Seed and Honeywell are sponsoring a great opportunity for aspiring science writers: the Seed 2007 Science Writing Contest. All you have to do is write a 1200 word essay that answers these questions:

What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?

How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?

A mere 1200 words? ‘Tis nothing. That’s the length of my usual column in Seed magazine. You can crank that out in an evening’s work, send it in, and get a shot at winning $2500 (first prize!) or $1000 (second prize!) or the eternal love and affection of scientists everywhere (third, fourth, fifth, etc., prize, and by far the most valuable!).

Best news of all: I’m not eligible! I’m sure otherwise I’d just clean up in the contest, and none of you would stand a chance…but since I’m out, I’ll double-dog-dare you all to show all of us sciencebloggers what real science writing is like. You’ve got until 1 July to teach us all the meaning of real scientific literacy, so get cracking.

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The latest word from the Home Office on why this contest is restricted to only Americans: it has to do with the legal regulation and taxation of winnings. It’s not because they dislike you weird non-Americans — a surprising number of the people behind Seed are actually Canadian. Really. Hard to believe, I know, without a Tim Horton’s in sight anywhere in New York.

Anyway, blame the IRS, not Seed.

I’d planned to have that Creation Museum carnival done early this morning, but the response has been huge—I’ve culled it down to about 65 entries, and I’m busily trying to sort them out in some semblance of order, so it’ll be a little longer. Have patience.

Boy, you guys really hate Ken Ham’s Propaganda Palace. It warms me right down to the black, empty void at my heart, where I think the temperature might have risen to a whole tenth of a degree above absolute zero.

I got about 5 times my usual traffic yesterday, which explains why there were some occasional slow-downs all across scienceblogs. I think the server held up fairly well, though, and I know the big guys here are planning some server upgrades to handle future growth.

Don’t worry, it’ll ease up. You can tell from the relatively small increase in page views vs. visits that most of these people zipped in to read one post and didn’t hang around. The new creationists trying to argue weakly in that thread have been mildly amusing, though.

The creationist science fair article got picked up by both Digg and Reddit, so we’re experiencing a bit of a traffic spike. Watch out for slowdowns and more of those pesky “internal server errors” while we undergo a kind of stress test. Also watch out for the brand spankin’ new, virginal creationist newbies who are showing up, and I will remind you all of the three comment rule: be patient, try to explain first, and only after they’ve said 3 stupid things, then can you whack them with a 2×4.

Oh, and if they post the same thing 3 times, that’s the server acting up, and it only counts as one, OK?

While I’m off at this meeting, you all can nominate your favorite commenter for the Order of the Molly. I’ll tally up the votes on Sunday, when I get back home.

The server here is not working well—people are getting lots of “Internal Server Errors” when they try to post comments, and I’m seeing the same problem when I try to post articles. Despite the error message, though, the comments are usually going through. IGNORE THE ERRORS.

Here’s the usual run of affairs. You type in a witty and insightful comment as you always do, and then click “Post”. Usually, this goes smoothly, the comment gets sent, the server tucks it into its database, and the page is refreshed to show your sweet, beautiful words in the thread.

Lately, something is balking after the server stores your comment, and it’s showing you an error page instead of your sweet, beautiful words. Now here’s the problem, and this is important. Do not ever do this: click the “back” button in your browser, and then click on “Post” again to resend it. Your comment is already there, and you’re just piling up more copies of the same comment.

Here’s what you should do if you get the error. Click the “back” button. Select your comment from the text box, and select “copy” from the edit menu. Then click on the “refresh” or “reload” button in your browser, and see if your comment was actually stored. If it was, you’re done. If it wasn’t, then you should paste your words back into the text box, and then click on “Post” again.

Remember, the error messages may be lying to you. Don’t trust them. Verify.

If you’ve made umpty-eleven submissions of the same comment, don’t ask me to delete them for you, either. When I go in to the control panel to tinker, I get those error messages on just about every operation. It’s driving me a bit nuts, so please don’t add to it.

