I’ve been grading. Grading grading grading. I’ve been crankily making illegible red scrawls with lots of exclamation points on lab reports, and it’s been a stressful couple of days. The pile is cleared now, though, but much as it would be appropriate to immediately down a couple of pints of whisky, I still have a lecture to give, and two lab sections to crack a whip over, before I am free of immediate obligations.

I have brilliantly managed to clear the deck before I fly off to Skepticon tomorrow, at least. And I shall return these bloodily reddened reports to the students today, and they will spend their weekend making corrections while I mingle happily with a crowd of interesting people for a few days.

And then they get their revenge when I return and they re-inflict their papers on me next week for re-grading. But they will be perfect papers then, after all of my suggestions/demands are implemented, and instead of red slashes I’ll be drawing little green happy faces on their papers, and we shall all be full of joy and contentment.

Maybe I should stock up on heart and smiley face stickers for the next round. We can still give those out in college, right?

I haven’t done one of these in a while, largely because a) that Caturday nonsense has faded, and b) everyone now knows that cats are both wicked and full of derp, so it’s redundant. But this morning I stumbled across a fine collection of photos of cats the slaves to toxoplasmosis won’t enjoy, so I thought I’d share an example.

I laughed and laughed. I thought about showing it to our cat, but I was afraid I’d get clawed.

Don’t tell our cat I mentioned this. Please don’t. Help us. She’s in our house right now. Gotta go. She’s watching me.

My students are turning in lab reports later today. That means…I’ll have to read them all, critically. Imagine how much fun I’m going to have tomorrow! No, don’t, I don’t want you to start crying.

And I just realized that I haven’t even started preparing my talk for Skepticon, and I’ll be there in lovely Springfield, Missouri at this time next week.. Wait, no, I always wait until the last minute to throw that together, so no problem. I’ll just do it on the flight.

No! Hey! I don’t have to give a talk at all this year — I’ll probably finish that Ann Leckie novel on the flight. And then I’ll just relax with the happy enthusiastic people attending the conference, and I’ll be one of them! I expect to see you there, and we’ll spend long days and late nights talking pleasantly together. And I’ll have all the lab reports graded, and we can heal all the scars together.

Remember when Rupert Murdoch and 21st Century Fox bought National Geographic and we all gasped in horror and thought, “Well, there goes a distinguished brand,” and they went, “No, no, it’s all good, this infusion of cash will give us stability,” and we all gave them the suspicious side-eye and said we’ll wait and see? Remember that? I wouldn’t want you to have forgotten, since the latest news from National Geographic is all…

Employees across the National Geographic Society came into work Tuesday knowing only that they could expect “information about your employment status,” based on a vague email they had received from the organization’s president on Monday. By late morning, dozens of them had been laid off, including photo editors, an online science news writer, members of the TV channels, members of the digital NG Kids team, members of the legal team, administrative employees, and one higher-up position in graphics, multiple people who work there told me. It’s not yet clear how many layoffs there will be in total.

And they’re all biggest layoff in NatGeo’s history…

The National Geographic Society of Washington will lay off about 180 of its 2,000-member workforce in a cost-cutting move that follows the sale of its famous magazine and other assets to a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

The reduction, the largest in the organization’s 127-year history, appears to affect almost every department of the nonprofit organization, including the magazine, which the society has published since just after its founding in 1888. It also will affect people who work for the National Geographic Channel, the most profitable part of the organization. Several people in the channel’s fact-checking department, for example, were terminated on Tuesday, employees said.

Rupert Murdoch has a different definition of stability than I do, I guess.

Oh, and do you remember the fussy prudes who declared that my presence was going to poison the dignified reputation of NatGeo? I am amused.

No, wait, I am horrified.

Freethoughtblogs has an email address dedicated to receiving your technical complaints…like, for instance, the annoying outage that occurred earlier today, for several hours. It is also a destination for mythical, cave-dwelling beings depicted in folklore as either a giant or a dwarf, typically having a very ugly appearance, and we also get complaints that are not technical in nature, and therefore not fixable by our usual procedure of kicking the box, or jiggling the wires, or flipping it off and on, or other such arcane rituals of the informational technologists who control our lives. And those non-technical problems fall into my domain.

Here, for example, is a Technical Complaint™ transmitted to us today by one Elliott.

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It’s odd…we have rather limited choices for dining out here in Morris, but over the last few months or year we’ve been avoiding our local Subway. Nothing against the place, good service, familiar food, etc., but there’s just been something…off.

Maybe it’s Jared Fogle’s fault.

[Read more…]

And punishment is not the cure. This video summarizes the problems in our current war on drugs.

One quibble: near the end, it seems to imply that online social interactions aren’t real, and are even addictive substitutes for the real thing — we’re supposed to get together with our friends physically. I have to disagree: you can form good relationships online, and having a conversation in a chat room can be richer and more productive than going to a bar or a bowling alley, for many of us.

A frankenquote is a chimeric monster: you take two separate quotes from someone, and then you stitch them together with an ellipsis, and presto, you can make someone say all kinds of strange things. My favorite example of all time was found by John Lynch, in a fulsome review of some creationist tripe from the Discovery Institute by a theologian named Edward Oakes. It holds some kind of record.

In making his case, Oakes also states that

Darwin actually, if unwittingly, promulgated the charter for all later social Darwinists: “Let the strongest live and the weakest die… . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”

Astute readers may recognize the latter part of the quote comes from the final paragraph of Origin (Chapter XIV). The earlier part comes from chapter VII (‘Instinct’). Yes, folks. Oakes has constructed a quote from two statements seven chapters apart, possibly the longest ellipsis known to scholarship.

Creationists are very fond of frankenquotes. I’ve spotted a few, including one from Luskin where the ellipsis spanned -36 pages. Sometimes they put the words together so seamlessly that they don’t even bother to include the ellipsis.

And now I learn that the MRAs have adopted the habit.

You know, you’re really in trouble when you’re cribbing your rhetorical style from dishonest creationists.