The smartest take I've seen on these so-called "conscience clauses" for pharmacists is most of the way down here:

Four states already have laws that specifically allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that violate their beliefs.

Here's the plan for when I get canned:

1. Move to one of these four states.
2. Become pharmacist.
3. Convert to Christian Science.
4. Get paid for doing NOTHING and they can't fire me!

Posted by Sarcastro at March 28, 2020 04:23 PM

Goddamn! I shoulda taken more biochemistry in college.

But, y'know, pharmacists need these provisions for the same reason people need to be able to file for Conscientious Objector status within the military. Like soldiers, pharmacists are required to serve the full terms of their contracts (which are subject to unilateral extension or "stop loss" policies at the whim of the Department of Health and Human Services); pharmacists who leave their jobs during an epidemic are subject to the death penalty. Moreover, all high school chemistry students must register with the Selective Health Services department and will be subject to a draft in the event of a severe shortage of pharmacists. So it's a testament to this country's commitment to religious freedom that we allow Christian Scientists to perform community service web-surfing, rather than conscripting them into passing out drugs!

Free! And! Democratic!

It's official, signed, sealed, and if not quite delivered, at least dropped in the mailbox: I'm off to UC Berkeley next fall for a Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. Do not hesitate to fail to withold your applause!

Topics to be covered in the next 5+ years may include (in that nested list format that's so trendy this week):

• Mud:
  • Its squooshiness.
  • Its jiggliness.
  • Its squooshiness when jiggled:
    • On Earth.
    • On Mars.
• Beating civil engineers over the head:
  • Sometimes simplifications are necessary for projects to proceed efficiently.
  • Sometimes they clearly haven't been paying attention to:
    • Seismology.
    • Statistics.

I'm still working out the implications of this decision in the hypothetical case of a Stanford-Iowa State playoff. It's a good thing I have a Division III alma mater and don't really follow college sports at all, or my head might explode.

So I've been hit! And badly, too; the server has been responding at best intermittently this morning. Or perhaps someone else was hit; with 80 sites co-hosted on the same machine it's hard to tell. But the barrage of Spaminator messages appearing at the same time as the site becomes inaccessible is a bit of a coincedence.

I'll have a look-see at renaming wp-comments.php tonight. Any other suggestions for combatting spam without chewing up resources to run it through WordPress and plugins and etc.?

For now, comments from "new" commenters will go into the moderation queue. If yours fails to appear right away, please be patient.

Okay, so I'm buying myself a laptop. And an iPod. For quasi-reals, yo, they're sitting in my shopping cart at the Apple store. But Apple, not knowing that any moment of indecision will send me and my checkbook scurrying back under the bed, is offering free engraving on the iPod. Aaaagh!

• iPolka
• I'm a consumer whore
• this machine kills fascists
• ???

Sure, I'm blogging on a Saturday night, but that's because I went outside today and picnicked while the sun sapped all my energy. Look!

Though most of the WordPress-related dust has settled, the problem of What To Do With The Photoblog remains. This post is mostly to test out IImage Gallery - which could be a swell plugin. And I still have a few pictures laying around from my visit to Seattle, sooo...

Look at the pretty things made from dead marine micro- and meio-organisms! First, a ridge of limestone formed from crushed-up foraminifera:

Second, a couple pretty laminated diatomites:

Third, partial silica replacement of a foram shell in a porcelanite matrix:

As you might have guessed, I'm in nerd mode tonight. And somewhere in the chaos of multiple tabs of earth scientists I found a parade on which I would really like to pee:

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.
[...]
Perhaps, [the authors] suggested, there's an unknown "Planet X" somewhere far out beyond the solar system that's disturbing the comets in the distant region called the Oort Cloud -- where they exist by the millions -- to the point that they shower the Earth and cause extinctions in regular cycles. Or perhaps there's some kind of "natural timetable" deep inside the Earth that triggers cycles of massive volcanism...

