Administrative
pharyngula | March 15, 2011I've got banners out the wazoo now: 19 26 have been installed now, and I can always add more, so it's not too late to send one in.
As several people have noticed, I was wrong. The actual dimensions of the space allotted for banners is 760x126 pixels, but the bottom 24 pixels are obscured by a menu. Those who sent me adjusted banners, I've already swapped them in — it may take a while for your image cache in your browser to clear. If anyone else wants to patch theirs up, send 'em along and I'll replace those, too.
All of the current banners are on display below the fold.
I lost the attribution…
pharyngula | March 13, 2011Many have noticed that the Pharyngula banner has been gone for a few weeks. This is a completely independent problem from our recent (and still ongoing) access bugginess. For some reason, our tech guy hosted all those images on the Amazon web server when setting up the pages, and Amazon has either locked us out or reorganized their directories, and they aren't loading any more.
The easy solution would be to put the images in some other accessible place, and tweak the code to redirect it to load from the new address, but unfortunately, when the tech guy set up the images, he cropped and…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011We've finally received some information from the overlords about the recent problems. We're being attacked.
We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that ScienceBlogs is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has blocked a range of IP addresses involved. While this means that ScienceBlogs is now loading correctly for most users, the attack is still ongoing and other users may still encounter sporadic loading problems, or be…
pharyngula | March 8, 2011As many people are reporting, the site is having a few problems, and you may occasionally experience errors when commenting or even trying to look at Pharyngula. I know the site banner also mysteriously disappeared a few weeks ago, and yeah, I also know about the el cheapo ads for psychics that sometimes appear in the sidebar.
Unfortunately, the landlord is currently unavailable even to us residents, and I don't even know who to complain to anymore, and even if I did, we don't seem to have the tech support we'd need to fix the problems. Bear with us. I'm kind of expecting that when the whole…
pharyngula | March 5, 2011I really am catching up! Today, I tallied up the votes for the Molly for January, and the winners are…Iain Walker and Ing. Huzzah! Fireworks! Clink of glasses! Screams and alarums!
Now moving right along to the next order of business, you need to forget Iain and Ing and think back to last month and let me know who was the most memorable commenter of February. Leave their name in a comment here.
pharyngula | February 26, 2011I told you I was bad and neglectful, but we're getting there. The Molly award for December 2010 goes to a long-dead Seleucid monarch, Antiochus Epiphanes…on the condition that he promises to leave Egypt alone, and occupy himself with conquering trolls on Pharyngula instead.
Now you get to leave nominations for a Molly winner for January 2011 right here in the comments.
Yeah, January. I'm behind. I'm going to do an abbreviated round of voting, so I'll announce the January winner next week, and put up a post for nominations for February then. It'll work, I think.
pharyngula | February 26, 2011This happens every year about this time: that first month of the new semester is such total chaos that I let stuff on the blog slide…like failing to take care of the Molly stuff. Now I'm going to catch up quickly.
The first order of business: I proposed a Molly of the Year award, and you people nominated a fair number of well-appreciated people for it. Unfortunately, you couldn't just pick one, and the results congealed around a trinity…so I'm giving it to three people. I also can't just call it a mega-Molly or something, so let's give this a completely different title: Champions of Reason,…
pharyngula | February 17, 2011This guest post from James Kakalios got me thinking — if anyone wants to take advantage of this prominent platform I've lucked into for the purpose of publishing their views, I'd be willing to give them an occasional opportunity. I wouldn't want to turn the place into wall-to-wall other people (it's mine, dangit!), but something from some other voice now and then would be OK.
I'm going to set a few rules, though.
No commercials, and this isn't Craigslist. Don't send me press releases, either. Opinion pieces and entertaining summaries of your exciting research are fine.
Don't expect to get…
pharyngula | January 17, 2011In my previous post about an absurd NIMBY protest in Canada, I suggested that it would be far worse to live next to a pig farm than a hospice. I was not aware of the sordid story of Canadian serial killer and hog farmer Robert Pickton and the rather traumatic associations people in that region have between death and pig farms. No such connection was intended, and my apologies to anyone who thought I was making any implications between dying in a hospice and being murdered by a vile criminal.
pharyngula | January 16, 2011Oh, gosh, the visitometer rolled over to a total of 100,000,000 a few days ago, and I wasn't paying any attention. I should celebrate.
