Just because I’m doing a lot of traveling this weekend doesn’t mean I can’t check in on the blog now and then. I notice that a particularly vile misogynistic troll, the cowardly Ostiarius, was emboldened by my absence to start make lots of nasty comments. He has been banned.

Trolls, you are on notice. This isn’t an opportunity for you to play.

I am seriously thinking of enabling comment registration, though…

I just noticed that it is September — we need to pick a new Molly award for August. Leave a comment and let us all know who you thought was a noteworthy, commendable, interesting commenter here on Pharyngula over the last month. I’ll enshrine the most popular name at the end of the month weekend.

Guest Blogger Danio:
Orac has posted a directive from the Seed Overlords regarding a survey they’d like us to conduct. As my distinctiveness has been temporarily added to the collective (I’ll be implanting the “sleep” command into their subroutines next week though, oh yes…) I am dutifully passing it on. It takes less than 10 minutes to complete and you can enter to win stuff at the end of it.

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Whoops! The survey has been closed already. Sorry about that. Here’s a pointless poll instead.

Hello Pharyngulites, Danio here in my second official stint as ‘guest blogger’. Like MAJeff, I’m very honored that PZ tagged me for the task, and I hope not to disappoint.

A bit about me: I am a postdoctoral fellow at PZ’s alma mater, the University of Oregon, working on zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model organism for studying hereditary deaf-blindness. I also have a broad interest in science education and science literacy, especially at the elementary and secondary school level, so I do a fair number of tours and demos for different student groups. I don’t have as much time for more formal pedagogic endeavors as I’d like, but I have taught courses in Human Reproduction and Development in the past, and I have a special interest in the intersection of science and public policy in this area.

Why just “Danio”, you might ask? My identity is not a secret, per se. People in my field who are reading this can probably figure out who I am, and that’s totally ok. My choice to post under a pseudonym on Scienceblogs is out of consideration for my kids, who aren’t old enough to make an informed decision on whether or not they want to be publicly associated with an unapologetically godless Mama, and for my husband, who, as a healthcare provider, has to kiss a lot more ass than I ever do, and thus could also suffer by association.

I’m glad to be here and looking forward to posting somewhat regularly. In keeping with the theme that MAJeff has started us off with, here’s another question to mull over:

In reflecting upon PZ’s current journey to the Galapagos, what site of significance in the history of scientific discovery would you like to visit, and why?
(If that doesn’t do it for you, feel free to use this as an open thread).

Have you been wondering who won the Molly for July? It goes to … Owlmirror, OM. Let’s hear some applause for the worthy champion.

In other news, you may recall that I’m going to the Galapagos Islands, and I’m leaving tonight! I shall be spending the next week and a half bobbing about in a boat in the Pacific, 600 miles off the coast of mainland South America, and while I’ll still be able to access the internet in a limited way, I’m going to be somewhat distracted. “Oh, no,” you’re thinking, “Pharyngula will go all silent and boring, and there will be no biological ejaculations from a godless liberal to add flavor to my morning coffee.” Have no fear! I could just schedule a blank post to appear every morning, and knowing you people, it would fill up fast — you don’t really need me to provoke you. But no, I have gone another route, and have recruited a few guest bloggers who will post a few things now and then while I’m off. We’re squaring things away with Seed right now, and I’ll let them introduce themselves at their own pace.

If you decide you like them better than me, I shall be heartbroken, but I will be kicking them off on the 18th of August anyway. Maybe they’ll be inspired to go on to new blogs of their very own…?

I’ll also be handing the whip and keys to the dungeon to Skatje. She won’t be quite as diligent in monitoring things as I am (17 — almost 18 — year old girls have a life, you know), but she will be available to skewer any trolls. Don’t cross her, she might be cranky about not getting to go to the Galapagos.

And today is going to be spent packing and tidying up the Myers mansion for the housesitters, a job that requires carefully inventorying the beer. It might be a while, especially if I decide that leaving all that good beer behind that Don Kane and Rachel Warga left here last week would be a waste.

I’ve been getting a volley of complaints that Pharyngula is crashing Internet Explorer. It turns out that this is a problem all over the web, and is Sitemeter’s fault. I’ve changed the code in a way that I hope will fix it — let me know if it doesn’t. (←cunning ploy there…if you’re still crashing, you may not be able to read that!)

P.S. Explorer is the worst browser available. If your computer has the resources to handle something else, switch!

No, not that kind of host. Our scheduled host for the Tangled Bank had to back out due to time constraints. If anyone wants to volunteer to host it next Wednesday, let me know and I’ll forward the entries to you.

Also, who should get a Molly award for the month of July? Mention your choice(s) and reasoning in the comments here. I’ll tally ’em up at the end of this weekend.

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Tangled Bank hosting is taken care of: the first volunteer was PalMD of the denialism blog. Start mailing those links in!

So I have this new policy of posting email that threatens violence with full identifying information. I may have to retract that, since it looks like it’s getting abused. The idea was that I would have a public record of the threat, and that the smart people commenting here would be able to do a little sleuthing for me.

It is most definitely not intended to incite harassment. I do not want you to be dunning these people with email, threatening them back, signing them up for spam, or otherwise being a jerk. For one thing, we can’t be certain that an innocent’s account hasn’t been hijacked; for another, we’re supposed to be better than that. With the size of the readership here, any reaction by you is likely to be repeated a thousand-fold and turned into an over-reaction. I welcome any suggestions from you all but let me take care of any writing back.

I’m going to have to rethink my policy, which is unfortunate. Exposing roaches to the light is usually a good way to get them to scuttle away, but it’s not so good if people use it as an opportunity to swing sledgehammers in the kitchen to squash them.

Yeesh, not only am I busy at this meeting, but two factors are conspiring to keep me away from the web.

• The internet service in this hotel is abominable — I’ve tried both the wireless and wired access, and it’s like trying to read the 21st century internet over a 300 baud modem. I tried to edit a few trolls’ comments, and while I waited to load the page, I took a shower, walked a mile down the street, got breakfast and coffee, came back, found the maid service had cleaned up the suite (nice!), sat down to the computer, and just then it finished. I suspect the fact that the hotel is packed to the gills with computer scientists might have something to do with this.

• This is a conference way outside my discipline — I’m here to give some outsider’s context, talking about evo-devo to a bunch of evolutionary and genetic algorithms people. And everyone I talk to is telling me that they have very high expectations for my talk! Damn. These things are so much easier when I walk in and people have low expectations. Anyway, so I’m feeling mildly panicky — not too bad, though, because I think what I’ve got is at least a good talk — so I’m feeling like hiding away and just working it a little harder. Thanks, Conor Ryan and everyone else here, I’ve got butterflies now, and I never feel this nervous!

So you’re just going to have to talk amongst yourselves for a while, or browse some of the other fine sites in the Scienceblogs stable, as long as I’m choked up here in Atlanta…although I may just look elsewhere for an internet cafe later. Or if you want something to keep the flames burning bright, my atheist’s creed was cited in the comments — chew over that.

Please behave, don’t feed the trolls, etc.