Oh, to have a functional super-special proxy server in Caltech's privileged IP-space! It's very hard to pee on anyone's parade without at least reading their article first, and in this case probably also learning a whole bunch of new crap about statistics. But. Um. The smell of data-mining, it is as pheremones to a fluttery moth! So I flutter!

But fluttering takes energy, and it's really very past bedtime. Sigh.

It's time to play a game! Where are all the earth science bloggers? Are geologists genetically inclined to dislike the nontechnical nature of the blogosphere? Or are we being discriminated against by our colleagues in physics and biology?

I combed teh Intarnet and found these (in no particular order):

• Andrew Frederiksen - Seismology, earth science, and society
• Sabine's Garden
• Walter Kessinger - Industry Seismology and Stuff
• RealClimate
• John Vidale - SeismoJournal
• Brian Balta - Left Thinking in a Right Lateral Shear Zone
• Our Take - science of the natural environment, intersection of science and public health and development, what distinguishes the perfect croissant
• David Wininger - Yuccacentric (defunct?)
• Martian Soil
• Rock Blog
• Ron Schott
• Dave Schumaker - Geology News
• Revolving Duck
• My Sediments Exactly
• Yorrike
• Schmerles - auf deutsch
• Wolverine Tom
• Mike Zoldak - a geographer specializing in geoinformatics, who never posts on it
• Irene - a geographer's photoblog (auf deutsch)
• Beth Bartel - live from antarctica and points elsewhere
• Andrew Alden - at about.com
• Zoltán Sylvester - webnotes of a skeptical east european
• Cogdogblog - Was Geologist, Now Technologist
• Twinkling Radiance
• Elizabeth - plans to do something like Geology and Geophysics, or English, or... something.
• Ellery Frahm
• Juan Penalosa
• Tarka Wilcox
• The Oil Drum - Peak oil production and sustainable growth
• Joe Gilbert - Just Another Day

And now there's like a billion LiveJournallers to sort through! I always forget about LiveJournal. But it has geophysics! And geology and geodynamics and hydrogeology. And probably, y'know, all that trendy geobio blah-de-blah and other specialties I'm not so interested in.

So that's the answer. All the earth science bloggers are on LiveJournal. But please do keep suggesting anomalies from the rest of the Internet...

One

From Emma Goldman at War on Error, Class, Part VIII on cultural signifiers and Sorting Hats:

So, really, the conundrum is that, on one hand, we want some kind of shorthand, some way of sorting people, and, arguably, some agreement on an assortment of dimensions of sorting. This isn't even necessarily a bad thing, although it certainly can be (e.g., when people who are hiring employees think of "someone who is like me" in terms of skin color or religion or genitalia, for example). On the other hand, restricting yourself to people who think and look and dress exactly like you is boring, tedious, and likely to lead to literal and figurative inbreeding of all sorts.

We can play the proffered Dichotomy Game and point out that between those two hands lies something entirely reasonable, but - oooh! Look! I've just burped up a piece of old cud!

I've long held a Goldilocks theory of difference: life (or any given aspect thereof) is best shared with people whose (relvant) views and experiences are not too similar, not too alien, but just the right amount of different. Though most Goldilocks statements pass without comment (they're practically tautologies, after all) this is one of the few that seems to provoke disagreement. Not on the cloistered end, but on the end where I feel conversation can degenerate into pointless conflict and talking past one another, disputes where neither party is ready to give up their side of the argument.

I don't think it's particularly respectful or honest of me to participate in a serious discussion if I'm unwilling to come out of it standing on one ear. Maybe in an ideal world we'd all be ready to give up our cherished beliefs at the drop of a hat, but... naw. I don't think that's how people do or should work. Does that make me close-minded?

Two

Rana on the historiography of the American frontier. Yeah, I was fed that line about the expansion of the West...

Many

Gah! Stupid futzy internet connection. A different selection of the Many than what was originally intended: ester on thigh high stockings, Steinn Sigurðsson with an acronym puzzle, and the new Get Your War On.