Administrative
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008From Almost Diamonds, by Stephanie Zvan, comes a description of many of my favourite trolls, including the one who won't take "you're banned" as an answer. This is why he's banned.
Or, A Primer in Antisocial Attention-Seeking
Lay your groundwork. Watch the group interaction. Make yourself known to the community. Engage on a topic or two. Piss a few people off so they'll react to you reliably later.
Watch for your chance. If the blog is any good, the host and/or community practices some sort of moderation, active or passive. You'll have to catch them on a busy day or heated topic to get them…
pharyngula | December 10, 2008Ken Ham of the Creation "Museum" linked to an old thread from June, prompting a sudden influx of dull-witted creationists regurgitating old canards. Normally I wouldn't mind — the poor dullards don't get much outlet on the creationist sites, which typically prohibit any kind of expression from their flocks — but in this case we've also got lots of fierce godless evolutionists who see an opportunity to sharpen their claws. That means the old thread is at a roiling boil and is now over 1300 comments, which is a bit excessive.
I'm closing that thread and inviting them to come here to carry on…
pharyngula | December 8, 2008Uh-oh…I've been so scatterbrained lately that I've neglected the Molly Awards. You know how it goes: I put up a post for nominations, leave it to simmer for a while, it scrolls off the bottom of the page, and I lose track of it all. Then I come back and the soup is all scorched and horrible. Oh, wait, no — it's fine! This internet thingie let's comments sit there forever if I let it.
Anyway, I've caught up with two months' worth of nominations, and here they are:
For September, two awards: Patricia and Nick Gotts. Give 'em some belated applause!
For October, the winner actually got lots of…
evolvingthoughts | December 6, 2008Bora made me do it... first line of the first post of each month the year. It doesn't quite read like a dadaist poem.
January: OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links......
February: Readers will know that I got very angry about the Haneef Affair, in which a muslim Indian doctor was accused of being a terrorist and deported by the improper abuse of power by the minister for immigration of the previous government.
March: So I'm here, and…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2008
Note the careful ambiguity there: this is not a blog of another antipodean philosopher, but another blog of this antipodean philosopher. The ins and outs of Australian politics and policies are not of interest to much more than 0.3% of the world, so my asseverations are even less interesting to you all. Hence I have started an intermittent blog, The Drought Resistant Philosopher, wherein I will whine (or as we say here, whinge) about the latest stupidity from our representatives and public service, and so on. All ISP filtering posts will go there from now on.
No more mister nice silverback…
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2008
New: Solutions listed
Mike Dunford, who is still trying to get me to pay for that time he put me up in Hawaii when his wife was on active service in Iraq (if I knew what I'd have to pay, both in climbing horrific rainforested slopes to release wallabies, and this meme, I'd never have gone) has tagged me, the bastard. It's a meme created by Henry Gee (I'll get even with him later, too).
Find ten books, the first ones you see, go to page 56, sentence five and transcribe it. You readers are supposed to guess what they are. [I better keep a note or I'll be screwed later...] Below the fold…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:
Books
Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
This continues Sober's general project of giving a…
laelaps | November 26, 2008I only just noticed that Janet tagged me with the 5 Things meme. Here we go...
5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago:
Absolutely despising high school
Taekwondo (2nd degree black belt)
Being an emo kid before I even knew what that was
Learning how to drive
Playing DOOM
5 Things On My To-Do List Today:
Work an 8-hour day
Brave the grocery store with Mrs. Laelaps
Tidy up the sections of the human evolution chapter about "Ramapithecus," Miocene apes, Louis Leakey, W.E. le Gros Clark's study of australopithecines, etc.
Start reading The Lions of Tsavo
Find more papers about chimpanzee infanticide for…
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2008
From here via here via here, 99 things I have or haven't done.
1. Started your own blog2. Slept under the stars3. Played in a band4. Visited Hawaii5. Watched a meteor shower6. Given more than you can afford to charity7. Been to Disneyland/world8. Climbed a mountain9. Held a praying mantis10. Sang a solo11. Bungee jumped12. Visited Paris13. Watched a lightning storm at sea14. Taught yourself an art from scratch15. Adopted a child16. Had food poisoning17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty18. Grown your own vegetables19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France20. Slept on an overnight train21.…
evolvingthoughts | November 16, 2008
We had a little storm here yesterday. It left my brother's flat wet inside and out, destroying their mattresses, and giving my motorcycle a jet blast clean. It's clean for the first time since I bought it four years ago. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, very scared. Two minutes before I arrived at my brother's place, I was on the road on my bike. Then this happened. Hailstones the size of a small orange, winds up to 130km/h (and I am sure that was what I saw when I took this pic), tree branches down and water just pouring into the flat.
