Technical issues
jstemwedel | June 30, 2010Recently, I traded up from my nowhere-near-smart phone to a slightly more advanced (but still nearly obsolete) phone -- one maybe about a year newer (in terms of technological endowment) than the old one.
Practically, what this means is that I am now able not only to receive text messages, but also to send them. And, tremendous Luddite though I am, I have discovered contexts in which sending a text message actually seem reasonable (e.g., to contact a fellow conference-goer in the morning after a night of conference-carousing, when a phone call might interrupt sleep or networking or something…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2010It has come to my attention that a number of people are risking catastrophic seismic activity today by exposing n00bs.
This so-called "n00bquake" frightens me, and not just because I live in earthquake country.
If the internet is flooded with n00bs today, the consequences could be tragic.
We face the spectacle of people hot-linking images on other people's servers -- and then, when admonished, asking what sausages have to do with anything;
Of putting their names or handles at the end of their posts even when their usernames automatically appear beside their posts -- like there's no…
jstemwedel | March 6, 2010Which has a larger carbon footprint:
An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper?
How much difference does it make if you're using the carbon paper in an electric typewriter as opposed to a manual one?
How much less is the environmental impact from being able to proofread on the screen before printing out and making your copies (which I'm assuming is itself lower impact than printing multiple copies ... but maybe I'm wrong)?
How do we pin down the relevant impacts of the manufacture of the computer and printer and photocopier compared to those of the manufacture of…
jstemwedel | January 27, 2010It's true that I recently returned from a fairly geeky conference, but I just found out about one happening practically in my backyard. And, given that I don't yet have any papers to grade, I figured I should check it out.
(Today is the last day to register without paying the late registration fee, in case that helps you make up your mind.)
From the web page:
She's Geeky's 5th unconference, the third in the Bay Area, is coming up the last weekend in January at the Computer History Museum [Map] in Mountain View. Register now to receive regular pricing.
Who is invited?
Are you a woman? Are…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Last night I arrived home safely from ScienceOnline2010. As expected, the conference was tremendously engaging and useful, as well as being a rollicking good time -- so much so that the only blog post I managed to post while there was the Friday Sprog Blog. (Major props to the elder Free-Ride offspring for taking notes from our conversation and letting me bring them with me.)
However, as some others have noted (for example, drdrA), I did manage to maintain an online presence by "Tweeting" my real-time notes from the conference sessions I attended. And, as a step toward blogging something…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2009And really, why wouldn't you? What could have prepared you for the possibility that reading one would make the other vanish, as if there were some kind of blogular wavefunction collapse?
The ScienceBlogs powers that be have been alerted that there's an issue with disappearing comments (if you're reading a post) and disappearing posts (if you're reading the comments). They are busy trying to get the squirrels out of the ductwork (or fix the javascript problem, whichever).
In the meantime, if you're desperate to contribute a comment to a post, or to get the 411 on a post on this blog that…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2009I have a quick question for the hive-mind:
Where are good places with free wifi in Boston, Cambridge, and Wellesley?
I'm heading off to my 20th college reunion and I am hopeful that an area as student-centered as the Boston metropolitan area will be brimming with free wifi. But, seeing as how I lived long enough to have my hopes dashed before, I figured it was worth asking for specific recommendations.
Anything close to a T-stop or stocked with pastries is a plus.
Thanks for helping keep me connected!
jstemwedel | April 26, 2009Ah, Spring! The time of year when children wear sandals and then admonish their siblings not to pick their toes on the way to pot-luck dinners.
Yesterday's toe picking prompted me to tweet a question that was mostly facetious:
If a child sequentially picks toes and nose, is there a risk of getting athlete's nostril?
But on Twitter, no silly question goes unanswered. So Bora replied:
I think so. The fungus just needs a decent amount transferred and sufficient time to set up shop elsewhere in the body.
Interesting. Also, potentially painful!
And of course, one of my Facebook friends took…
jstemwedel | April 15, 2009A bunch of people (including Bora) have pointed me to Clay Shirky's take on #amazonfail. While I'm not in agreement with Shirky's analysis that Twitter users mobilized an angry mob on the basis of a false theory (and now that mob is having a hard time backing down), there are some interesting ideas in his post that I think merit consideration. So, let's consider them.
Shirky starts by considering how sentiments were running on the Twittersphere Sunday evening, when Amazon still hadn't put out a statement about what was going on, and how those sentiments didn't ratchet down much by the time…
jstemwedel | April 13, 2009Those of you on Twitter yesterday probably noticed the explosion of tweets with the hashtag #amazonfail. For those who were otherwise occupied carving up chocolate bunnies or whatnot, the news spread to the blogs, Facebook, and the traditional media outlets. The short version is that on Easter Sunday, a critical mass of people noticed that many, many books that Amazon sells had their Amazon sales rank stripped, and that these books stopped coming up in searches on Amazon that were not searches on the book titles (or, presumably, authors).
