Category Archives: Housekeeping

You may have noticed that the posting lately has been reduced mainly to quick links and reposts. I’ve been busy (in a good way). I will try to produce something longer soon. The review of The God Delusion is forming in my mind and just needs to be spilled onto the virtual paper – perhaps some time next week. And a few more posts are in a similar semi-baked state. Soon.
In the meantime, if you have a couple of bucks go see Grrrl and hit her PayPal button. I am broke, but she is more broke and in much more dire situation and if you can help her, please do.

My Bloglines feeds are functioning again, so it’s time for me to start updating my blogroll, as the one linked on the sidebar is woefully out of date. What I am going to do is post here the blogs I have, one letter at the time, more-or-less one letter a day or whatever time I manage to find to do this.
Today, here are the blogs I subscribe to that have titles that begin with numbers (or symbols):
0xDE
10000 birds
11D
2 cents worth
2 sides 2 ron
3 Bulls
3 quarks daily
5/17
511
90% True
What I want you to do (after checking the blogs I link to) is give me links to other blogs starting with the same letter (or, today only, numbers and symbols) that I have missed so I can take a look and consider for inclusion. And it’s fine if you are days, weeks or months late – I get comment notifications, so this can work indefinitely into the future.
Then, once I have assembled blogs starting with the first couple of letters of the alphabet, I’ll try to remember how to place the new blogroll up top, behind one of those cute little grey buttons right underneath the banner. Afterwards, it will be just a matter of updating it on a regular basis. In the meantime, you can keep checking my old blogroll linked on the sidebar.

2000 comments on this blog (2002 actually). Unfortunately, I did not pay attention, so I made the round-number comment myself. So I get the prize (whatever it was).

I am not dead and gone, taken away in the middle of the night (yet). I am just working on two carnivals – Tar Heel Tavern and the Teaching Carnival, both of which will air somewhere around here at some time tomorrow.

Wow! It’s been less than three months since my move to Seed ScienceBlogs and my Sitemeter already hit 100,000.
The round-number visitor came from Oslo, Norway, a Firefox user, from Stumbleupon to see Did A Virus Make You Smart?, made three pageviews and remained 4 minutes and 13 seconds total on the last two pages.
In comparison, it took almost 16 months for Science And Politics to reach 100,000 and it has still not hit 200,000 after more than two years (the traffic there has dropped considerably but it still gets about 180 per day, mostly through Google searches).
So, I am self-congratulating myself today. Thank you all for coming and I hope to see you again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after…

Hello to my 90,000th visitor, who came in from the Culture Wars Channel, and is good at hiding wher s/he is coming from except that it is North America. Still on here right now? Say something in the comments.

Do you remember the old Five-Year Plans (‘Petoletka’) in the communist countries? Well, five years is far too long for the ADHD world of the 21st century, not to mention the hyperspeed of the Internet and the Blogosphere. So, I decided to try organizing my blogging in Five-Day Plans. What do you think of that?
First, next five days (Wednesday to Sunday), it will (almost) all politics all the time. The occasion? Guest-blogging on Echidne Of The Snakes. Yes, the Goddess herself has touched me with her bifurkated tongue! After a stint guest-blogging on Eschaton, Echidne is going on a well-deserved vacation for a week and she has lined up a very good list of guest-bloggers, including Blue Lilly, Pseudo-Adrienne, Skylanda, Hybrid and olvlzl.
So, although I have signed up for Thursday, Saturday and Sunday mornings, I may, if inspired, write a few more posts at different days/times. Every post will be cross-posted here, but I urge you to go check out Echidne’s great commenters (and get me out of trouble if I screw up) on each post!
After that, The Second Five-Day Plan (Monday through Friday) will be (almost) all clocks all the time. I will re-post almost all of the remaining Clock Tutorials from Circadiana, plus a few posts pertaining to vertebrates, then write a few more, detailing my research – at least the stuff that is already published, so you’ll know better what I did.
Of course, if something exciting happens in science, politics or whatever, I will make excursions (deviate from the plan! – don’t tell the comissar!), but for the most part I will stick to the plan. After that, I will welcome your feedback – do you like single-focus five-day plans? Did it work for me? I’l ask you again in ten days.

It’s been a very busy day (and I am teaching tomorrow morning), but I am working on Friday Weird Sex Blogging right now. Lots of pictures. It will posted later tonight….

Keyboard screwed up! Bakspace, Delete, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th key on high row do not work (q, e, t, u, and a). Does anyone know what could be wrong? (using onscreen keyboard to type this)
Update: I bought a new one and it works fine….

Many of us on SB are having problems with Movable Type today. Some of us can post OK, some can post only very short posts with no links and/or no mention of dr*gs etc. Others cannot post at all. This is a test to see if I can post anything. I’ll try to post The Synapse late tonight or early in the morning, but if that does not work I may have to postpone it until Monday when the tech-guy fixes the problem.
Also, I have not received a single comment in more than 24 hours. We have a new super-tough anti-spam system. I am afraid that it is blocking legitimate comments (and trackbacks). Please try to comment and if it does not “take” e-mail me so I know to tell the tech guy.

