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.

[Read more…]

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.

I’m taking Dr Rubidium’s advice: to avoid zombie attacks, wear a cologne that smells like rotting people. She recommends a mix of putrescine, cadaverine, skatole, and dimethyl trisulfide, which sounds delightful.

Unfortunately, lacking easy access to those compounds, I’m dousing myself with Axe Body Spray instead. Same thing, right, or close enough.

If you want candy, don’t come to our house tonight — we’re following the recommendations of the Teal Pumpkin Project and are handing out glowsticks, instead. Not only do we not have to worry about child allergies, but we won’t have a house full of tempting candy. It’s also cheap: glow stick bracelets are less then ten cents each, so we’ll give out a bunch.

Otherwise, we’re celebrating by staying home and maybe getting a scary movie on netflix.

P.S. Daylight savings time ends tonight, so don’t forget to set your clocks back.

I’ve been increasing my daily penance of exercise by a considerable amount, and am now spending an hour or more a day making my brain send electrical impulses to large muscle groups generating somewhat rhythmic motions. This is not fun. I’m only doing it because the technology has not yet arrived to allow me to discard the decrepit husk of flesh supporting me, and place my brain in a vat with a nerve bundle connected directly to the internet. So it goes.

Anyway, what I’ve been doing to make it tolerable is hook my auditory nerve, via a sensory transduction interface made of meat, to a device that feeds my brain podcasts, downloaded off the internet. I know, you peons who have been chained to long commutes in a vehicle are already totally familiar with this medium, but my commute is about one minute long, and involves crossing the street. So until now I haven’t had much opportunity to soak in soundwaves long enough to get past the introductory title, but that’s changed.

Give me ideas! I’ve been listening to Welcome to Night Vale, which is nice, because here in Minnesota we’ve long been habituated to this form of entertainment by Prairie Home Companion, but this is like PHC as written by HP Lovecraft with a heart transplant from a gay socialist.

Need more. Light, weird, entertaining is best — heavy, too distracting stuff might get me run over by the massive farm equipment on our roads. Also, soon enough I’ll be bundled in layers and freezing in icy blizzards while walking, so it’s got to be amusing enough to motivate me to brave the winters.