One of the blogs here, New Frontier, is experimental: we bring in people who want to try their hand at this bloggery thing, and put them in that group blog, and give them an opportunity to see if it all works out for them. It’s a way to try out people who may not have much of a track record yet, but look promising.
Those of you who’ve been following the prolific Siobhan on that blog will be pleased to know they’ve been bumped up to their own independent blog: check out Against the Grain.
Today has been blog maintenance day. I’ve been tidying up some things behind the scenes here at FtB, and I’m also almost done with a chore over on ScienceBlogs. Some of you who’ve been around for a while know that 5 years ago, National Geographic took over the management of Sb (it’s one of the things that prompted Ed Brayton and I to move out, since they were going to have some new policies), and one of the first things they did was update the blogs there to WordPress.
In my case, they botched it. My site was so huge and full of comments that their scripts weren’t able to cope, and while they got my posts updated, mostly, they butchered the comments: an unknown number of comments were outright lost (I estimate somewhere around half a million to a million; don’t be surprised, we’re approaching a million comments on FtB Pharyngula soon), and another 750,000 were erroneously flagged as spam, and hidden away in the spam queue. Easy to handle, right? Just approve all those mistakenly filtered comments, and voila! Done!
Except…I don’t have direct access to the database, so I can’t just charge in and approve all those records through MySQL. No, I have to do it through the WordPress interface, which is limited to doing 250 comments at a time. It’s 3 clicks of the mouse to approve 250 comments, but 750,000 comments? You do the math. So what I do is once or twice a week, I sit down and plod through a thousand or two comments. When I feel like it. It’s really boring, so there are long lapses where I just let it go. But today, I got it down to just 20,000 comments held up, so I was going to power through and get ’em all done at last.
But…boring. Easily distracted.
So anyway, while doing all of that stuff, I ran across this old post of mine that made me chuckle. I’m writing about this woman who has been stalking me for decades. Decades, I tell you! Since 1957! It’s amazing how much similarity there has been in our lives. And then I realized that post was written ten years ago…and she’s still here.
Shhh. She’s in the next room. Don’t make a noise or she might notice. My knee is acting up, or I’d try to sneak out and make a run for it. Maybe you can get away for me and come back with help.
She just went into the kitchen. There are knives there. I’m so afraid.
I just thought I’d mention that Convergence is coming up — I’ll be there the whole weekend and will be having a grand time. We usually go with the whole family, but this year we’re scattered and we’re just coming off an expensive reunion/wedding in Korea, so it’ll just be me and my son Alaric.
I’ve also just now learned that there will be another NerdCon in October. I went to the one last fall, and it was excellent — a very writerly sort of event, all about getting those creative juices bubbling. I’ll probably go to that, too.
If you see me, say hello! I’m always happy to meet you all.
As long as I’m planning ahead, how could I forget to mention Skepticon in November?
Right here on FtB! If you’re looking for something to cleanse the palate after this mess, I recommend…
Nathan Hevenstone on White Supremacy and Violence.
ThoughtsOfCrys on how anti-scientific opposition to GMOs is actually an aspect of privilege.
Siggy explains how not every decision benefits from skeptical rationalization.
Siobhan rakes religious sex education over the coals.
The Digital Cuttlefish has a poem about the Australian census (are you surprised?). Australians, speak your conscience about religion!
There. Much better.
Do you know what Obama is going to do as he leaves office?
The Viacom, CIA-run weapons system is activating the Beyoncés and all the rest of the folks to say, ‘Go out and kill the pigs.’
That sounds awesome. It’s so awesome, I confess that my brain locked up solid for a moment as I imagined it. So Obama has an army of Beyoncés? Please let them loose.
Unfortunately, this wonderful prediction comes from Alex Jones, so you know exactly how credible it is.
Yesterday, we saw this big green area, Apsan Park, on the map, and it was in walking distance…so we started walking. And then we discovered that the flat oval on the map was actually a mountain. A mountain in the middle of the city. So we gave up and went back to our hotel.
But today, we got a cab and got driven up to the cable car that takes you to the top, so that’s what we did.
And DJ Grothe does not. The Reason Rally has a published Code of Conduct, and apparently a few bad apples are protesting that they won’t attend because they don’t want their freedom to harass limited. Dave does a very good job of explaining what they do and don’t do, and why they are reasonable. Don’t read the comments, though. So many people are getting their asses in a wringer because they hate being told that they don’t get to do whatever they want at a public event.
In vaguely related news, Ammon Bundy is planning to sue Multnomah County for violating his right to bear arms in prison.
Stupid people who don’t understand that living among other people compromises your right to have tantrums over your privileges are everywhere.
We arrived in Daegu at about 3am last night. We were exhausted, but we had to go out for a meal — I don’t know what you call a 3am meal, though. Dinfast? So we popped into a little all night restaurant, took off our shoes, and sat on mats, and ordered something mysterious off a menu in Korean from a woman who only spoke Korean. It turned out to be what can only be called pig spine soup. There was a big bowl, with cabbage and a savory soup, and big lumpy bones, which were vertebrae nicely sawed in half on the saggital plane. Not vegetarian. Oh, well. So we picked off little slivers of meat off the bones with chopsticks and spoons. I also ate the spinal cord, which was a first for a guy who studied spinal cords for so many years. It was tasty. So was the kimchee and pickled vegetables on the side.
Then we got a cheap hotel–25,000 Korean won per night, which was nothing, since once we’d done the currency exchange at the airport, we were millionaires. Big bonus, too–when we checked in, they gave us a bag of special items for our stay, which included condoms. Score! I don’t think we are the usual kinds of customers here.
We did a little sight seeing in Daegu today, but not much, because once we finally checked into the hotel, we slept until 2 in the afternoon.
That’s my excitement so far. We’re talking about going up some nearby mountain or hitting some museums in the next few days, so stay tuned for more thrilling adventures.
