CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2011-08-02 15:15:10 (25 comments, 5 reshares, 69 +1s)

2011-08-02 15:14:51 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 13 +1s)

2011-08-02 14:15:51 (60 comments, 15 reshares, 94 +1s)

Nothing created the universe.

Man, that was easy. How many theologians have been arguing over that for how many centuries?

2011-08-02 13:55:52 (9 comments, 2 reshares, 29 +1s)

See, if you let all the bright kids opt out of religious instruction, only stupid kids will be religious.

2011-08-02 13:54:03 (4 comments, 4 reshares, 20 +1s)

So how many suicides does it take to convince a Catholic priest that raping children is bad?

It looks like the answer is at least 26.

2011-08-01 21:27:40 (12 comments, 3 reshares, 21 +1s)

Creationists are going rather nuts over Xiaotingia, it's actually kind of funny to see. They are so wrong and confused.

2011-08-01 13:51:01 (24 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Ka-boom. freethoughtblogs.com has gone down in a flurry of database errors right after I linked to it.

2011-08-01 12:02:28 (26 comments, 4 reshares, 34 +1s)

Pharyngula has metastasized! http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula

2011-07-30 19:43:36 (16 comments, 26 reshares, 113 +1s)

The news is leaking out fast. Yes, we have a new blog network, http://freethoughtblogs.com, opening for business on Monday. We've got a good starting lineup, and will also be adding +Greta Christina and +Jen McCreight and some others once we shake out the bugs. We'll also consider adding a few other good blogs later -- ask me or +Ed Brayton once the dust settles -- but our goal is quality, not to build a massively huge network.

My plan is to post the current full content of Pharyngula on the new site. I will still be maintaining my relationship with Scienceblogs and National Geographic, but only select content will appear there: that is, science, anti-creationism, that sort of thing...the openly anti-religious material will be on FtB only. So if you're a Christian, you'll now be able to read Sb Pharyngula without crying (but don't fool yourself, I'll still be despising... more »

2011-07-29 23:24:32 (15 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

William Bateson on positive eugenics: "If we picture to ourselves the kind of person who would be infallibly chosen as examples of 'civic worth' - the term lately used to denote their virtues - the prospect is not very attractive. We need not for the present fear any scarcity of that class, and I think we may be content to postpone schemes for their multiplication."

2011-07-29 13:28:48 (23 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Travel day off to a bad start. Stayed at the La Quinta Inn near the airport: terrible place, towels like tissue paper, and worst of all, the internet sucks balls. So slow it times out when I try to check my mail; can only connect to Google half the time I try; can't connect to SciBlogs at all. So bad I thought there must be a filter in place, but no, it let's me connect to porn sites just fine (attempted only in the interests of testing a hypothesis!).

It must be one of those motels.

OK, SSA, the internet better be a little more reliable in the hotel in Columbus where I'll be staying, or I'll be snarly all weekend.

2011-07-28 22:57:01 (21 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

Tomorrow: I'll be at the SSA Conference in Columbus, Ohio, along with Dan Barker, Greta Christina, David Silverman, Jessica Ahlquist, Jennifer McCreight, Hemant Mehta, Jamila Bey, Debbie Goddard, and Amanda Knief. So what are you doing?

2011-07-28 22:53:46 (7 comments, 4 reshares, 15 +1s)

Cool fossil.

2011-07-28 22:52:54 (5 comments, 5 reshares, 31 +1s)

Hitchens is to be awarded the Richard Dawkins Award by AAA: in Texas this October.

2011-07-25 18:37:42 (11 comments, 11 reshares, 19 +1s)

The cephalopods have nothing to fear. That's a pretty ineffectual tentacle.

2011-07-24 02:02:27 (31 comments, 30 reshares, 118 +1s)

Feature request for G+: stop banning people for stupid, inane reasons and locking them out of their entire Google account, including their mail, documents, photos, bookmarks, contacts, etc.

Don't try to play it down, Big G. My Twitter (not my G+: for obvious reasons) has been lit up like a Christmas tree with horror stories of waking up banned. Your early adopters are upset and we are scared. It's really come across as "we will ban you and ruin your life for the stupidest of reasons, like a Unicode wingding in your profile name." I hope I don't need to stress to you why frightening your highly technical, early adopter, evangelizing crowd is a really bad thing.

