I’m thinking Friday night, about 8pm Central time, UTC-5 hours (here’s a time calculator). Subject: let’s figure that out, leave comments here. Who: anyone who wants to join. Send me your google+ name so I can add you to the invite list.

I think it might be fun to talk about the recent spanking Carl Zimmer gave the Discovery Institute, among other things…

Digital Cuttlefish had to remind me that FtB has been running for about a year. And in that brief span we have drawn out so much venom and hatred…I’m rather proud. Success!

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.

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.