Anyway, that to one side, here are some…
evolvingthoughts | November 15, 2008
This one started at Nature Networks, where I am not a blogger, but as Larry and Bora have answered it, among others, I figured I'd have a go too...
1. What is your blog about?Basically the philosophical implications of science, although that extends into the distance a bit when I get angry about antiscience or political moves that either interfere with science or rely on bad science.
2. What will you never write about?There's not much I won't write about. I'm a philosopher, so a mere lack of knowledge hardly fazes me. I can express complex views on any topic even if, or rather…
laelaps | November 4, 2008First, many thanks to everyone who donated to the DonorsChoose challenge during October! Altogether, everyone who participated at ScienceBlogs raised about $30,000 for students, and I was proud to see that most of my challenges were fully funded.The Boneyard #25 is delayed due to some technical difficulties, but it should be up sometime tomorrow. I'll announce it when it is ready, but if you have any last-minute nominations please send them to me sometime today.The finalists for the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship were supposed to be announced yesterday, but there has been a delay. They…
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2008
Readers: if you haven't eaten lately, hover your mouse over the Snowflake avatar to the left. Give it a bit of time and you will see what I look like when I shave.
Clicking on it merely takes you to Barcelona Zoo's page on my avatar.
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2008
The Ediacaran period is the era between around 635Mybp and 540Mybp, just before the Cambrian. You pronounce it "ed-ee-ack-a-ran". It is also the name of a new blog by the inimitable Chris Nedin, erstwhile paleontologist who specialised in the Ediacaran fauna before joining the Dark Side (federal public service) in order to eat. Go read Ediacaran: Past Imperfect and leave some comments. His first post is about why Anomalocaris couldn't continue to eat trilobites. I guarantee that he will be interesting and informed. Bugger knows way too much anyway...
evolvingthoughts | October 15, 2008
It occurred to me that some readers may be interested in the grant project, so I put the details beneath the fold. I am funded for an Australian Postdoctoral (APD) research fellowship for three years.
DP0984826 Dr JS Wilkins; Prof PE Griffiths
Approved Project Title: Contemporary scientific explanations of religion: A methodological and philosophical analysis
2009 : $ 87,1952010 : $ 88,5062011 : $ 88,446
Primary RFCD 4401 PHILOSOPHY
APD Dr JS Wilkins
Administering Organisation
The University of Sydney
Project Summary
The idea that religion is an evolved feature of human…
pharyngula | October 13, 2008DO NOT SEND ME ANY MORE REQUESTS TO CRASH THE PBS POLL ON SARAH PALIN. I am receiving over 50 email requests per day to do it, and there are a dozen comments every day mentioning it. You don't see them because I've had to specifically add a filter to trash them automatically, and similarly, I've got an email filter that is killing all the messages direct to me. I know, the stupid poll has gone viral and there is email circulating all over the web asking people to vote on it, and everyone who sees it forwards it on to me, for some reason. It's been done. It is a thoroughly hacked poll already…
pharyngula | October 9, 2008Things are getting ugly at scienceblogs right now — you've probably noticed all the errors in making comments, and those of us on the inside are struggling even more to get through to put up posts. Rumor has it that we may be undergoing some kind of denial-of-service attack — we're short of information ourselves, since our tech people are too busy tearing their hair out and pounding on recalcitrant iron to give us updates. We'll know more when everything is fixed. Soon, I hope. Until then, have patience and try not to post too many duplicate comments.
We may have to switch to old media. I'll…
pharyngula | October 7, 2008Scienceblogs is experiencing some technical difficulties right now: the guts of the machine are being very recalcitrant and generating time-out errors all over the place. Please be patient and heed the message when making comments: getting an error when posting does not necessarily mean the comment did not get posted. Most often, it just means that the MovableType software has gotten very, very stupid.
And if you think you're having problems with comments, you can't imagine how bad it is for us trying to post articles. I just tried to create a new entry, and went off to a doctor's appointment…
laelaps | October 3, 2008I'm a little bit behind starting up the DonorsChoose challenge, but I've finally got everything set up and ready to go. In case you haven't heard the buzz already, ScienceBloggers are banding together to raise money for classrooms across the United States so that elementary school children can get a good science education. If you'll look at the sidebar, you'll see a little module tracking my "Digging Deep for Science" Challenge, which will track the projects I want to help fund this month.
For my set of challenges I have decided to stick with a particular theme; anatomy. There are many…
pharyngula | October 1, 2008Now that it is October, it is time to finally announce the winner of the August Molly award: our first non-human primate wins by a landslide, the Rev. BigDumbChimp. There may have been a few irregularities in the voting, since his backers were able to raise twice as many thumb-like appendages in approval compared to the others, but we will accept it as a reasonable consequence of biological diversity.
Now let's move on to September. State who you think was the most interesting, insightful, amusing, thoughtful, or attention-seeking commenter for the past month in the comments below.