3 weeks
159 posts: that is 53 per week – a suit of cards with a Jocker – or roughly 7.5 posts per day! You have to click on Archives – June 2006 to see them all!
268 comments
17 trackbacks
$582.52 raised for DonorsChoose (9 of the 15 projects fully funded)
Technorati Rank: 15,376 (245 links from 135 sites), which is nice drop down from around 32millionth three weeks ago.
Visits: 46,379 (daily average 722) – according to Sitemeter, about 30% more by Google Analytics
Pageviews: 57,120 (daily average 1,101)

If you look up, just below the banner, there is a new button “Banner Art”.. My recent post about the banner is soon going to go off the page, so this is the way to make the information available at all times with just one click….

There are some excellent news from Seed overlords. They will add to our DonorsChoose educational action for science and math programs for underfunded schools. You can see the donation thermometer on the sidebar of about 20 blogs here, including mine. We are doing excellent – my readers have already donated $342.26 and other bloggers are also doing fine – we have two weeks to go.
Now Seed bosses have announced that they will match our donations, up to $10,000. So, if all the bloggers combined raise $10, 000 or more, SEED will donate an additional ten grand! You will be able to see regular updates on the drive on Adventures in Ethics and Science, including the complete list of participating bloggers. And the drawing for prizes will be on July 1st.
On a less charitable and more egotistic note, noon today marks exactly one week since the grand opening of the new SEED Scienceblogs homepage and the introduction of all the new blogs here and, how can I put it humbly, I had a really good start here. On the first day – Friday afternoon, I got 564 visits (by Sitemeter). Weekend saw an expected slump: 354 and 401 on two days starting with S. Monday brought in a nice 752. But Tuesday was a killer – a post of mine spread over Digg, Fark and Stumbleupon lists and brought in astonishing 25,986 readers – I printed out that day’s pie-chart from Google Analytics in order to frame it and put it on the wall because it is a unique day in history, unlikely to ever be repeated: my blog brought in more traffic to SEED scienceblogs than Pharyngula (PZ was doing something scary with his tentacles there, but I managed to escape in a cloud of ink). On Wednesday the traffic started dropping off somewhat to 4,491 and Thursday saw 2,064. So far today, I’ve got 664 for a grand weekly total of 35,370! Not bad at all! Keep coming back – there will be more cool posts here every day.
On a less happy note, Serbia&Montenegro lost to Argentina 6:0! I am glad I did not watch it – it would have been heart-breaking!

When I first uploaded the banner it was kinda mrky and muted. Look at it now! Clear and gorgeous!
Thanks for the banner go (again) to Carel Pieter Brest Van Kempen. You may want to visit his website to check his artwork (and perhaps buy some, or comission your own banner). You can see some of his art also on this webpage.
He has also recently published a gorgeous book, which you can buy either here or here.
Finally, you are surely going to enjoy his beautiful blog. I hope he gets invited to be in the next wave of new SEED sciencebloggers.

According to Blogger Dashboard (which cannot be trusted, but there is no other source), I have written a total of 2420 posts (Science And Politics – 2124; Circadiana – 220; The Magic School Bus – 76). Many of those posts are too irrelevant to move to the Archives here – things like carnival announcements, linkfests with lots of dead links, outdated news, etc.
But, there are perhaps somewhere between 100 and 200 posts that are, in my opinion, good, timeless and thoughtful. [more under the fold]

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I hope you like my new banner. It was commissioned from a real artist,….

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The Big Blogging Gurus suggest that one should often link back to old posts. I do that, actually, quite often, but now that I have moved my blog here, all the old posts are elsewhere. Over the next few months I will re-publish some of my best posts here so they get archived on this blog. In the meantime it is nice to have the permalinks of the best (and most likely to be linked) posts, or at least most interesting posts all in one place.
I noticed that, when they moved to their new digs at SEED, several science bloggers posted their lists of “best of” posts. I found those lists very useful, even with bloggers I’ve been reading for quite some time, and even more for those new to me. I never dug through their archives before so this was an easy and quick way to get to know their older stuff.
I have compiled a list of “best of” political posts here, if you are interested, but since this is a science blog, I should showcase here the best, or at least most characteristic science-related posts. This is an attempt at such a list, putting together some of science blogging from “Science And Politics”, “Circadiana” and “The Magic School Bus”. I hope you find it useful. See it “under the fold”…

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I am Coturnix.
If that is insufficient information for you, click on “Read more…”

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So, the Big Day has finally arrived – the inauguration of the new SEED scienceblogs homepage and the addition of 24 new bloggers to the stable, including me – yeay! So, go check out the brand new front page and all the old and new bloggers there.

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OK, let’s try to figure out this Movable Type thingie.
Let’s see how bold looks like.
…and italics…
How about I put something in

blockquotes?

Or try to embed an image:

That is the early bird that got the worm (which, as R.A. Heinlein said, just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed). So, PZ, Tara and the other early birds here caught worms. Now, we in the second eshelon may not get a worm, but we may get some seed, or SEED…
Hmmm, the “Under the Fold” function is not working….
And “Comments” are not working…
The MovableType thingie apparently gives individual posts wrong permalinks, i.e., instead of the date, it places the category in it, or nothing if I do nto assign a category. Ah, well, hopefully the tech gurus of SEED will get to me eventually…
Update: Thank you Tim – it is all working perfectly now!