Well, shit.
An old pal from the days of talk.origins, and also formerly of the NCSE, Skip Evans, has died. He’s been active in the freethought community in Madison, Wisconsin, and now I really regret not looking him up last time I was out that way.
Skip was notorious for getting his hands on Kent Hovind’s Ph.D. dissertation. That’s the kind of thing he was good at: tearing up the creationists and leaving us all laughing.
It always amazes me, but here you go: you’re going to have to plunk down $8 to see me talk science in Washington DC on 18 August. At least I’m really, really cheap.
I’m going to be doing a bit of traveling again starting in August. I’ll be in Washington DC on the 18th, to do a fundraiser lunch for CFI-DC, and I’ll also be doing a talk later that afternoon. The talk title is “Life is Chemistry“, and I’ll be explaining why material causes are sufficient to explain this phenomenon we call life — no ghosts, spirits, souls, or magic Frankensteins in the sky to make it all happen.
Sign up for tickets now! Last time I was there they sold out.
You may remember Rieux, indefatiguable quality poster who wrote many good things here before getting overwhelmed by the volume of comments, and who more often now comments on various other blogs around these parts? He was at the CONvergence party this weekend, and he kept fretting that he ought to get home to his greatly pregnant wife, and I kept telling him things like ‘nah, she’s probably just sleeping, stay longer’ and ‘it’s your first, she’ll probably have a late delivery anyway,’ and I kept him around ’til 1 am. I was a cavalier jerk.
Well, now I learn that after the late night carousing, when he was probably all worn out, of course his wife went into labor the next day and delivered a robustly healthy baby boy. Now I feel guilty. Although probably with the adrenaline and the terror and the yelling, he probably didn’t fall asleep during his wife’s labor, so maybe it was OK in the end.
My old one was getting flaky and unreliable, but now I have a brand new machine that’s faster and slicker and more powerful, so I can type faster! I’ll start working like mad once it’s done syncing and rearranging everything far, far away from where I’m used to finding it. It may be a little while.
Lot of dead air here lately, sorry about that. It’s a combination of factors: my laptop is dying (replacement has been ordered) and is no longer reliable, especially not for traveling…so it’s locked down in my office and confined to only light duties. But that means I’m away from home without a fully functional blogging computer. My work flow is disrupted! But I’ll be going home today.
Also, I was ambitious: I’ve done 11 panels at CONvergence so far (one more this afternoon), and co-hosted the Freethoughtblogs party, 8pm-1am, every night — actually, most of the work there has been done by Mary, who’s going to collapse once we get home, I think. My voice is gone, fried and frazzled, which will make this last session an ordeal. I think I’ll just point to the other people and have them do all the work, while I nap.
Anyway, Pharyngula will be back to normal by Monday. I hope. I think it depends on me getting my brain back on track. Fortunately I don’t need to talk to blog.
I’m mentioned in a newspaper, in a way that isn’t likely to send a pitchfork- and torch-wielding mob lurching in my direction. I don’t know if I like it; it’s not as exciting.
I am doubly sad: Richard Harter has died, and most of the readers here now probably never heard of him. He was a dry wit who frequented talk.origins on usenet with brilliant comments; he ought to have been recognized as one of the early bloggers for his idiosyncratic and engrossing web page, Richard Harter’s World, which has been regularly and frequently updated since 1996.
It’s an eclectic page — Harter just seems to have manually linked in lots and lots of web pages of arbitrary stuff; humor, history, science, correspondence, computer science, science fiction, whatever struck his fancy. Go ahead and get sucked into it — it’s about as dangerous as TVTropes that way.
Perhaps even more appropriately, you can read about Harter on talk.origins.
There is no story to this story. I spent a long day driving yesterday, and my mind wandered, and I’m writing it down, because I can. That’s all, don’t expect anything more. It’s totally pointless.
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I’ve been doing the tourist thing this morning, and I bought a hat. I thought it would make me look more like the natives.
Except that it’s warm and sunny, and Icelanders don’t look like madmen. Rats, foiled again.
