This one was in a London pub…the jealousy, it burns.

Martin is in a protracted Wikipedia battle with a cult, Falun Gong, that is trying to erase unpleasant aspects of their ideology from the record. I know there are a few dedicated Wikipedians aroung these parts, so you might want to help him out.

Important news!

• Daylight Saving TIme begins at 2am on Sunday, 8 March. Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour.

• You better set those clocks correctly so you can catch Atheists Talk radio at 9am. This week, it’s interviews with some of the bigwigs of American Atheists.

• Yeah, it’s my birthday on Sunday. I’ll be of the age that means I have three 17 year olds yammering at each other in my cranium, and I’m going to celebrate it with a quiet day spent getting some writing done.

Nerds everywhere will be grieving: Gary Gygax has died. I haven’t played the game in a long time, but I had a lot of fun with it in my undergraduate years — if they haven’t succumbed to mold and decay, I have the original manuals somewhere down in my basement. I also had a set of miniatures, but those definitely got battered into shapelessness by my kids playing with them (but I win in the end, since my oldest son left a huge collection of his fancy miniatures at my house. Maybe I won’t give them back.) My thanks to Gygax and his colleague Dave Arneson for some good old fun times with my geeky pals.

One weird thing: it looks like a lot of Gygax’s fans think he’s just gone on to a new fantasy game — which is strange. Most of the role-players I know were good about telling the difference between the fantasy world and the real world, and the real world doesn’t include deities.

I feel like I missed so much. MAJeff organized a gathering of Pharyngula readers, and it sounds like it was great fun, as a group of like-minded godless skeptics and rationalists used my web site as a mere pretext to justify meeting to drink bar and talk.

I’m superfluous to the whole affair, which is a little strange, but also reassuring. It’s the opposite of the L. Ron Hubbard effect — what if you started a movement that wasn’t a religion? You wouldn’t get rich, you wouldn’t get worshipped, you wouldn’t even be personally necessary, and what you’d have instead is a whole lot of people thinking for themselves. Helping to catalyze freethought isn’t going to get me a yacht with a flock of slave bimbettes, but at least it also won’t lead to drug addiction, delusions of grandeur, criminal behavior, paranoia, poor hygiene, and dying in a soiled bed doped to the gills on psychiatric drugs and worried that the clams were going to eat me. Cool.

You want pictures? You can have pictures. And more pictures.

Now go organize your own.

The two most amusing explanations for why we have leap years that I’ve heard came from creationists:

1. Those scientists can’t even measure the length of the year accurately! They have to keep fudging their numbers every few years to make everything add up, so why should I trust them?

2. We have leap years because the earth is slowing down in its orbit, which proves that the earth can’t be old — a million years ago the earth would have been whirling around the sun so fast it would have flown out of orbit!

Phil’s detailed explanation isn’t quite as funny. My simple answer: the earth goes around the sun in 365 days plus a fraction. We carry the fraction each year until it adds up to one, and then we add a day to the year. We know with great precision how long a day is and how long a year is, and the adjustment is not to “fudge” the numbers, and we also know the rate at which both the day length is changing and the orbit is changing, and those numbers are miniscule and are not the reasons we have leap years.

But perhaps some of our Korean readers will appreciate it. All I know is that I was interviewed for an article on the Han/Warda paper, and that’s my face in the Korean news.

In response to your efforts to turn Pharyngula’s domination of the virtual scienceblog world into a real world conquest, John Wilkins has suggested another strategy for organizing meetups: Facebook. There is a Scienceblogs Facebook group, which could be a useful tool for finding people in your region. There is also a Pharyngula Facebook group and a PZ Myers for World President Facebook group (shouldn’t that be “PZ Myers for Galactic Overlord”?)

So there we go, another mechanism for finding each other.

What? Today was Roy Chapman Andrews’ birthday! I almost missed it, but I shall raise a cup of tea to one of my heroes.

It’s all about that goofy Abunga bookstore nonsense — I love how a couple of paragraphs and a few hundred comments can make the zealots swoon.

There are lots of comments there, too, most seem to either dislike Abunga’s model, or are defending it on false pretenses: “we MUST maintain the integrity of our free enterprise system”!!! It seems to me that having a swarm of people using their rating system exactly as they designed it is perfectly fair and a fine example of free enterprise in action.