maintenance
drorzel | April 17, 2015So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers.
This makes sense given the form and content of the other comments, and makes me sorry we live in a world where my first guess regarding this was that it was some sort of con. But, you know, I was led there by gigabytes of email from ersatz Nigerian widows.
I would, however, like to send one message to whoever it is at the…
drorzel | March 30, 2015I hinted once or twice that I had news coming, and this is it: I've signed up to be a blog contributor at Forbes writing about, well, the sorts of things I usually write about. I'm pretty excited about the chance to connect with a new audience; the fact that they're paying me doesn't hurt, either...
The above link goes to my contributor page there, which will be your one-stop-shopping source for what I write at Forbes. There are two posts up this morning, a self-introduction, and an attempt to define physics and what makes it unique. The "Follow" button has an option for an RSS feed; this isn…
drorzel | March 24, 2014This week is Union's spring break, and like basically everything associated with Union's academic calendar, it's too short. I have to turn in my Winter term grades today, and next Monday is the start of my Spring term class.
I also find myself in a place right now were every little thing is pissing me off, which is a terrible place to start the Spring term. And since social media functions largely as an aggravation engine right at the moment, that means I need to step back for a bit. So, don't expect much of anything here or on Twitter for the next week at least. We'll probably still do…
drorzel | May 23, 2012So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you'll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and "featured" images. This makes us look more like the blogs at National Geographic, the new Corporate Masters (for a good while now, actually, but they only just did the redesign). On the back end, we've changed from Movable Type to WordPress, which will take a little getting used to, but which lots of people…
drorzel | May 11, 2012As mentioned previously, the crack technical team at ScienceBlogs HQ is working on shifting us from our creaky Movable Type system to a shiny new WordPress system. Part of that process involves moving all the old posts over, which has been done... sort of. At present, any post since April 18 has not been moved, and will need to be shifted by me, by hand. Worse yet, the comments to posts between April 18 and whenever the switch finally happens are currently going to be lost forever.
This is, obviously, highly sub-optimal, and efforts are being made to find a better solution. Until and unless…
lborkowski | May 8, 2012At Wonkblog, Brad Plumer highlights a new NBER paper that's disappointing to those who hoped that distributing cleaner cookstoves in India and other countries would be an easy way to improve respiratory health and help slow global warming. Many low-cost, traditional cookstoves belch soot, which is bad for the lungs of people who spend long hours near the stoves and for the ice that melts more quickly when soot particles settle on it. Cleaner stoves would improve respiratory health and could run on less fuel, and these changes could be of particular benefit to women, who often spend hours each…
drorzel | May 7, 2012Since I've gotten a bunch of questions via email and Twitter, this probably deserves its own post: Yes, I'm aware that the ScienceBlogs front page and the Last 24 Hours and ScienceBlogs Select RSS feeds have gone dead.
Here's the story: The crack technical team and ScienceBlogs Headquarters is working around the clock to upgrade the back end from the creaky and kludgey Movable Type set-up we've had since the beginning to a shiny new WordPress system. They're moving posts over from MT to WP, and setting up new blog templates, and all that fun stuff.
While I have not been officially told that…
drorzel | September 6, 2011Classes for the 2011-2012 academic year start tomorrow, which means that blogging will come to a nearly complete stop. I have an exceptionally heavy teaching load this term (deliberately, because I'm developing a new course in the winter term, and FutureSibling! is due in November), and it's become clear that there are not enough hours in the day to fulfill all my professional and family obligations and still generate worthwhile content for the blog.
It's not a total shutdown-- I'll still be reading things, so there may continue to be Links Dumps, and I've got some book reviews in the queue…
drorzel | April 27, 2011It's been in the works for a while, but a couple of days ago the news got out via the usual combination of rumor-mongering and confidentiality-breaking that makes blogdom such a joy to work with (seriously, you want to know why it's hard to get mainstream media types to take bloggers seriously, or keep bloggers in the loop about major decisions? Take a look at the drama surrounding any changes at ScienceBlogs...): ScienceBlogs and National Geographic are "partnering" in a way that looks an awful lot like NatGeo taking over SB.
What does this mean for this blog? I haven't the foggiest. NatGeo…
drorzel | January 2, 2011Because I'm sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here's the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form:
In case you can't numerically integrate that in your head, I'll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to crack the million mark in any one year, but the total number of pageviews over the history of ScienceBlogs is just short of 3.9 million. Not too shabby.