There might be trouble. I’ve already seen a lump of coal with legs go running across the Pharyngula logo, and a frog (it is a nice frog) go hopping across the page. We have not had good luck with ads that try to escape from their cage in a box on the page — send me a note if you’re experiencing annoying obstacles in reading the site.

As long as I’m mentioning site weirdness—we’re also experiencing some slowdowns and annoyances in posting. If you get a “500 Internal Server Error”, don’t assume your comment failed — it was probably accepted, and then something in the server choked. You aren’t alone, either, I also get that error when I post articles, and we’ve got our Wizard Tim working on fixing the problem.

First order of business, we have a new inductee into the Order of the Molly:

April 2007	Torbjörn Larsson	I, too, would like to cast a vote for Mr. Diacritical, Torbjorn Larsson, not for any one post but for the overall excellence of his contributions. And his wit. And his cool name. And his hair. I bet he has nice hair. Having read some of his offerings, I have to say it would not surprise me in the slightest should TL turn out to have access to more than one mind at any given moment. He’s, um, really smart.

Secondly, my latest blogroll open enrollment day harvested 88 90 new souls blogs. Take a look below the fold for the long, long list of new additions.

[Read more…]

A lot of people (really, a lot—I’ve got a stack of emails on this subject) have been complaining that their browsers routinely crash on loading this site, and a few have been telling me about other peculiarities. The epidemic struck about the time we added the new video ads.

As an experiment, those ads have been at least temporarily pulled from this site. Now we need some important feedback from those of you who have been having problems.

• If your browser was formerly crashing and now everything is smooth and sweet and easy, let us know in a comment. That means it was the ads, and we’ve found the source of the problem.

• If your browser was crashing and it’s still crashing, send me email if you somehow read this. Otherwise, the complete silence from anyone who has experienced the problem in the past will tell us there is some other source of the problem.

• If your browser wasn’t crashing with the ads and is now crashing with them gone, we don’t want to hear from you, and fortunately you won’t be able to comment here, because that result just causes too many headaches.

• If your browser didn’t crash before and still isn’t crashing (like mine), ignore this message. We aren’t worried about you.

If you do send me a note about continued problems, it’s very useful if you include your OS and version, and the browser you use and its version.

Thanks!

I’ve finally had it with my mail software. I need advice on what I can do.

Here’s the situation: Mac OS X (that’s not going to change), the standard Mac Mail program, everything up-to-date with the latest versions. I’ve got about 20 folders set up in Mail, with filters to automatically redirect incoming mail to sensible places — student email gets top priority, for instance, a couple of listservs get their mail shuffled off to a convenient holding pen, mail from family members gets its own place, etc. Spam is currently not a problem; I’ve set up all my email accounts to forward through gmail, where the spam gets held up and eventually discarded, and I never even have to look at it.

I get a lot of email, even without spam. Every three months or so, I toss everything out of email and into a new OS folder just for archiving purposes, and reset everything to a mostly clean slate. It’s been a couple of months now, and I’ve got roughly 100,000 messages in Mail. I know. It’s unreal. Why all these people want to send me mail, I don’t know, but there it is.

Now here’s the problem: Mail can’t handle it. The software just gets slower and slower and s l o w e r, until, like now, it’s at the point where I get a message that I’ve got incoming mail, I click on the folder where it’s stored, and I can go fix a pot of coffee while Mail struggles and strains to just display the gorram list of messages. If I look at the processes, Mail is eating 80-90% of the CPU time for several minutes to show me one folder full of messages. And don’t tell me to just throw out all the accumulated mail: I’ve tried. I’m trying right now. I said to myself, OK, this folder with 10,000 messages in it? Goodbye. I selected all, hit delete, and waited — for two hours. Now it’s in Mail’s trash folder. I select “empty trash” and … wait another two hours.

Mac Mail is no good if you are trying to cope with a lot of email. It’s dead, dead, dead as far as I’m concerned. I’ve begun to actively hate Mail — it’s my daily enemy.

So someone tell me what nice, sensible GUI mail reader is out there for Mac OS X that is actually intelligent about managing large volumes. Gmail is nice, but I want something that will let me deal with mail offline.

Post it here, though. Please, please don’t email me suggestions, unless you really want to make me cry.