Weblogs
pharyngula | August 21, 2006People, people, people. There is far too much attention being paid to a pair of obnoxious trolls in the comments. Ignore them. Do not call them out. Do not pester them with questions. Just let 'em rot.
I'm going to have to start disemvoweling the stuff from Bres Mac Elatha/Robert O'Brien and Jason, as well as the posts that refer to them, if you can't leave them be. I get cranky when I have to start hacking up annoying comments, you know.
pharyngula | August 20, 2006New Kid on the Hallway tried to give up on blogging, but now she's back…with an interesting set of excuses for why she needed to resume. See, if you've been carrying on an internal dialog about you'd get so much more done if weblogs would disappear, it isn't true.
pharyngula | August 19, 2006How can I be tagged with the Random Quotes meme? I've had this set of random quotes set up to appear on my site for years—it seems redundant to ask me to go through someone else's quote file and pull out five that I like. Since Janet did it, though, I'll go along…only I'm going to insist on using my own file, and just giving you the first five that pop up.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in…
pharyngula | August 18, 2006Well, there I am again, mentioned in an article in Nature (Nature Reviews Genetics, actually), but I have to agree with RPM: it's an awfully thin article that draws unwarranted and hasty conclusions from a tiny sample. It would have been better to actually talk to some of the people blogging about genes and genetics—we tend to be a voluble bunch, I think, and would have given her plenty of material to work with—rather than glancing at a few sites and trying to draw grand generalizations from them.
Skipper M (2006) Would Mendel have been a blogger? Nature Reviews Genetics 7:664.
pharyngula | August 17, 2006Palaeos is gone! There is a brief note about being unable to support it any longer, and then poof, it's offline. Martin Brazeau has a comment on it's value; you can still see fragments of this great resource in google's cache, but even that will fade too soon.
This is troubling, and it's one of the worrisome aspects of using the net—there's no sense of permanence. It would be good if someone were to step forward and at least archive all of the pages, but the essential feature of the Palaeos site was that it was continually maintained and updated to reflect current information, and that's not…
pharyngula | August 6, 2006The Invasive Species Weblog is running a contest to come up with an appropriately punalicious title for an entry…and Jenn is awarding real prizes.
pharyngula | August 1, 2006She's written up her experiences at BlogHer. It's also a good guide to where all the women are at in the blogosphere.
pharyngula | July 29, 2006If you want continuously updated content, the place to go today is Stupid Evil Bastard's joint. He's engaged in a blogathon to raise money for Americans United for Separation of Church and State —so go read, and if you're willing, sponsor him!
pharyngula | July 25, 2006As Shelley says, if we aim to make this place the place for the biggest conversation about science, we can't be shy. Scienceblogs has cracked the Technorati Top 100, and we're aiming higher, so it would be nice to get more links to that page. Pharyngula isn't on the Top 100, but I figure all the squid pics will eventually allow me to destroy Cute Overload (oh, wait, nooooo…that's another link contributing to the dominion of cute furry immature felines!).
Technorati also keeps a list of the Top 100 Favorited Blogs, so you can help us out there, too, by adding Pharyngula to your Technorati…
pharyngula | July 21, 2006John Lynch doesn't have a Friday tradition of his own, so he's trying to start one with a free association game…I'll join in.
Video ::
Fantasy ::
Homework ::
Crush ::
Late ::
Husband ::
Soccer ::
Wine ::
Before ::
Romantic ::
My answers are below the fold. They're mostly predictable, I think.
Video :: Signal
Fantasy :: A four-letter word I won't repeat…you can figure it out.
Homework :: Grading
Crush :: Kittens
Late :: Period
Husband :: Wife
Soccer :: Fan
Wine :: Beer
Before :: After
Romantic :: Interlude
pharyngula | July 14, 2006Fewer open threads and more of this would make it clear why Atrios is popular.
