Dodgy and getting dodgier

I read that story about two women being rescued after 5 months at sea, and it bugged me. Wasn’t it awfully convenient that they’d packed a year’s worth of supplies before taking off on a short trip? And gosh, but they looked in good shape for people stranded at sea for so long. Even the dog! Wouldn’t they have eaten the dog after the first month of living on ramen?

Anyway, now there’s a detailed breakdown of all the fishy stuff in their story. They had an emergency beacon that they didn’t even bother to turn on!

I’m looking forward to learning the true story behind this phony tale of survival at sea.

The end of Scienceblogs. Long live Scienceblogs!

Let the countdown begin.


(you might not want to click on that — it’s loud)

The self-destruct sequence for Scienceblogs has begun. If you head over there on this last day of existence, you’ll find that the last post on most of the blogs is an announcement that they’ve jumped into their escape pods and are jetting off to new worlds of discovery.

It’s a shame. Scienceblogs really was revolutionary in its time — the idea was to bring in all these people who were writing about science as a hobby, give them a little profit from their work, and harness them to generate lots of continuous online content as part of a larger science communication strategy by Seed Media. It worked! Sorta. Unfortunately, the blog network was about the only part of the media empire that was running in the black, and the big projects — Seed magazine, a popular science glossy, and ideas about data visualization — didn’t last. And then online ad revenue started to get ugly (and still is!) as the ad companies cannibalized their readership with increasingly aggressive and off-putting ads (see freethoughtblogs now for example). Management tried to make it work with a few terrible missteps, like selling a blog to Pepsi, blurring the lines between commercialism and science content. But otherwise, it was a great, fun, contentious, interesting community.

The beginning of the end came when National Geographic bought up the network. It was clear in discussions with the new management that they had no idea what they’d bought — their concerns were all about bottling it up and constraining the beast by imposing conservative standards and practices on a diverse collection of independent bloggers. People started to leave. It didn’t help that one of their first acts was upgrading everyone to new software, botching the process (I lost about a third of my comments) and leaving us with rather drab, vanilla-ish appearances. And then neglecting everything. It was clear that they didn’t care, there were caretakers put in place to just reign over the decay, and there was to be no improvement, no growth, no excitement. So many of us drifted away.

And today is the day they nuke it from orbit.

One last fond look backwards at the main Sb page…

Gosh, I sure hope no hostile alien life forms have smuggled themselves aboard the escape pods.

Ominous hallway

This is the second floor office wing of the science building where I work. You may notice how well kept-up it is, the floors clean and shiny — our custodians do an excellent job. But notice the line of ceiling lights marching off into the distance, with their bright reflections in the shiny floor, one aligned with each office door…except one. One office sits in a pool of relative darkness. One where the lights don’t shine, where the resident lurks in perpetual gloom.

Can you guess who dwells there, in room 2390? Who has crouched there in the room haunted by gloaming murk for years?

The number of posts & comments on Pharyngula has roughly doubled today

It looks like Jason Thibeault has succeeded in bringing all of my old posts and your old comments over from Scienceblogs…just in time before it sinks into the abyss. So we now have 24,205 posts and 1,812,731 comments here on Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula, with archives going all the way back to 2006.

So that’s one bit of good news today.

D&D never went away, but it’s coming back

The last time I played Dungeons & Dragons was around 1979, maybe 1980, with two old friends from high school, Steve and Steve. The network of friends was broken up by my need to travel around the country, chasing an education and a career, and I never got back into it. It’s just not the same without those face-to-face friends. I have great memories of those years in that small gaming group in the Pacific Northwest, though, and it was my primary outlet for social networking at that time. I should just get on a plane to Seattle and surprise the two Steves some Saturday night.

Anyway, I guess there’s been a bit of a renaissance in D&D’s popularity lately, which, as usual, I’m missing out on. It’s an old-new way to escape some of the faceless anomie we sometimes experience in our digital universe.

