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jdupuis | July 25, 2012I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys.
This interview with CJ Rayhill, then of Safari Books Online, is from September 27, 2007.
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Welcome to the latest installment in…
gregladen | July 24, 2012... older than a few days so that I can do something other than deal with a new spate of spam. This spam is different from other spam, so it is quite possible that I'll accidentally delete real comments. If you think a post of yours is taking too long to get posted let me know, and I'll see if I can dig it out of the spam folder.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
gregladen | July 24, 2012Just to let you know, I've got a couple of new posts up in the "weblogue" series on The X Blog:
My career in music: The Early Years
We put a chair there, and we would take turns sitting in the chair and listening to the sound effects record.
A train coming from one side to another. A pin dropping on one side then the other. A voice coming right from the middle even though there was not a speaker right there. The voice was saying “Hey, there’s no speaker right here, but you hear my voice like there is a speaker there. Isn’t stereo amazing!”
>
and
OK, I didn’t really have a career in music…
gregladen | July 23, 2012The question came up: If referring to a person as a word for a female body part in an insulting manner is sexist, then isn't calling a man a "boob" sexist?
(I may or may not have referred to some guy as a boob.)
My first reaction was to simply say, "No, because a boob, in this sense has nothing to do with female body parts. It is a dunce, idiot, stupid or bumbling person, etc." However, often, when we make assumptions about the origin of a word we are wrong. And since part of that conversation was about whether using the word "hysterical" was sexist, even if one did not know the origin of…
gregladen | July 22, 2012Dropbox is still the best way for most users to store their files on multiple computers and in "the cloud" in part because it is system agnostic and not linked to a corporate entity that has other plans for you. And, using Dropbox you can share files pretty easily as well. However, there is another way to share files that is amazingly cool that I just found out about. It's called "Drop Canvas." With Drop Canvas you drag and drop files onto a "canvas" (it's a web page) and then send the canvas to someone.
I've implemented a test already. A couple of other people and I are planning to make…
gregladen | July 22, 2012The minor league baseball game is on Friday, August 10th, and it is sponsored by the Minnesota Atheists. The local team, the Saint Paul Saints, will change their name to the Mr. Paul Aints for the occasion. If you are in the greater Twin Cities area please try to get to the game! I'm not sure if the discount Minnesota Atheists tickets are still available, but there will certainly be some seats still for sale somewhere in the stadium.
Now, you are probably already guessing that when an organised Atheist group gets together with a sports team to do something together, there will be...well,…
gregladen | July 21, 2012I've started a new, modest but I think good, project on The X Blog. I've dragged out and dusted off, and rewritten and reorganized, a selected series of essays that I wrote few years ago but were not widely read, especailly by you if you are fairly new to this blog. I'm going to be posting a few a week. The original corpus is about 40 or so essays in total but I'm combining some and it is quite possible that I'll toss some aside as I get to them because I am trying to be selective.
Originally, these essays were written in batches, or as part of a theme, and there are several different…
pronald | July 21, 2012Stanford and Venter Institute Simulate an Entire Organism With Software - NYTimes.com.
gregladen | July 21, 2012The smartest radio talk show in the world addresses ignorance, Sunday.
Skeptically Speaking # 174: Ignorance
This week, we’re looking at how the basic condition of not knowing things provides the motivation to keep science moving. We’re joined by Stuart Firestein, Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, to talk about his book Ignorance: How It Drives Science. And on the podcast, we’re joined by Toronto attorney Adam Wygodny, to talk using the law to protect consumers from ineffective and untested alternative medicine products.
We record live with Stuart Firestein on…
sastyk | July 20, 2012Hi Folks - The more I look at my life, the more I think I'm not doing things as well as I could be - too many balls in the air. Many of the things I care about are paying a price. The addition of the chronic sleep deprivation that goes with a new baby is pushing me to strip down my life to the bare minimum.
