Category: Blogosphere

Here’s the test which everyone’s linking to. Me? I guess I’m right brained. I see her turning clockwise, and I can’t reverse it. Oh, wait: I just tried the technique that Sully posted, and she flipped to anticlockwise, and now it’s stuck that way. Aargh!

I just joined the group “People who don’t sleep enough because they stay up late for no reason“. ‘Nuff said.

Quiz time:

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock – you’re the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

(h/t to the Barefoot Bum)

I seem to be a “Benevolent Inventor”. Sounds good to me…

Picture this.
You’re a moderately successful businessman, with an amateur interest in evo-devo. One day you dream up a weird theory about how evo-devo works: it’s all to do with geometry, specifically patterns of toroids. Now this is a strange idea, but fortunately it’s one can than be easily tested: all we have to do is point a microscope at developing organisms and compare what we see with the strange “balloon creatures” that your theory predicts. Evidence. Good stuff, that. And the results are not what you hoped for.
But as I said, you’re a successful businessman. You have a little money to play around with. And so, undaunted, you assemble a book to explain your theory. You don’t have much original material to work with, so you include photocopies of unrelated articles by various authors, and you pad it out to 160 pages. You self-publish this puppy, and pretty soon it shows up on Amazon.com priced at $60. At this point, a real scientist who specializes in this stuff finds your book, reads it, and publishes a detailed review which exposes your theory for the nonsense that it is.
So what do you do next? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You sue the reviewer for FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS, for “Assault, Libel, and Slander”.
Sadly, this farce is actually playing out right now. The crackpot amateur scientist is one Stuart Pivar, and the reviewer is our very own PZ Myers, a.k.a. Pharyngula. Inevitably, the blogosphere is all over this, here, here and here. If there’s any justice, Pivar will lose his shirt over this.
UPDATE: Here’s the ultimate take-down from a lawyer, Peter Irons. Pivar’s attorney may wish to draft a letter of apology for wasting the court’s time…

Blogthings – Are You a Feminist?:

***You Are 98% Feminist***
You are a total feminist. This doesn’t mean you’re a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).
You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It’s a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Not sure where the 2% went, but never mind.

For many years I’ve used Ranchero‘s NetNewsWire to keep up with all of the RSS feeds that I keep track of. It’s been a rock-solid application, and I’ve got no complaints.
However, when I headed out on this business trip with my new MacBook, I had a problem. For various reasons, I didn’t want to install any non-work applications, but I still wanted to be able to keep up with my feeds. So before I left, I exported the OPL subscriptions file from NetNewsWire and uploaded it to Google Reader. I’ve used this for the last week, and I don’t think I’m going to be going back. I’ve found Reader more convenient than NetNewsWire: easier to reorganize stuff, easier to scan and catch up with big feeds (like HuffPo and Boing-Boing), easier to integrate into my web-based workflow. (I have a toolbar folder called “Daily” which I open in tabs first thing every morning; I work through the tabs, closing them one by one, and at the end I have Google Reader loaded and ready to go.)
So thanks for years of service, NetNewsWire. But I’m moving on.

A few minutes ago, I checked in with the BBC Sports website to see how the match between Moya and Henman was going. Quoth the commentator:

Moya 11-11 Henman
And so the epic goes on, now to Mahabharata lengths. This set alone has been going on for over an hour and a half. Moya holds to 15 with two sensational cross-court forehands.

“Mahabharata”? Qu’est-ce que c’est? And I checked the source:

The Mahābhārata… is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India… With more than 74,000 verses… and some 1.8 million words in total, it is one of the longest epic poems in the world.

And how comprehensive is it?

With its depth and magnitude, the Mahabharata’s scope is best summarized by one quotation from the beginning of its first parva (section): “What is found here, may be found elsewhere. What is not found here, will not be found elsewhere.”

Hmmm. That sounds like the Wikipedia mission statement – or perhaps Jeff‘s ambition for the Amazon.com catalog! In any case, it’s an impressive citation from a sportscaster…

Like many bloggers, I log in to the admin pages of geoffarnold.com every day to see what housekeeping tasks need to be done. The section that generally needs my attention is Comments: moderating comments from new visitors, and checking the spam catcher to make sure that there aren’t any false-positives. In common with most WordPress users, I rely on a distributed spam detection system called Akismet, which does a really good job: I’ve only had a couple of legitimate comments flagged as spam.
Today I skimmed the latest batch of spam, confirmed that they were all correctly classified, and hit the delete button. Akismet responded:

Just to put that in perspective, my blog has received 2,394 legitimate comments, a third of which pre-date my use of WordPress and Akismet. ((I started this blog in December 2003, and switched to WordPress in December 2005.)) And to put that in perspective, here’s Akismet’s big picture…
Early blogging software didn’t include any kind of defence mechanisms, of course, and we’re still living with the consequences. Quite often I find that a web search will take me to an entry in an abandoned blog. ((And sometimes not even abandoned blogs! A few minutes ago I found myself re-reading Steve Yegge’s rant about the Next Big Language, which is still attracting comments four months after he wrote it, and I noticed a number of blogspam comments. I guess Blogspot doesn’t use Akismet.)) The entry may have attracted a couple of comments when it was posted, but since then there have been dozens (even hundreds) of spam comments attached. The search engine spiders are presumably smart enough to avoid the spam, but it keeps on coming. So if you used to run a blog that you’ve since abandoned, do us all a favour by shutting off comments. Think of it as turning off the gas and water in a derelict house: do it for the neighbours!