In 2017, gathering your friends in a room, setting your devices aside, and taking turns to contrive a story that exists largely in your head gives off a radical whiff for a completely different reason than it did in 1987. And the fear that a role-playing game might wound the psychologically fragile seems to have flipped on its head. Therapists use D. & D. to get troubled kids to talk about experiences that might otherwise embarrass them, and children with autism use the game to improve their social skills. Last year, researchers found that a group of a hundred and twenty-seven role players exhibited above-average levels of empathy, and a Brazilian study from 2013 showed that role-playing classes were an extremely effective way to teach cellular biology to medical undergraduates.

Hey, what? Teaching cell biology with role-playing games? That sounds interesting, and I had to look that one up.

In short, an RPG is a game in which a person (in this case, the teacher) tells a story that is enacted by the players who are given roles as the various pieces of background information. Challenges related to the story are then presented and must be addressed by all participants. Each player represents a character in the story and is attributed (quantitatively-defined) skills. These skills are tested during the game to decide if the character succeeds in his or her attempt to perform a task that solves the problem or overcomes the challenge. The skill is usually tested against some kind of quantifiable decision-making system, such as rolling dice. The dice introduce randomness into the game, create suspense and provoke playfulness among the players. This is the main difference between role-play, which refers to the playing of roles in a theatrical play, and RPG, that introduces clear rules according to which the players must decide how to act.

One of the most interesting and significant aspects of the RPG is that the whole team must win together: there are no losers in this kind of cooperative game, ensuring that nobody is excluded or feels excluded.

Unfortunately, all the details of how the game works are in appendices that I can’t find online! I can believe that adding a narrative to the biochemistry of the cell would help with student engagement, I would just wonder if the investment of student time in a game like this is effective enough.

Penis goes in, penis goes out. You can’t explain that!

Bill O’Reilly is god’s puppet — he isn’t even responsible for his own actions. He settled a sexual harassment suit for $32 million, and he’s mad at god for making him…do something. It’s not clear what.

You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.

…

If they could literally kill me, they would, we didn’t kill him, so we’ve got to kill him again.

If I die tomorrow and I get an opportunity, I’ll say, ‘Why’d you guys work me over like that? Didn’t [you] know my children were going to be punished? And they’re innocent.’ But then I think about people who have it much, much rougher than me. And you know, I’m a big mouth. I’m a target. They’re not targets.

So they came back with another bunch of garbage. I talked to them this time just to see the devil that I was dealing with. And I truly believe that these people at the New York Times are out to hurt people with whom they disagree. They don’t want me in the marketplace. That’s what this is all about.

So he’s mad at god, and wishes “stuff” didn’t happen. What stuff? That he harassed women? Or that the NY Times exposed that he harassed women? That he harassed Lis Wiehl, or that the case against him was so strong he had to cough up $32 million? Is he acknowledging that he is guilty, when he makes the point that his children are innocent? Is it god who makes his children declare that they don’t want to live with him anymore?

Who are the “you guys” he’s blaming for working him over? Since he’s going to be meeting them after he dies, I assume he means the administration in heaven. Or is he talking about the ghosts of NY Times reporters and editors? Wouldn’t that imply he’s going to meet them in hell?

The only thing we can definitely extract from that mess of a statement is that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t consider himself accountable for his own behavior, and is reduced to blaming god. I suggest that the only possible recourse he has now is to sue his god. He’s got deep pockets, he ought to be able to get a substantial settlement out of it.

The Bog that Ate Brainerd

Just wait until it gains a primitive sentience and ambulatory appendages. A giant bog has come adrift and is wandering about demolishing docks in a Minnesota lake. It’s so big it has trees growing on it.

We could also wait for The Blob solution: winter will be here soon and will lock it down in a cage of ice. Except that might be the final incentive it needs to break free of its aquatic limitations and rampage across the prairie. We’ll keep you alerted, but in case Pharyngula suddenly goes silent, it may be because I’m imbedded in a slimy matrix of muck and cattail roots and algae.