What's frustrating me most is that writing and online work are taking up time I should be spending on sustainability measures - while I'm writing about the joys of pickling, I'm not actually making pickles with the kids. For a long time this was manageable, but right now, with a two…
jdupuis | July 20, 2012Academics aren't exactly known for their sartorial splendor. And that may be the understatement of the year.
A fun article by Daniel J. Myers in Insider Higher Ed from a few weeks ago: Faculty Fashion
Here's a quote:
What message might academics be trying to send when they flout the dictates of fashion and good taste, and ignore the color-clash pain they inflict on others? Well, it flows from the same reason we drive beat-up cars (rust-buckets that are still only automobiles in the academic sense) and refuse to edge our lawns. These choices are rarely driven by financial necessity, but rather…
gregladen | July 20, 2012This from Slashdot:
"Microsoft has apologized and promised to rectify the fact that one of its developers slipped a sexist phrase into Linux kernel code supporting Microsoft's HyperV virtualization environment. In that code, the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor reads '0xB16B00B5,' or a slightly camouflaged 'BIG BOOBS.' After Linux developer/blogger Matthew Garrett criticized Microsoft for the stunt, the predictable debate over sexism in the technology world ensued. Microsoft issued a statement to Network World apologizing and added, 'We have submitted a patch to fix this issue…
gregladen | July 20, 2012Climate gate involved the criminal theft of computer based data from University of East Anglia (UEA) researchers by global warming deniers. According to Julian Gregory ,Detective chief superintendent, "the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack" and that there was no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with UEA was involved in the crime." However, the criminal perpetrator, we assume a member of the global warming denialist community, was not discovered and the statute of limitations for this particular criminal act runs out in…
sastyk | July 19, 2012It is easy to get fixated on the big things that you need to do to have an impact. You need to build a barn, buy a higher-mileage vehicle, pay down the mortgage, build a three month stash of food. These are big or biggish projects, and often they depend on you finding time and energy and money in a world where those resources are limited.
I notice that when I'm fixated on big projects I can't get done, I tend to ignore smaller ones that would be really useful. If I don't have time or energy or money for the big things on my list, I can forget the other kinds of projects - low input, high…
gregladen | July 19, 2012Science Debate is an organization that has been trying to get the presidential candidates to directly address important science policy issues. After several months of meeting and convening and conversing among top science organizations and seeking public input, Science Debate Dot Org has nailed down what questions they feel should be asked at a presidential debate. Without further ado, here is the press release from that organization just as it came to me moments ago:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—JULY 19, 2011
Organizations List Top Science & Environmental Questions Obama, Romney Should…
sastyk | July 19, 2012Every time my life settles down enough for me to return to regular blogging, crazy stuff happens. First there was the sudden arrival of newborn baby Z. - we were called at 2:30 pm and by 4:30, Eric was picking him up at the hospital. Since normally one gets more than umm...two hours to prepare for the arrival of a new baby, we were a little discombobulated.
Then there was much back and forth insanity as the County and C. and K.'s family attempted to make possible a visit from across the US to our area. We didn't know until last Friday whether it would happen - and all of a sudden it was. …
gregladen | July 19, 2012John Abraham is a friend of mine who works in climate science. Pretty soon you'll get to hear him and some other doods talking about climate change, in a special edition of Skeptically Speaking. Meanwhile, you can read an excellent, just posted interview at FutureDude magazine, where some dood interviewed my dood-man John.
It is here.
sastyk | July 19, 2012M.'s latest update (see the first post for her bio) on what it is like to take the class. It is funny - I always worry I'm not providing enough reading material for people. Apparently that may not be a critical issue ;-).
This class is very different from any other I've taken. There are a lot of suggested readings, let's just say many of them have been posts from Sharon's blog and we know how long those can be! But there's also the class discussion, which is online. That alone is new to me, I've never taken an online class before.
Something I'm noticing every time I read through the…