Lost internet access there for a frikkin’ day and a half. What’s more, my ISP only has web links in its emails to point you to customer service. Much like the phone people giving you a number to call for service problems. Sheesh.
No matter. The weather has been gorgeous. I love fall weather like this.
Finally signed up for “The Twitter.” When I first learned of it, I thought it would just be a compendium of noise, since the threshold to tweet is so low. And this is precisely why I don’t do Facebook very much — I am just not all that interested in the level of minutia of my friend’s lives, and I shudder to think they are that interested in mine (or feel that they’re missing out because I don’t post such trivialities very often). But today I found out that Steve Martin is tweeting, so I signed up to follow that.
I don’t want it to be a collection of “Boy, I could use more fiber in my diet” or “De-linting my belly button!” tweets. On the other hand, I do have these random thoughts, which I occasionally blog. That’s the kind of stupid stuff I’ll probably tweet. Probably.
I understand it’s protocol to follow those who follow you, but … no. I’m not going to return the favor in order to be a statistic, or even to be polite. I am a physicist, and have no social skills. Follow only if you have some slight possible interest in the content.
[T]his year we’re hosting our first ever physics.org web awards to give the best physics sites out there some well-deserved recognition
…
Nominations open on Monday 6 September 2010, and you’ll have 6 weeks (until 10 October) to give your favourite physics sites the chance to scoop up an award.
Either the upgrade of the strain of golfing against Judge Smails for $40,000 has left the blog admin software acting a little psychotic lately; I am intermittently not allowed in to post or edit, and then later it acts as though everything is fine. (I will not, will not, will not speculate on the server’s gender, though you may insert your own joke — and nothing else — here.) At the moment I have successfully distracted the beast with some cheese which allowed me to post this, though, so I can apologize for not posting other things.
SFN server will be (or was, depending on when you read this) offline today for an upgrade, ~1700-2100 UTC.
The WordPress upgrade prompted me to look at the themes available to me, and have been experimenting with them Unfortunately, the “preview” option doesn’t seem to work, so I have to do it live. Ergo, things will look different from time to time. There were a few things I didn’t like about the Daleri Dark theme, so I’ll probably end up with a new look.
The upgrade killed the stats widget, and the upgrade to that reset everything, so I can’t tell who is really my 18th customer, and thus entitled to a free oven mitt. (Though I was somewhere over 150,000 in my aggregate daily visitor count. I haven’t advertised milestones because they don’t matter to me. Really. OK, they do, but I don’t like to advertise them unless they show I’m crushing everyone else)
Scienceforums.net has upgraded the blogs to WordPress 3.0, so we’ll see if this causes any problems, or any user error as I fool around with new features.
Sonar, aye.
I’ve been wretchedly sick the past week or so, with absolutely no desire to blog, but appear now to be on the mend. My appetite is returning (the loss of which is a sign that I am really ill) and I can actually concentrate on concepts again. And type (semi) coherently, which was an intermittent skill, at best. So I’ll be easing back into things.
I notice that Chad is upset about a bad Pew poll quiz question about GPS, and boy did it look familiar. It was — I grumbled abut it months ago
Chad admonished me for yesterday’s post on superconductors — and rightly so.
I scanned the article and assumed it was a blog about superconductors, and was quoting a press release. So the lack of a reference didn’t set off any alarms — citations aren’t always given. But I didn’t notice the bit near the end about patent protection, despite the yellow highlight, which indicates it’s not affiliated with academic research. When I Googled on the topic, hoping to find a better summary, I saw several links, quoting what I had assumed to be the same press release. But in reality, all of those sites were just linking back to the original source, and none of this has even passed the preliminary hurdle of peer-review. And it seems that this is a guy working in his garage, doing this as a hobby. That doesn’t make the results wrong, but since people familiar with high-temperature superconductivity haven’t reviewed the work to look for obvious errors, and nobody has corroborated the results, one can’t provisionally accept that it’s right, either. Not being demonstrably bad science doesn’t make it good science.
So I shouldn’t have linked to it. I screwed up (and I’m sure I’ll do so again, somehow. I’ve seen me do it.)
Very Important Poll: Dot Physics Census
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find as many different computers as I can to vote.
(I see there was a “not Tom” listed as one of the “other” submissions. That’s OK. If there’s an antiTom, though, I’m going to be worried.)