Navy, you’ve got a nasty little worm in the works

I rarely do this, but we’ve got a troll who deserves an outing. wordplague has been plaguing this thread — 62 comments in 10 hours! — claiming to be a graduate student somewhere. He’s being over-the-top misogynistic, making rape jokes, bragging about making rape threats, making death and mutilation threats, and man, he really, really hates his advisor, who is a woman, working in a lab that uses lasers and liquid nitrogen. If I knew who he was, I’d be calling his advisor right now to warn her she’s got a time-bomb in her lab.

But I don’t know who he is. So I’m just going to release his IP address. All of his comments come from a couple of gateways at bremerton.nmci.navy.mil. I don’t know what research facilities they have in Bremerton — I know of the Bremerton Naval Hospital — but he may just be lying to us all. If any authorities at the naval institutions in Bremerton or NMCI want my assistance tracking down the creep, I’ll gladly forward the stuff I’ve got to them. He needs help.

What happened to the “Why I am an atheist” series?

Nothing! It’s still going on, I’m still getting submissions (and you can send them to me still), and I’ve still got a backlog of hundreds.

It vanished for a while this week because I got a shiny new computer, and my backup restored everything but my old email messages…which is just as well, because my mail is broken and overwhelmed and messed up, and I just archived everything into a big messy tarball, and am setting it aside. I’m trying out a new procedure for handling and sorting mail on my new machine, which will eventually be less prone to grindingly slow struggles to manage a huge list whenever I open my inbox, but right now is new and incomprehensible territory, and has me hopelessly confused. I will learn it, though. Just give me time.

That means that right now email is total chaos, and I’m struggling with it. It also means that I had to go back and extract essentials, like the WIAAA stuff, from the archived mess on the old computer, and get it over to the new one, which is why there has been a little hiatus. All is well now, though, and the series will resume every day.

Meanwhile, I’ve probably got a few weeks of daily cussing at my email ahead of me.

Another Pharyngula podcast this weekend?

You tell me, and give me a few ideas for subjects you’d like to hear discussed. And most importantly, volunteer to join in! It works much better if I prearrange a group of participants.

Here is what we’re going to do. The podcast begins at 11:00am Central time on Saturday (a little later, to be kinder to the West coast). We’ll have two topics: this evo psych article about menstruation and shopping, and this article about how your brain is faulty. We’ll give a half hour to each.

If you want to join in, here’s what you must do:

  • You must have a Google+ account.You’re also going to have to email your Google+ name to me.

  • You should have a headset. Look at the past podcasts; if you don’t have a headset and you start clickety-clacking on your keyboard, it’s picked up and gets annoying fast.

  • You should read the articles at those links. If you don’t, why are you wasting our time? Also, I have a pdf of the peer-reviewed, published evo-psych paper…if you haven’t even tried to read that, we’ll be a little pissy with you (if you’re having problems following the article, try anyway — we’ll go over it.)

  • You MUST send me an email by Friday confirming your attendance, so I can put you on the invite list. Include your Google+ name. I’ll also mail you the evo psych pdf back. IMPORTANT: the email MUST have the subject “PODCAST CONFIRMATION”. Why? Because I’m switching over to a new computer and a new method for filtering email, and it’s a total mess right now. I’m setting up filters to catch that subject, and ignoring that rule might get your mail totally lost.

All clear? See you Saturday morning!