I started this blog and adopted this style in part because I thought it was important to introduce a more combative and caustic discourse on our side. I'd be quite happy and comfortable in a world where politics more closely resembled an academic seminar - that is where I come from, after all - but we don't live in that world and it's a tragic mistake to pretend we do.
It's a tragic mistake to think most creationists will be won over by kind and supportive conversation over a cup of coffee, too, or by any kind of…
pharyngula | July 7, 2006We've received word that there have been some behind-the-scenes improvements in spam filtering, and I've gotten enough complaints about that annoying typekey thingie, that I've gotten rid of it. This is provisional, and I'm hoping I don't get a flood of spam now, but try it—commenting should be easier.
pharyngula | July 7, 2006Only this one has a real prize. Invasive Species Weblog wants a title for an article—a strange story about those wretched starlings.
pharyngula | July 7, 2006Regular commenter Ed Darrell has started a weblog of his own now, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, dedicated to knowing US History. And really, don't you want to learn the story behind the name?
pharyngula | July 6, 2006There have been these annoying glitches in TypeKey comment management in the past, and the source of the problem is inconsistency in how the different science blogs require valid email addresses in your comments. We're about to enforce a uniform standard across all the science blogs—you will all be required to use a valid email address, although I don't think it will be displayed—and that might cause a few hiccups here, at first. Give it a chance and it will all shake out, I hope.
pharyngula | July 5, 2006Declan Butler has a short article in this week's Nature on the "Top 5 Science Blogs". This was determined by identifying blogs written by scientists and determining their rank on Technorati. The top five are:
Pharyngula, at #179
The Panda's Thumb, at #1647
RealClimate, at #1884
Cosmic Variance, at #2174
The Scientific Activist, at #3429
Declan asked each of us to say a little bit about why we were succeeding in this medium, and that's given in a short summary. It's seriously edited down, though—I have no complaints at all about what he wrote, but he didn't use one part I wrote to him. I can't…
pharyngula | July 5, 2006Reading some of my favorite blogs today, I can't help but feel the looming hand of fate preparing to destroy us all.
Jon Voisey is praising a director of the Oklahoma ACLU, Joanne Bell. You're in Kansas, Jon. It's not that far from Oklahoma. What happened to Bell could happen to you.
Ophelia Benson is saying harsh words about Mother Theresa. An uppity woman criticizing an icon of Christian charity? Someday, you could be in a hospital with a hatchet-faced nun looming over you, contemplating how best to chastise your body before your immortal soul meets the god who will fling you into the…
pharyngula | July 2, 2006I get lots of email from people—it's not just creationists and wingnuts calling me nasty names, but also people on my side who just want to express their appreciation, or people passing along tips and links to interesting stories. I rarely reply. It's nothing personal, it's just that if I wrote back to everyone who was sending me stuff, I'd have to do nothing but write email replies all day long. I also can't possibly post it all, either, unless you want to see 50 short articles a day consisting of nothing but a link (I have been tempted, I confess.)
So let me just say now, thanks! Keep it…
pharyngula | July 1, 2006Civilized Celts would send skillful bards to sing satires in great competitions. I applaud the idea of returning to such a literate tradition, but really…a skilled writer who knows something of meter and meaning vs. a clumsy, chattering hack who strings words together in lumpy, clattering arrhythmia? If this were a boxing match, it'd be like pitting Mohammed Ali in his prime against Steve Buscemi with a hangover. It's Bambi sans charm vs. Godzilla with a keyboard. It's the Philadelphia Philharmonic playing over a gurgling drainpipe. Who put together this embarrassing mismatch?
pharyngula | June 28, 2006This is becoming a regular occurrence: someone is trying to bomb my email address again, with 5-10,000 junk emails pouring in each hour. Look, fool, this is a waste of effort: the effect is that the activity monitor on my sidebar shows a lot of red and green bars, and my email software gets really sluggish as it sucks up all the garbage and automatically throws it away. If you're trying to inconvenience me, this is a rather silly, pointless way of doing it.
If you're trying to get through to me by email, the one real problem this causes is that I'm not going to be checking it for a while,…