Weblogs
pharyngula | April 26, 2006My fault, the site was screwed up for over an hour—it's a really bad idea to slip when typing "</p>" and type "<?p>" instead.
pharyngula | April 24, 2006I've turned on the requirement to login and register with TypeKey in order to make a comment. Can't stand it? Things not working? Leave a comment (if you can) or mail me (if you can't).
This is a trial, we'll see if it works. I'm willing to turn it off again if it causes more grief than it solves.
Ooops. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the TypeKey page. It's simply a centralized site where you register once, get a password, and then you can use that password to make comments on various sites, including this one. It doesn't cost anything, it's fairly easy to do.…
pharyngula | April 24, 2006I owe many people some apologies: this site has been quietly eating your comments. There are filters set up to catch and discard spam comments, and they work very well. I'm getting thousand or so junk comments a week that are not making it through to be displayed.
Unfortunately, about a 5% of the junked comments are false positives. I've gone through and tried to restore the ones I could find, but that represents a far too substantial loss of blameless comments.
I've set up the comments section now to optionally allow TypeKey registration. I'm hoping that the software is smart enough to…
pharyngula | April 21, 2006It's been a long, long day of committee meetings and classes and various other time-sucks. Time to unwind with a Friday Random Ten.
Raspberry Beret
Prince
Make Your Move
The Delgados
Wayward Bob
Bonobo
A Town Called Luckey
Rilo Kiley
Horses
Patti Smith
Crazy Man Michael
Fairport Convention
Wicked Game
Chris Isaak
Down Slow
Moby
Not A Pretty Girl (live)
Ani Difranco with Indigo Girls
Shambala
Donovan
pharyngula | April 20, 2006A helpful reader has improved his killfile script—now you don't need to edit it at all, and it puts a little "kill" link in each comment so you can easily take out annoying commenters with a click. Again, this requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin, so you IE users and us Safari people are out of luck.
pharyngula | April 18, 2006What is this phenomenon called "Science Blogging"? And when are you going to start?
pharyngula | April 17, 2006I don't quite understand this etiquette thing. So Maryscott O'Connor is angry about war and corruption and our incompetent administration, and that's bad. Naughty leftist, she should be better mannered and respectful to our president, no matter how badly he screws up.
Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin sics her mouth-breathing minions on some college-aged peace activists, and they get swamped with death threats from right wingers. And she does it twice, even after learning what kind of sewage her pals are spewing.
Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. Angry denunciations of political actions vs. vicious but…
pharyngula | April 17, 2006I try to avoid censoring people here, and it takes some persistent nuisance value to get evicted. There are a few people, though, who really don't add any value to the site, even though they haven't done anything (yet) to warrant banning them. A reader sent me this script many of you might find useful: it requires Firefox and the greasemonkey plugin, and what it does is chop comments by certain people out of the page, so you don't have to see them, or even see comments by people that refer to them. Cool—a www killfile!
If you're interested, click here to download it. It's currently set to…
pharyngula | April 16, 2006Everyone is writing about this WaPo story about angry liberal bloggers that focused on a site I rather like, My Left Wing. Hilzoy writes about the media laziness behind the story, and Norwegianity punctures the myth that anger is a property of the Left
I'm baffled by it all. Shouldn't we be angry about war and torture and tax breaks for the rich and incompetence and corruption? Isn't anger and opposition the appropriate response?
It seems to me that the real news story is all of those angry right wing blogs that are screeching in support of war and torture and tax breaks for the rich and…
pharyngula | April 14, 2006Hey, does anybody know what's happened with The Inoculated Mind? They're scheduled to be the next host for the Tangled Bank, and the site seems to be down.
If that's your weblog, get in touch with me soon.
pharyngula | April 11, 2006Yikes…while all these new people are reading here, I should be sending them off to other good science sites. Quick, here are a few links:
The gang at Scienceblogs.com—lots of sciencey stuff there.
The Panda's Thumb.
A few more: De Rerum Natura, Evolving Thoughts, Evolution 101, Thoughts from Kansas, The Austringer, Deep-Sea News, FrinkTank, Good Math, Bad Math.
More! I know, the more I mention, the more I dilute the effect, and I feel like I ought to dump the whole humongous blogroll here. Try Mike the Mad Biologist, Red State Rabble, The Lancelet, Muton, Newton's Binomium, Dharma Bums,…
pharyngula | April 11, 2006My wife is one of those statistical people who analyzes data for a local college, and she spends much more time poking around figuring out website traffic than I do. I just kind of wing it and follow my urges, she casts a calculating eye on the whole thing. So the other day, she tells me I ought to bring back that old Sex in the MRI article; it will be hot, she says, it'll draw in a lot of new traffic. So specifically at her urging, I did.
I'm getting about 20,000 visits per hour right now.
It feels a bit eery, being married to a prophetess…although I suppose anyone could tell you that sex is…
pharyngula | April 10, 2006It's the most irresistibly linkable blog post in the world.
Oh, wait. Not that one.
I guess we're still looking for it.
Maybe this is it. I found it compelling, at least.
pharyngula | April 4, 2006Andy is looking for donations to a good cause. I lost a good friend to colon cancer several years ago myself, so I've kicked in a few dollars.
pharyngula | April 3, 2006I'm getting a flood of google searches from Korea, from people looking for images of anencephaly. Anybody know what's prompting this? I know there was some news on the practice of infanticide in North Korea last week…otherwise, it's a mystery.
pharyngula | April 2, 2006Everyone is going to be there now—Duncan Black is going, so are the Firedoglakers, and oh, yeah, me. Not yet in the press releases is the fact that the lovely Dr. Mrs. Gjerness Myers will also be attending. It's going to be quite a crowd at the Yearly Kos. Anyone else joining the gang?
There will be so many of us, I don't think we'll need to worry too much about the blustering wingnuts showing up with ax handles (by the way, don't these right wing kooks ever consider the meaning of their words? Or is it intentional?)
Now if only it were being held in an interesting place. At least there is…
pharyngula | March 29, 2006Here's an optimistic idea:
Personally, I have a great deal of hope that this is going to start to change in the near future. Indeed, this is one area where the blogosphere could actually prove quite powerful. Ten years ago, I'm not sure there was anywhere that your average Christian American was exposed to openly atheistic viewpoints. These days, I'm constantly amazed how many prominent bloggers profess their atheism on a daily basis. On the list, with the help of The Raving Atheist: Daily Kos, Washington Monthly, The Volokh Conspiracy (Jim Lindgren), Pharyngula, Daily Pundit,…
pharyngula | March 27, 2006Oh, no—the Frinksters (<--dead link) have been kicked out of the scienceblogs stable. This is somewhat disturbing, since I think they were a real plus for the group—science is supposed to be fun and profane and weird, after all—but I am assured that they were not evicted for content, but solely because the authors insisted on maintaining anonymity, which meant that all liability devolved on Seed Media rather than the authors. That does mean we can still make dick jokes (good), but it also says that anonymity here is not supported (bad). I guess that's the price we're paying for free…
pharyngula | March 26, 2006Clearly, everyone on the team is required to answer this one.
6.25 %
My weblog owns 6.25 % of me.Does your weblog own you?