I was bad. I completely forgot to have Molly nominations for July, and here it is August. So let’s catch up: name your fave commenter for either month right here, or just your favorite for any time, and I’ll tally ’em up when I get back from New York — we’ll have a super-duper double induction ceremony, with both cake and pie.
Mainly because you don’t know what foo camp is all about. Yes, I have arrived in lovely Sunnyvale, safe and sound, ready for my alter ego, Tyler Nerden, to face the google geeks.
While I was hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, what did I miss? I just caught Behe on the Colbert Report, and yowza, what a clown. Einstein’s theories were all about putting limits on Newton? And Behe is the guy who’s putting limits on Darwin? Can we just say he’s an idiot and be done with it now?
And speaking of dismissive one-liners, what the heck is going on here in my own little fever-swamp? There are 357 comments on this trivial article! I could tell just from the numbers that a troll has been at work, and what do you know, there’s David snarking away (68 of those comments are just him prattling away), and all you people are feeding the little infestation. Stop it. He’s not worth it. Poof, now he’s gone.
I will be checking in a little more regularly now, so behave yourselves.
Urgent news for the chatty among you: Skatje tells me the Pharyngula chat room has been playing musical chairs lately, and it is now located on channel #pharyngula on irc.synirc.net. If you want to try it out, just click on the link above, and it’ll launch a java-based irc client and you can type away in real time to human beings.
Creationists and fundies are especially welcome to go witness to the regulars.
The terrible thing about going on vacation is that you fall behind on everything, including your reading, and when you get back you have to struggle to catch up. When I got back on Sunday I found three books waiting in my mailbox, and of course I’d missed a whole week of the journals, so I’ve been reading, reading, reading every day. I’ve decided I can never go on vacation again.
No, not really! But I do have a backlog to clear, and just this morning I had a chance to sit down and read through that wonderful new paper on the sea anemone genome. I’m going to get that assimilated and I should hope I can whip out a summary by early this afternoon. And then there are these other great stories piled up in my office, on my coffee table, on the ottoman, on the arms of my easy chair … ask my wife, she’ll tell you I’m mired in a mess of papers.
Anyway, it takes a while to get back into the rhythm. Don’t worry, though, good stuff is coming.
Yes, I am away for this week — I’m off wearing flannel, listening to grunge, and drinking coffee as I chop down trees in the rain (did I miss any stereotypes?). Updates to Pharyngula will still happen, though, so don’t abandon me completely. They will be more sporadic, but when they do happen, they will be pungent with the tang of Puget Sound, soaring like the majestic Cascades, and as affectionate and cuddly as the banana slug. Or not. Check below to see if anything new trickles in.
And if the content sucks, tough. I’m having fun!
And this month’s winner of the coveted and prestigious Molly award is … Ichthyic. He handily beat out the inanimate carbon rod, fortunately.
I’ve been getting complaints that images aren’t showing up at all to some readers. This is strange, because there isn’t anything at all special about the html we’re using to display images. Anyway, just to rule out some possibilities, here are a few random images. If you’ve been having problems viewing images, and if you can see any of these, let me know in the comments which ones. If you haven’t had any problems, just ignore this post.
Please note that images #4 and #5 should be on the far right side.
#3:
#4:
#5:
It’s mid-month, and all you regulars know what that means: it’s time to poll you guys for the winners of the Molly award for June. It’s easy: just leave a comment with the name of the person you most enjoy stumbling across in the comment threads, I count ’em up, the winner gets the grand prize of getting his or her name entered on the Molly roll call. You might want to review that list before casting your vote, so you don’t nominate someone who has already won one.
If you’ve been wondering who the grand prize winner for last month was, it was a tie between Kseniya and BronzeDog. That means you have to read their comments with a special reverence now, and you also have to cast a vote for someone different.
I haven’t been monitoring the comments too closely lately, so I hadn’t taken a closer look at this latest trollin’ fool, “Peanut Gallery”. When I saw that his latest comment seemed awfully familiar, though, I did a quick search and … whoops, what do you know. It was our old pal, the Kansas troll. Oh, and “Critical Thinker”? Same guy. The same person was also posting as Sophie, Your Dad, Yoshi, Piece of Advice, and many others. Those comments have all been obliterated now, so my apologies if the various comment threads that moron derailed now have lots of dangling references. See, this is what happens when you respond to trolls!
It’s nothing personal. For much of this morning, they’re going to be moving the database to a new server, and they’re going to shut off write access to it. That means you won’t be able to write comments on any of the articles on scienceblogs for about 3 hours, from 9-12ET today.
Don’t panic.
This is one step they’re taking to improve performance and make those annoying “internal server errors” and double-posts a thing of the past.
D’oh! Coturnix, who must be more aware of the time than I am, tells me that comments will be off from 9-12pm today. Never underestimate how late a programmer will sleep in; I just assumed 9am was plenty late for someone to get up, have coffee, read the newspaper, write a couple of pages, make a trip to the grocery store, and go in and take care of the lab animals—which was what I got done before 9—and that all that stuff would have been gotten out of the way by lunchtime.
