Today we have to judge whether any of our contestants have met their immunity challenge. The challenge was this:

The challenge for the seven surviving candidates is to write a short comment, 200 words or less, that reveals that they actually understand why their attitudes and pattern of expression have so exasperated readers here, and explains what they will do to change their behavior in the future. This will be a tough one for this crowd, I’m sure. Let’s see if they can wake up enough to do some honest self-assessment.

The purpose of this challenge isn’t to force people to change or defend their ideas, of course, but to see whether they can honestly recognize why other people might find them so irritating that they are asking me to ban them. So your job in the comments here is to tell me who you think did the best job of actually being briefly self-aware.

Here are the attempts:

• Africangenesis, who explains that far left progressives don’t like being shown to be shallow, destructive, and vindictive by someone who is more comfortable with himself.

• John Kwok apologizes for name-dropping and talking about his high school…and then tells us that he should be talking about it. And then he tells us about his high school again and

  again and

  again and

  again and

  again. And makes a new threat.

• Pete Rooke talks at length about beliefs. You tell me if he makes it, because I couldn’t read it all without nodding off.

• Facilis has one that I missed first time through.

Vote for who you think meets the immunity challenge. Considering the quality of the entries, “None” is also a legitimate vote.

Well, gang, the voting is closed on our first Survivor event. I would never have expected such a dramatic turn-around. From out of nowhere, John Kwok surged out of fifth place in the field — I had written him off as a bad bet — to rally astonishingly by doing one simple thing: commenting. He clobbered Pete Rooke and Simon, even, just by writing one threat (to sic his facebook friends on me), and doing his usual irritating name-dropping nonsense. He showed real heart in this race, and I’m sure that if he just continues to babble, he will eventually win his place in the fabulous Pharyngula dungeon.

In the end, though, he could not stop the juggernaut. One person stood out as a universal target for opprobrium by virtue of her homophobia and her cheerfully evil views. She was described as the Dolores Umbridge of Pharyngula. And for that reason, Barb has been found unfit, and is cast into the dungeon for all time.

Now, on Day Three of Survivor: Pharyngula!, you get to vote on who you’d next like to evict. You may notice some changes in the list.

Africangenesis
Barb
Facilis
John Kwok
Piltdown Man
Pete Rooke
Silver Fox
Simon

A few people on the first list who garnered little enthusiasm have been dropped. On the other hand, a few have been added. It’s a remarkable thing: these threads represent an opportunity for readers to vent their spleens over some of the more obnoxious commenters here, and thus represent a dangerous circumstance for the pesky little goblins — you’d think, if they had an sense at all, that they’d realize this is the time they should be lying low, keeping as quiet as possible. But no! I guess if they had any brains in the first place, they wouldn’t be quite as annoying. Maybe if I’d called this Shark Week: Pharyngula!, they’d have realized that jumping into a well-chummed lagoon full of vicious beasts champing their razor-toothed jaws was not a good idea.

Now vote by leaving a comment here. Or, if you’d rather, you can always send the thread off in unusual directions — the last one seemed to be all about oral sex, lesbians, and bacon. I’ll tally the votes on Friday, if I can manage to pick them out of the non sequitur salad.

How about an immunity challenge for our contestants? Since the last runoff was characterized by an astonishing lack of self-awareness on the part of the victims candidates, we should test that. The challenge for the seven surviving candidates is to write a short comment, 200 words or less, that reveals that they actually understand why their attitudes and pattern of expression have so exasperated readers here, and explains what they will do to change their behavior in the future. This will be a tough one for this crowd, I’m sure. Let’s see if they can wake up enough to do some honest self-assessment.

They have until 1pm tomorrow to complete the immunity challenge, and then we’ll open those up to the crowd for honest evaluation.

I’ve counted the nominations for the Molly Award, and the winner for January 2009 is…Wowbagger! I don’t know why, he just wanders around insulting everybody, and of course there was no hurry, since he is immortal. I think you all just fell for the ploy of favoring the guy riding Douglas Adam’s coattails.^*

Now you can leave comments here congratulating the Infinitely Prolonged, and you can also nominate other fabulous posters for the Molly for February. Now don’t you be handing them out to Princess Hooli and Max Quordlepleen just because you like their names!

^*OK, so there probably were some other good reasons, too.

The people have spoken, and the honored recipient of the Molly for December is…Nerd of Redhead! This, of course, merely confirms the nerdishness and raises it to new heights, so the nick is now even more appropriate.

Next, we have to pick some other nerd to get the OM after his or her name for the month of January. Leave your nominations/votes in the comment thread below.

Since an annoying security hole in Typekey was exposed here, I’ve reenabled anonymous commenting. I still want to tinker with this, so later I may try requiring OpenID registration…but I’ve irritated everyone enough for one weekend, so I’ll try that some other day.

