overall response to my Pilate-like offer to turn the responsibility of banning Alan Clarke over to you was that most of you…
pharyngula | April 12, 2009As many of you know, Alan Clarke is a fundamentalist/creationist kook who has been babbling in the comments for a while now. A reader alerted me to how Clarke found his way here: he was posting his silliness on a powerbasic support forum, and was warned that we would "kick his butt" if he came here. He's just as obtuse there as he is here, so nothing has changed…and yes, his butt has been kicked up and down the threads here.
This is no big deal, and completely unsurprising, but Clarke left one comment there that made me think.
I took your advice and have been hanging out on the Pharyngula…
pharyngula | April 11, 2009I have just spent over an hour of my day cleaning up the spam from the insane asshole, David Markuze/Mabus. I'm still not done; I've got various tools cranking away in the background purging his recent eruption of hate-filled, lunatic rants. 160 comments, all saying the same thing.
It's too much, and it's eating up way too much of my time. Starting Monday, I'm turning user registration back on. I know, a lot of you find it a real pain, and it will inhibit some people from commenting…I'd rather not do it. But I'm serious: David Markuze is costing me too much time and effort, and I have to take…
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2009A young gorilla escaped from his enclosure at the Melbourne Zoo last night and wandered about for 20 minutes while craven visitors hid out. I would have sat and waited for him to introduce himself. And paid good money for the chance.
A moron by the name of Cardinal George Pell, who has a chance at being a pope one day, has reiterated the lie that condoms do not reduce the incidence of AIDS, with anecdotal accounts filtered through the Jedi Catholic Mindshield.
And to the folk who were up at 6.30am to go to Mass, and decided that everybody had to be able to hear their conversations in…
laelaps | April 6, 2009As regular readers may (or may not) have noticed I have not been posting many updates about my book, still tentatively titled Life's Splendid Riddle, lately. The primary reason for that is because other projects have taken up much of my time, but it can also be frustrating trying to find something to say in my occasional progress reports. That's why I have decided to forgo my previous method of posting updates and start tweeting.
When I first heard about Twitter it sounded interesting but not like anything I was intending on signing up for. I am not interesting enough for people to care about…
pharyngula | April 1, 2009I noticed that, in this recent thread asking why you were all here, that many of you said it was for the community and for the smart commenters here. Nobody said it was for my irresistible physical beauty and scintillating and delicate charm…in fact, I got the distinct impression I could drop dead and you'd all keep chatting away happily. Well, then, I guess it's time to update the Molly awards, since you all love each other so much. <sniffle>
The people have spoken, and they have selected the lovely and diplomatic raconteur, Sven DeMilo, as the recipient of the Molly for the month of…
pharyngula | March 31, 2009The month of March was a record traffic month: 2,296,911 visits. What did I do this time?
laelaps | March 21, 2009Hi, everyone. I noticed that many of the people who originally expressed interest in meeting up at the National Zoo tomorrow will not, in fact, be able to make it. As such I have decided to cancel the meet-up tomorrow. Don't fret, though. I hope to be back in the area sometime later this year and I will provide a little more notice about it.
I just hope I will be capable of walking around at all tomorrow. After 9 hours of shuffling around the museums and memorials I don't know if I'll be standing up again anytime soon.
pharyngula | March 20, 2009Perhaps the tables have been turned! I have received one report that Pharyngula has been blocked on government computers in Kentucky — can anyone confirm that? Apparently, you can read Ann Coulter, Focus on the Family, the Drudge Report, and Rush Limbaugh when you're supposed to be pushing those government forms around on your desk, but you can't read PZ Myers. I think I'm flattered. I suspect I annoyed some fan of Ken Ham.
pharyngula | March 20, 2009Yet more internet melodrama! Several of our unwilling contestants took a shot at the immunity challenge, to comical effect: they either completely failed to be aware of what people find irritating in their posting habits, or in one case, even plagiarized his answer. The result of the vote by the readership: none met the challenge, although several thought Facilis made a good effort, so no one has immunity.
What about the vote to see who would be banned? Once again, John Kwok saw an ember of a possibility that he might be selected, and chose to fight it by repeatedly throwing buckets of…
pharyngula | March 19, 2009Today we have to judge whether any of our contestants have met their immunity challenge. The challenge was this:
The challenge for the seven surviving candidates is to write a short comment, 200 words or less, that reveals that they actually understand why their attitudes and pattern of expression have so exasperated readers here, and explains what they will do to change their behavior in the future. This will be a tough one for this crowd, I'm sure. Let's see if they can wake up enough to do some honest self-assessment.
The purpose of this challenge isn't to force people to change or defend…
evolvingthoughts | March 18, 2009I have a six hour layover at the airport in the morning of 20 April... or I can just work on my talk.
pharyngula | March 18, 2009Well, gang, the voting is closed on our first Survivor event. I would never have expected such a dramatic turn-around. From out of nowhere, John Kwok surged out of fifth place in the field — I had written him off as a bad bet — to rally astonishingly by doing one simple thing: commenting. He clobbered Pete Rooke and Simon, even, just by writing one threat (to sic his facebook friends on me), and doing his usual irritating name-dropping nonsense. He showed real heart in this race, and I'm sure that if he just continues to babble, he will eventually win his place in the fabulous Pharyngula…
pharyngula | March 17, 2009Today, we have to assess whether any of our contestants have met the immunity challenge. Very few have tried; I'm afraid this is very much like Monty Python's Upper Class Twit of the Year contest, in which the competitors are lucky to stumble onto the field at all. Here are all the attempts to answer this question:
In a comment that isn't longer than about 200 words, that is grammatically correct and logically coherent, and that does not cite the Bible or other religious authorities (and does not rely on tales about who you went to high school with, or tortured analogies involving…
pharyngula | March 8, 2009I've counted the nominations for the Molly Award, and the winner for January 2009 is…Wowbagger! I don't know why, he just wanders around insulting everybody, and of course there was no hurry, since he is immortal. I think you all just fell for the ploy of favoring the guy riding Douglas Adam's coattails.*
Now you can leave comments here congratulating the Infinitely Prolonged, and you can also nominate other fabulous posters for the Molly for February. Now don't you be handing them out to Princess Hooli and Max Quordlepleen just because you like their names!
*OK, so there probably were some…
laelaps | March 4, 2009Later this month (March 20-22) I will be headed down to Washington DC to check out the national museum of natural history, the national zoo, etc. (It's about time, especially since I blog for Smithsonian...) I would love to set aside some time to meet some DC-area bloggers and readers while I'm there, though, so if you would like to organize a meet-up just say so in the comments. I'll work out the details once I know whether anyone is interested.