Regular commenter Ed Darrell has started a weblog of his own now, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, dedicated to knowing US History. And really, don’t you want to learn the story behind the name?
That’s some kinky photo Revere has put up—and he’s looking for captions. Most of mine were not fit for a Family Blog, but I’m sure you can do better.
Oh, and if brain teasers are more your thing, World’s Fair has a mysterious puzzle to solve.
Via Deep Sea News, here is a site for the BP Kongsberg Underwater Image Competition 2006: a whole collection of underwater images. It’s beautiful!
I posted a little sample of my creationist junkmail yesterday, and I’ve finally figured something out. The first mailing said, “Original Theory By Perry Marshall, Edited in part by D. Donohew”—what that meant was that D. Donohew had found this crap by Perry Marshall on the web, and was simply doing a copy&paste and sending it to me. How did I figure this out? Because Mr Donohew is now regularly sending me crap that he has written himself. You may be surprised to learn, given that that first email was a pile of spluttering nonsense, that Mr Marshall is a paragon of lucidity and insight compared to his plagiarist.
There have been these annoying glitches in TypeKey comment management in the past, and the source of the problem is inconsistency in how the different science blogs require valid email addresses in your comments. We’re about to enforce a uniform standard across all the science blogs—you will all be required to use a valid email address, although I don’t think it will be displayed—and that might cause a few hiccups here, at first. Give it a chance and it will all shake out, I hope.
While I’m announcing a few carnivals, I’ll remind all of you readers in West Central Minnesota that there will be a Drinking Liberally tonight at 6:00, in Old #1 on Atlantic Avenue in Morris.
Otherwise, for those of you trapped in the virtual world…
Martin Rundkvist has some complaints about the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, specifically about their staff and contributors.
They’re all men, and their mean age appears to be about 55. This is perhaps not surprising given the age and gender of the editor-in-chief.
Now wait a minute—being in your 40s and 50s and 60s is no problem! It’s actually a very sensible age. The lack of female input is a serious shortcoming, but let’s not give people grief for their commendable longevity and long-term activism. (Also, Martin seems to have missed that young whippersnapper, Chris Mooney, who has a column in the magazine.)
The problem isn’t old people: it’s the lack of diversity. When I see the list Martin puts up, what I see is a group in trouble, one that has failed to extend its reach beyond the fairly narrow circle of its founders, and one that is going to fade away as that group dies off. As he notes, it also means the magazine acquires an old-fashioned tone that is going to fail to bring in new blood.
He recommends Skeptic magazine, to which I also subscribe, and which definitely tries much, much harder to extend its reach—it has a whole section, the Junior Skeptic, specifically for kids. My one complaint about it is similar to the one about SI, though: sometimes there isn’t enough diversity, because there’s too damn much Michael Shermer. Nothing personal against the guy, but sometimes it does seem like it’s a glossy magazine dedicated to showcasing Shermer…and that also has perils for long-term viability.
I knew someone would eventually be brave enough to try and support Coulter’s “science” in Godless…wouldn’t you know, though, that it would be a columnist on the disturbingly unhinged RenewAmerica site, Wes Vernon, the fellow whose disturbingly asymmetric visage you see here. It doesn’t quite do the job, I’m afraid.
Dave Thomas explains Genetic Algorithms and demonstrates that, as usual, the Intelligent Design bigwigs don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