This is a long traveling weekend for me — I’m on my way to Calgary/Edmonton for a lecture and a debate. That means my internet access may be a little spotty, and I’m a little concerned about some of the trends in the comments, so I’m laying down a few rules.

• There are too many trolls. I’m shutting off anonymous commenting for at least a little while — it won’t make them go away, but it will make it much easier for me to clean up their stinky little droppings afterwards. If it suddenly makes it impossible for you regulars to comment, let me know by email.

  I may turn anonymous commenting back on when I get back, or I may leave it in place. Consider this an experiment. Aw, heck…I’ll definitely restore it for at least a few days when I’m back so everyone can discuss whether they hate it or not.

• Another of those interminable back-and-forth threads where people insult others with slang terms for female genitalia, and others point out that that is demeaning to women, has begun again. I hate those. I am not about to start policing language here (I hate that, too), but I will point out that if you think it’s disparagement to compare someone to any of the delightful features found in the sublime wonderland of a lady’s garden of Venus, you are a sloppy anus with a faulty sphincter and a putrefying colon. So there. You can go ahead and use any slang terms for genitals that you desire, but henceforth they will all be regarded as expressions of endearment, love, and lust.

  I’ve noticed that we’ve got quite a few readers here who feel a passionate desire for Ann Coulter. She should be flattered. You should be embarrassed that you are communicating your true feelings so poorly.

• Comments are getting a little too gratuitously snarly. I’m not going to censor your general cussedness, but think a bit — spitting out a swear word doesn’t make you witty. At least make an effort to be creatively profane. I have high expectations for commenters here: you can be rude, I even encourage it, but force yourself to use your brain to a higher degree than is demanded by knee-jerk strings of expletives. Remember, I do have a rule about boring me.

Some of you have noticed some little instabilities around here since the software upgrade. Well, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to get a little more rocky tonight. Our crack technical team is going to be ripping into the database and shaking some more bugs out of the system overnight, and while everything should still be usable, it may be slow, and there may be a few glitches now and then. It should all be fixed by the morning.

I think they chose to do it starting at midnight New York time because they hate all the Australian readers. Or maybe it’s because they trust you to be tough enough to cope with a few rough hours.

You may have noticed a recent influx of whining wackaloons, whose enchanting cries have consisted mostly of “You’re all so uncivil” and “This is not a science blog”. This is fallout from the Weblog Awards, where a couple of climate change denialist blogs have effectively turned out the disgruntled conspiracy theorist vote. One of those blogs will almost certainly win the ‘award’ — which tells you the value of these contests — so don’t worry about that. However, I do want to reply to the mindless, repetitive complaints of our new visitors, even though they will almost certainly evaporate when the award voting closes later today.

I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion. I want them to charge in to the heart of the issue and shred the frauds, without hesitation and without faltering over manners. These demands for a false front of civility are one of the strategies used by charlatans who want to mask their lack of substance — oh, yes, it would be so goddamned rude to point out that a huckster is lying to you. I am quite happy that we have a culture of being rude to frauds here.

The other claim is also a stupid distraction. This is a blog by an educator and scientist. We are not one-dimensional caricatures — I write about whatever interests me, whenever I feel like it. To claim that because I sometimes laugh and sometimes get angry and am a concerned citizen of a screwed-up country and have interests outside of journals and academia and am a father and husband and am willing to express myself on any topic that strikes my fancy means that there can’t possibly be any science here implies that you are a freaking idiot with a bizarrely narrow view of who scientists are, and a peculiarly close-minded vision of how this medium actually works.

Keep this in mind, O Regular Readers of the blog, and please do feel free to be uncivil to these fresh fools from the pseudoscientific fringe of the blogosphere.

Pharyngula will be going silent this afternoon. Do not panic, do not call 911, do not convert to Catholicism in a desperate search for succor. The Seed overlords are implementing a much-needed upgrade to the software that drives this place, so some of the functions will be turned off this afternoon, like posting and commenting, while a team of code dwarves move in and bang up the joint. It’s a big upgrade, so you’re likely to be locked out until sometime on Saturday. Be strong.

What will you get out of this? At first, not much. Everything will look and act exactly the same to the reader after the upgrade. However, I’m hoping for some performance improvements in some of the database functions, which means better troll control. There will probably be some other changes as I get a grip on the new functionality; I know there will be an option for threaded comments which I’ll give a trial run, and I’ll also be looking into requiring some minimal site registration requirements. Any changes that will affect you will be rolled out gradually, have no fear, and if they are disliked, I won’t hesitate to roll them back.

Anyway, this afternoon and tomorrow will be your chance to step away from the computer, take a shower, bake cookies, shovel your driveway, whatever…but I expect you all back on the job filling up comment threads by Saturday evening, and definitely back at it by Sunday.