Looking at the overall traffic states for the five years (five years!) that I've been blogging at ScienceBlogs, the thing I'm happiest about is this…
drorzel | December 18, 2010As has been mentioned in countless places over the last few days, Yahoo plans to shut down Delicious, the social bookmark service that lots of people use for lots of things. My interest in it is pretty narrow, but important for this blog: I use Delicious to generate the quasi-automatic daily Links Dump postings here. As I surf around during the odd free moment, I tag pages that strike me as interesting, and every morning, Delicious generates a blog post that I then copy and publish here.
I really like this feature, because it gives me a way to acknowledge the dozens of interesting things I…
drorzel | September 15, 2010So, I'm looking at the couple-dozen tabs I have open in Chrome for stuff that I think would be worth blogging about, and the slides for this afternoon's lecture that need revising, and the student poster that needs to be completed before tomorrow, and the committee stuff that I ought to be doing, and the laundry that needs dealing with, and it occurs to me that there's one thing I haven't had time for, which is the book I'm writing.
Thus, effective immediately, I'm putting social media on quasi-hiatus. There may still be some links dump posts here, as I will occasionally be reading stuff…
drorzel | August 29, 2009The Corporate Masters are considering some steps to take ScienceBlogs more in a community/ social network/ Web 3.14/ whatever direction, and have asked us our opinions of various potential features. I have opinions on the subject, but they're ultimately less important than the opinions of you, the readers. So here's an attempt to generate some reasonably concise feedback (all of the proposed features would be totally optional-- they're not talking about mandatory registration, and I will fight it tooth and nail if they do):
Which of the following community features would improve the…
drorzel | August 5, 2009I'm going to be off at Worldcon for the next several days, but fear not, the blog will still be active. I have scheduled non-academic scientist interviews to post every weekday while I'm gone. There are two posts each for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so you'll have plenty of non-traditional career paths to consider.
This taps out my stock of interview responses. I am happy to continue doing these, though, as long as people are willing to volunteer. So, if you've got a science degree and an interesting job, drop me a line.
drorzel | July 27, 2009The Project for Non-Academic Science posts have been very well received, and I continue to get a steady trickle of new volunteers. I'm going to slow the rate of posting these a little bit, as the recent posting rate has been a little ridiculous, but I'll keep posting them as long as people keep answering questions.
Were I a more compulsively organized person, I would be tagging and indexing these in a systematic manner as I go. I'm not that organized, though, though it's possible that I will at some point be so desperate to avoid work that I ought to be doing that I will go back and sort them…
drorzel | July 21, 2009ScienceBlogs is getting some back-end work done this evening, with yet another server/ MT upgrade. This is intended to help with the frequent timeout problems that bloggers and commenters have been having. Opinions differ as to whether this will fix the problem, but at least Something is Being Done.
As part of the upgrade process, comments will be shut down starting at 7pm (Eastern) this evening, lasting until whenever the upgrade is finished. We apologize for the inconvenience.
drorzel | July 17, 2009A big thunderstorm last night took out the DSL at Chateau Steelypips (and most of the 518 area code, it seems), and service is still out. So, if you're wondering why I haven't had any online presence since 5pm or so, that's why.
I'm going to deal with the essential stuff using my office Internet connection, but I do have a day job, and lots to do for that as well. I would've posted the Thursday Baby Blogging pictures for the week, but like an idiot, I forgot to copy them onto a USB drive to bring to work.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Normal service will be resotred as soon as possible.
drorzel | July 10, 2009I'm headed out of own for the weekend to play golf and re-live the past with some friends from college. If all goes well, I should be in Chicago by the time this posts.
I wouldn't want to leave you starved for entertainment, though, so I'll follow many of the other ScienceBlogs folks (as usual, Bora has links) and ask:
Who are you people?
Today, it's all about you, so post something in the comments about yourself. Who are you, how did you get here, what keeps you reading the blog?
drorzel | June 16, 2009The recurrent timeout problem in the comments has been dragging on and on, but I'm not sure how much of a problem it is for you, the end user, as opposed to me, the guy who has to endure six timeouts while clearing out Turkish dating service spam. Of course, I can't very well ask people to leave comments about how messed-up the comments are, so I've been forced to resort to something higher-tech:
The commenting problems at ScienceBlogs are:(polls)
I'm torn as to whether to use this for Dorky Polls in the future-- the ease of clicking might make people more likely to respond, but half the fun…
drorzel | January 11, 2009The ScienceBlogs upgrade is now complete, so I'm typing this in an entry box that looks different that it used to, and my text is appearing in an ugly font. There are no clearer indications of progress, at least as defined by the software industry.
I had had big plans to get out in front of things by researching and writing some quality blog posts this weekend. Unfortunately, Chateau Steelypips was swept by some sort of stomach flu bug, about which the less said the better. To give you an idea of my condition, though, at one point I started to pick up the Donald Westlake book I'm re-reading,…