I think I'll have a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea this morning. That should about do it.
pharyngula | January 9, 2011That loopy homeopath, John Benneth, is bragging now that he is the most widely read homeopath in the world, and that his blog has broken all previous viewership records. He's quite proud of this "accomplishment".
One of the last John Benneth Journal entries for 2010, IN ONE YEAR, has broken all previous viewership records and sparked more commentary and outrage amongst the pharmaceutical company stooges than any previous Journal entry, enlisting the usual fury and nasty responses.
He seems to be aware of how it happened: I linked to that one article. What he doesn't seem to appreciate,…
pharyngula | January 1, 2011It's the end of the year, and for a change, we're going to have an additional Molly award given: this time, for notable contributions throughout the year. Think of it as a Molly with oak clusters for endurance and sustained performance. Leave your nominations right here in the comments.
In addition, the winner of this recognition gets a real prize: Hank Fox will send them a copy of his brand new book, Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods and Faith(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It's good, you want it — if you don't think you'll win this little contest, you might want…
pharyngula | January 1, 2011I've tallied up the votes for the November Molly award, and we have two winners: a posthumous and well-deserved award to DominEditrix, and another to the fortunately still living NigelTheBold. Celebrate the recognized contributors, and start thinking about who you liked to read in December…and leave nominations in the comments.
pharyngula | December 3, 2010It's the beginning of another month, and time to announce the Molly winner for October, and that sninily unique Pharyngulistan honor goes to…Mattir.
No sooner do I announce one winner, though, than we just move on to collecting nominations for the next one. Leave your comments here declaring your appreciation of some particular person for their contributions to the threads of November.
pharyngula | November 17, 2010I've had to make some changes to how comments are filtered here. Here is the only allowed html that you can use in any of your comments:
<a href=""></a>
<b></b>
<i></i>
<u></u>
<s></s>
<em></em>
<strong></strong>
<sub></sub>
<sup></sup>
<p></p>
<br />
<blockquote></blockquote>
This is rather minimal text formatting: you can do a little bold, italics, or underscore, with blockquotes and links. That's it. This is all retroactive, unfortunately, so if you had…
pharyngula | November 7, 2010I've hated those Survivor TV shows for as long as they've been on — I've never been able to sit through a single episode. Staging a phony zero-sum game and encouraging backstabbing betrayal and vicious psychopathic behavior is not my idea of fun.
I have this fantasy version of the game in which there are months of lead time, lots of promos highlighting the most odious aspects of each contestant's personality, with elaborate web sites (all in flash, of course) pushing the competitive edge, all working to build audience anticipation to a fever pitch. Then the day of the premiere comes, and…
pharyngula | November 7, 2010Scienceblogs was down for the count most of the morning — we had some annoying technical glitch on the server, nothing malicious. Now you can read this. Right? If you can't, let me know by leaving a comment describing exactly how the site is no longer visible, why you can't comment, and any other strange circumstances that impair your ability to read or write the page you are viewing or commenting on.
pharyngula | November 6, 2010I have reviewed the audition tapes you all sent in for Survivor Pharyngula, averaged together the scores given to people who had multiple recommendations, and sorted them into a ranked list, and then arbitrarily threw out everyone who got below a score of 40. Here's the list of Enemies of the Threads.
yanshen71786
Professor Frink
j-brisby
Al B. Quirky
Sili
MaxH
Manny Calavera
Brownian
Joshua Zelinsky
Ing
Walton
Cuttlefish
Ogvorbis
sandiseattle
Rascals and troublemakers, every one. But the list is too long! I have to whittle it down a bit before we move on to the next stage, so in my role as…
pharyngula | November 5, 2010Lately, we've had a number of threads blow up into furious arguments, which is fine and normal, except that they've also been fueled by contributions from an assortment of new (Yay! We like new people!) noisemakers who don't seem to respond well to argument themselves (Boo!), and there's been a great deal of non-productive turmoil going on. It may be time to purge a few of the more poisonous commenters.
This is stage 1 of our Survivor Pharyngula competition, in which we'll determine if we really do have an infestation of pests that need to be culled. After all, I'm not going to invest in…
pharyngula | November 5, 2010For a long time, TruthMachine has been the only person to have both been awarded a Molly and also been threatened with banning. Now he has to share that distinction with Walton, who has won the Molly for September.
Now pick one for October by leaving nominations in the comments. Don't get all contrary and try to elevate some random troll, though: that'll be taken care of a little later today when Survivor Pharyngula goes live.