What fanned the flames of the frenzy were certain…
jstemwedel | January 10, 2009To celebrate the successful (!!) upgrade of ScienceBlogs to MT4, here is a dragon:
Thanks, as always, for your patience.
jstemwedel | January 9, 2009You've probably already gotten the news that ScienceBlogs is getting a backend upgrade to MT4 this weekend.
While this is going on (from Friday 1 PM Eastern until sometime Saturday, we hope), you'll still be able to read the ScienceBlogs posts that are already up, but Sb bloggers won't be able to publish new posts and you won't be able to leave new comments.
(Actually, I'm hearing rumblings that the comments might already have been disabled. Hold that thought! Jot it down on a Post-it or something, 'cause I want to read it when the comments return in MT4)
During our radio silence, you…
jstemwedel | November 26, 2008And you're really a lawyer?
The verdict came back in the Los Angeles trial of Lori Drew, the Missouri mother who facilitated cyberbullying of a former friend of her daughter, who subsequently committed suicide. Since cyberbulling isn't an easy crime to prosecute, the trial focused on whether, in setting up a fake MySpace page as a 16-year-old boy (whose online identity was used to befriend and then harass the girl who killed herself), Drew violated MySpace terms of service.
So, here's the legal point- counterpoint, as reported by the Associated Press:
Among other things, Drew was charged…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2007David Ng at The World's Fair wants me to play along before I head to the airport. Here are the rules:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.
To make it easier…
jstemwedel | August 27, 2007This is our third teaching day of the semester (which started last Thursday), so of course, WebCT's servers decided that it would be a good time to freak out. (The official description:
... experiencing network latency within our VA2 data center that may be affecting your Blackboard environment. This may result in increased latency and/or packet loss when trying to access your hosted Blackboard system.
But you can't tell me that this doesn't amount to the servers freaking out, especially as they are still "working with our Infrastructure team to determine the cause and to work towards a…
jstemwedel | July 24, 2007I've been getting word (via carrier pigeon, mostly) that some of your favorite ScienceBloggers are just itching to provide you with fabulous new posts. However, a series of massive power outages in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon seem to have given the interwebs some hiccups.
When the series of tubes is properly connected, they'll be back. Thanks for your patience.
jstemwedel | June 2, 2007The ScienceBlogs servers are undergoing some serious spa treatments this evening (Saturday, June 2nd, starting at 9PM EDT) to rejuvenate them and help them achieve inner peace.
Or something.
Their massage and facial package (or whatever) is projected to last about three hours, during which time the system won't be able to accept new comments. Jot them down on paper and get them in tomorrow!
In the meantime, via my mom, there's a cool streaming video you might want to check out of Nobel Prize winner John Mather giving a colloquium at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center on November 21, 2006,…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2007I would like to rejoice that it is Friday. And yet, as the end of the semester draws nigh, the press of Tasks That Cannot Be Deferred Any Longer is sucking a good bit of the Friday-ness out of this Friday.
So, I suppose this post is the cyber-equivalent of an itemized primal scream:
When the review sheet for a final exam has, at the bottom, in letters that are bolded, a clear statement of the day, date, and time of the final exam, what should I make of the fact that students have been emailing me to ask for the day, date, and time of the final exam? (By the way, this same information is…
jstemwedel | January 9, 2007Since our technical guru Tim Murtaugh seems to have cleared the squirrels out of the ScienceBlogs server, I have managed to update my blogroll. (It's in the left sidebar -- scroll way down and you'll see it.)
In the main, the updates have involved:
Clearing out moribund blogs.
Updating URLs for those blogs that have moved to new hosts.
Breaking up my old list of "science" blogs (which was pretty long) into smaller categories. I recognize that my categorizations are not perfect (especially given that lots of bloggers regularly blog on lots of different topics). If you hove strenuous…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2006Hey, remember how I mentioned that there had been some issues with the commenting here? And how I suggested the utterly clunky fix of using a different browser to leave your comments?
We (i.e., our tech guru) think we know why that works and, even better, a less clunky way to achieve the desired result:
When ScienceBlogs came into the world not so long ago, the Universe may have experienced a little hiccup, wherein some bad ScienceBlog cookies may have been spewed forth.
Deleting all cookies your browser may have ingested from scienceblogs.com ought to clear up your commenting problems.…