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!

Episode CCCXLV: Nerds, geeks, dweebs

I’m about to depart for #cvg2012, the CONvergence con, where I shall spend a long, exhausting weekend with My People: the weirdos, the science nerds, the kids who were too smart to try out for the football team, the laughing accepting tolerant folks who don’t have to conform to the comfortable median. It shall be fun. It will almost certainly be distracting — here’s my schedule of the panels I’ll be on, and there will be others I’ll be attending — so this might be a slow weekend for the blog. Sorry, I’ll be busy.

You could always come on out to the con yourself — we’re partying all night long with the Skepchicks.

(Episode CCCXLIV: Just for the girls.)

We told him to do that

Ian Cromwell has some fun with the mythology outsiders have about Freethoughtblogs — did you know it’s a radical feminist hive mind here? I have to say, whenever I see someone talk about “radical feminist” unironically, I have the same frisson of rising ridicule I get when I see them babble about “militant atheist”.

By the way, despite all the furor lately (or because of it), I’m getting a number of requests from people wanting to join Freethoughtblogs, and asking how to do it. It’s not easy, especially right now.

We have a vaguely defined limit on how many blogs we want to take on. I think the major limitation is that right now, Ed Brayton has all the administrative duties, and we don’t want to break him. We’re getting close to what he can handle already.

Up to this point, we’ve been rather casual about it all — the bloggers discuss it, every once in a while someone emerges from those discussions as really good, and we send an invite. It’s worked exceptionally well so far, and I think we’ve got a great collection of people here, but it is going to have a significant failure rate, as we’ve recently discovered. We’re in the process of tightening up our procedure right now. That means we’re a closed shop for a little while, until we’ve resolved everything.

We don’t and won’t have an admissions boss — no one will have unilateral say on who gets in. We have an admissions committee to do preliminary review, but I’m not on it (and I won’t tell you who is), so there’s no point to sucking up to me. Again, it’s a consensus thing.

So don’t ask us, we’ll ask you is really the answer.

Your best strategy: write a really good blog. Write well. Write consistently. Talk about subjects the FtB bloggers are interested in. But of course, if you can do all that, you don’t need to be on FtB.

Also, did I ever tell you that early in my science career I was a surgical assistant, and my main job was carving into animals’ skulls with dental drills and using a stereotaxic to insert probes and cannulae that I’d then fix into place permanently with great globs of dental acrylic? Check our bloggers heads for little lumps of pink plastic with wires dangling out.