Chatter
tfk | March 8, 2010If you were curious why Farah Fawcett and Bea Arthur and Ed McMahon were omitted from the In Memoriam section of the Oscars show, apparently Hollywood has discovered Wikipedia's notability requirement:
"I would not say that it was an oversight," Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, tells E! News. "No matter how carefully and how conscientiously people address who is included, there are people who just simply can't be."â¦
"In any given year there will always be some people that other people think should have been included and that there's more…
goodmath | February 24, 2010 This post is off-topic for this blog, but there are some things that
I just can't keep quiet about.
Via my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Janet over at Adventures in
Ethics and Science, I've heard about some absolutely disgraceful
antics by an animal rights group. To be clear, in what follows, I'm not saying that all animal rights folks are scumbags: I'm pointing out that there's a specific group of animal rights folks who are sickening monsters for what they're doing.
The background: There's a neurobiologist named Dario Ringach. Professor
Ringach used to do research using primates. Back…
tfk | February 23, 2010Against my better judgment, I've read some posts by anti-accommodationists. If I decide I enjoy banging my head against a wall, I may even respond to some of them. Otherwise, I'll have to distract myself.
For the moment, I'm also playing with Twitter, so if you want to see what I've twat, check me out. The creative handle I chose is JoshRosenau. Thus far it's mostly reactions to AAAS. I may use it as a repository for articles and ideas that I want to write about but don't actually have anything to add to at the moment, thus clearing my RSS reader and my browser for more substantive tasks…
tfk | February 20, 2010The organizer of this education session caught me blogging her remarks, but I didn't get sent to sit in the corner.
tfk | February 11, 2010Dog owner fends off raccoon with Samurai sword:
A Fairfield man used a Samurai sword Wednesday afternoon to defend his dog from an attack by what appears to have been a large raccoon.
Perhaps the raccoon's mask confused him into thinking he was being attacked by a ninja?
tfk | February 11, 2010Inventor of Frisbee dies at 90:
Walter Fredrick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died. He was 90.
Morrison's son, Walt, told The Associated Press on Thursday that "old age caught up" with his father and that he also had cancer.
The cause of death, thus, is unknown, but I've heard speculation he got stuck in a tree.
tfk | January 15, 2010According to the Oakland Tribune: Bag of bones goes missing in Atherton.
And yeah, it was a real bag of human bones. A police search and rescue dog was doing a demonstration, after which, according to the Tribune "the organizers accidentally left the bones behind overnight inside a black plastic bag." This forced a new search and rescue:
When the organizers realized the gaffe, they went back to the park on Tuesday and couldn't find them after a search. The bones were reported missing that day.
"They were probably just thrown away," the police official said.
So if you find a bag of bones…
goodmath | December 23, 2009 One thing that continually amazes me is the amount of email I get from
readers of this blog asking for career advice. I usually try to just politely
decline; I don't think I'm particularly qualified to give personal
advice to people that I don't know personally.
But one thing that I have done before is shared a bit about my own
experience, and what I've learned about the different career paths that you
can follow as a computer science researher. About six months after I started
this blog, I wrote a post about working in academia versus working in
industry. I've been meaning to update it,…
tfk | December 15, 2009I currently have ~400 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. That is too many. By the end of the month, I'll have half that, with a goal of being below 100 feeds by the end of January. If you are one of those left out, sorry. Hopefully someone else will link to you and thereby bring you back to my attention.
While I'm at it, I'll update the blogroll which I haven't looked at in at least 2 years. So, you know, blogroll amnesty. Email me or leave links in the comments with blogs I should blogroll and wish to read even though I don't.
j7uy5 | October 29, 2009In general, I try to be respectful of cultural groups, even ones that
are rather aberrant. Somehow, though, I find it exceedingly
difficult to muster any sympathy or respect for Scientology.
By now, you probably have heard that Scientologists were fined $600,00
Euros in France:
href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iB4zZrgJt9_M4ltYiwOwQxcAnMmQ">
href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iB4zZrgJt9_M4ltYiwOwQxcAnMmQ">Scientologists
convicted of fraud in France
...The Paris case followed a complaint by two women, one of whom says
she was manipulated…
tfk | October 8, 2009I have 1193 unread items in the Politics section of my feedreader. I have 1249 unread items in my "toys" section (BoingBoing, funny blogs like Jesus' General, etc.). The News section, with NYT and WaPo feeds (but not my local news feeds from Bay area and Kansas papers) has 2503 unread items. I have 486 unread in my Science section.
Either I'm doing a good job keeping up with the science stuff, or you people aren't talking loud enough. And I've done a bad job staying on top of blog-reading lately.
Still crunching away on a paper, so no time for chitchat or sleep yet.
goodmath | October 8, 2009 This is really off-topic for GM/BM, but I just can't resist
mocking the astonishing stupidity of the Conservapedia folks.
I'm sure you've heard by now that Andy Schafly and his pals are
working on a "new translation" of the bible. They say that they need to do this
in order to remove liberal bias, which is "the single biggest distortion in modern
Bible translations". You see, "translation bias in converting the original language
to the modern one" is the largest source of what they call translation errors, and it
"requires conservative principles to reduce and eliminate".
Plenty of people…
tfk | October 8, 2009I haven't been following it closely because of blog drama, but it looks like health care reform with a public option has a good shot. That doesn't mean you should stop calling your congresscritters to tell them you're watching, of course. It's a moral imperative.
Buncha stuff going on today, but if you need a new thread to chat in, here you go.
tfk | October 7, 2009We had a special guest at NCSE today. The photo below shows NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch, me, some guy who writes about blind watchmakers, and Steve Newton.
It turns out, my shirt was rather appropriate for the occasion:
And no, blog drama did not spill over into the real world. It was a great visit, with Dawkins and Genie getting along swimmingly.
H8rs beware!
tfk | October 6, 2009LARGE GOLD OCTOPUS CIGARETTE / CREDIT CARD CASE by CosmicFirefly:
Now that mine has arrived, I can mock anyone else who doesn't have their own octopus-themed cardholder/cigarette case.
tfk | October 5, 2009An anonymous lurker in Wyoming sent a generous contribution to help me recover from the loss of my laptop, etc. Since all I know is that you live in or near Cheyenne, WY, I just have to thank you publicly.
Of possible relevance to ongoing discussions here, the note accompanying the generous gift says:
Not that it matters, but I am one of those dreaded "creationists" that many science bloggers love to mock. My own personal views fall somewhere between id [sic] (not ID the whole DI anti-evolution political movement) and TE [theistic evolution] or EC [evolutionary creationism, the evangelical…