#pseudonymsarenotasin




...

Now, if only I had someone to chew out for ChromeOS being less and less stable and losing features that used to work fine. Gods know... more »

2011-07-23 13:26:51 (66 comments, 32 reshares, 54 +1s)

2011-07-23 01:55:28 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 33 +1s)

At the garden

2011-07-23 01:51:49 (15 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

July 22, 2011

2011-07-23 01:49:59 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

July 22, 2011

2011-07-23 01:49:57 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

July 22, 2011

2011-07-23 01:48:54 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

July 22, 2011

2011-07-23 01:45:13 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

July 22, 2011

2011-07-21 20:40:35 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Job candidate day! It's all entertaining and seminar and grilling the guy. At least I'm glad I'm on this side of the table.

2011-07-21 00:56:44 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 26 +1s)

I'll be on the Ardent Atheist at 7pm PST tonight, along with Thunderf00t, Jamie Kilstein, Paul Provenza, Eric Schwartz, and Suzanne Whang.

2011-07-21 00:41:20 (58 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

I just installed Lion. No problem, except that Apple has decided to reverse the scrolling direction! My reflexes are all confused now.

2011-07-20 21:54:43 (20 comments, 11 reshares, 24 +1s)

New Cocktail Party Physics post: "Is it Cold in Here?" (yeah, it is) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2011/07/20/is-it-cold-in-here/

2011-07-20 21:27:26 (35 comments, 2 reshares, 75 +1s)

I'm flattered and amazed. The Journal of Cosmology (on the selling block, worth $100,000!) has dedicated a whole page in my honor. With photos! And a discussion of my scientific contributions!

Gosh, I feel a little tear in the corner of my eye.

2011-07-19 17:09:44 (94 comments, 1 reshares, 77 +1s)

NOOOOOOO! I just installed the Google+ app on my iPhone, and by default it sends notifications every time a comment is made...so it's waking up and going tinkly-boop and flashing a message at me every 10 seconds. And it's an utterly useless notification: "Joe Blow added a comment to your post."

WHAT FUCKING IDIOT DESIGNED THIS THING?

2011-07-19 16:50:14 (8 comments, 7 reshares, 14 +1s)

iPhone, meet Google+

Share just the right stuff, with just the right circles :-)

This app should be rolling out over the next few hours. Try getting it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google/id447119634?ls=1&mt=8

2011-07-19 01:11:24 (65 comments, 0 reshares, 32 +1s)

A good critique of The Moral Landscape: it should have been subtitled "How science can help us achieve the things we've already chosen to value"

http://lacrimae-rerum.org/?p=97

2011-07-19 01:07:36 (2 comments, 22 reshares, 52 +1s)

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, and he never goes anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls this the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age.” This is what we know. The rest is gravy.

--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

2011-07-15 05:47:33 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 35 +1s)

Rebecca Watson's quiz show was a blast, even if she wouldn't allow me to cheat.

I won anyway. Where's my prize?

2011-07-14 00:06:24 (33 comments, 1 reshares, 47 +1s)

Slides all done. Talk still slightly incoherent and slightly overlong...but we need to leave for the airport soon. Will be arriving in Vegas tomorrow morning! I'll have time to polish it up tomorrow, I think.

Also wasted some time. Those JREF guys sent me a powerpoint template to use to standardize the look, and it had two problems: 1) It wasn't Keynote. 2) It was all astronomy themed! Dang physics chauvinists. So I got the logo from the JREF and created my own theme, modeled after theirs, but in Keynote and using biological imagery. Much prettier, and just as garish as those space telescope pictures they were using.

2011-07-13 19:46:02 (18 comments, 0 reshares, 15 +1s)

I'm giving my talk at TAM on Friday morning. It's not ready yet! Panic time!

The annoying thing is that they've only given me a half hour, total, to talk and take questions. Don't they realize I'm a college professor? At the half-hour mark, I'm just getting warmed up.

So I'm cutting, cutting, cutting. And cutting some more.

2011-07-13 15:05:36 (10 comments, 4 reshares, 23 +1s)

I should just have my readers write my titles. "Fruit of their lions", ha ha.