Okay, this is the WordPress sandbox post! I'm still working on the design, and reassigning old entries to new categories - the mineral puns were cute, but getting old and generally not very useful.

Does anyone know how I get my name to stop showing up as "admin" in the comments? I've set it to "yami" in my user profile but it's just not sticking. - so that one wasn't so hard.

Next question: why isn't the hierarchical category list functioning as advertised? Answer: hide_empty was turned on.

Other transition issues: the import from MT went smoothly, but it seems to have auto-pinged everything all over again. D'oh! My apologies if you've just been slammed with a ton of duplicate trackbacks.

Not Pr0n - best riddle game I've played in a while. I'm currently stuck on level 10... yar!

Safe for work, but does have sound. Wear headphones.

We have a call and response and variations on the theme of brazen wimmins asking lovely shy manpeople on dates, and particularly, why a feminist who takes no crap from The Rules might still not want to do such a thing. Reasons discussed include (in ascending order of silliness):

1. She's shy, and society affirms that shyness.
2. She's scared that once she invites a little bit of attention, she'll lose the ability to put a stop to it, and she'll be annoyed/stalked/assaulted.
3. She's Venusian and wants to date a Martian.
4. She's from Earth, but thinks men are from Mars and will blast her with their phallus ray guns if she reveals herself as an Earthling spy never take her seriously if she fails to approximate a Venusian for the first N minutes of their acquaintanceship.

I'm primarily concerned, here, with the practice of telling women that traditional gender roles will keep us safe(r). While there are differences in the truth values of "math might make your uterus explode" and "flirting with a strange man might make him decide not to stop following you around in hopes of more attention" ... I'm not sure that they serve such different rhetorical functions.
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I'm having an eyebrow-hair-falling-outing day today. Eyebrow hairs all over my cheeks, in my fingers when I scratch my forehead, everywhere. I would make a lot of wishes, but I think that only works for eyelashes.

Is there a punishment for blowing your eyebrow off your fingertip and making a wish?

Am I going to be eaten by the eyebrow police?

Recently I was reminded of a bit of old lore about rapists: just as vampires cannot speak the name of Christ, rapists cannot speak the name of Andrea Dworkin. Which in turn reminded me of the sorry state of the common wisdom imparted to women as regards our personal safety: we are given nonsensical instructions about avoiding attractive clothing and seedy bars, but no one mentions the real-life practical tips that could save our maidenhoods from creepy crawly creatures of the night, vampires and rapists alike.

Below the fold: Three foolproof tricks for identifying rapists! And the things you should keep in your purse at all times - if you're not a slut who's asking for it.
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From Left2Right to Pharyngula to you and me: High-Speed Plate Tectonics and Young Earth Creationism. Yow! Before we indulge ourselves in pointless nitpicking, let us address one misconception that seems to have come up among even the reality-based participants in this discussion:

Whatever Wegener might have thought, Pangaea was not "primordial". Before there was Pangaea (c. 250 million years ago) there was Rodinia (c. 1 billion years ago). Before that, there may or may not have been other supercontinents, Columbia or Pangaea: Episode I or what have you - it's hard to tell when most of the evidence has been swallowed back into the mantle. But it's generally accepted that the continents have been stuck together and pulled apart at least twice. Since Genesis only allows for mentions one such event, it's silly to claim that the modern story of multiple supercontinents was a Biblical hypothesis.*

But we shan't let that ruin our fun with Do-While Jones, a hammer, and our trusty lumps of silly putty. Oh, no.
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Now tell me, Dearest Readers, what kinds of meat you've been eating lately:

Protomonkey!

It was a while ago that I was busy* looking up mammalian phylogeny, but it seems that our closest non-primate relatives are tree shrews. After that, there's some dispute as to whether it's bats and flying lemurs or bunnies** and rodents.
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How many entries do I have sitting in draft mode? A lot. One or two of them are halves of good posts. Why haven't I finished any of them? I don't know.

Which science fiction writer are you? I'm Hal Clement. [via]. I'm also Long Drugs "Goth Black" matte interior latex paint. Like, whoa.

Something weird is happening here. Has malicious Google-doping replaced high school bathroom graffiti?

1. The LA Times wrote an article about me! Or at least me considered as a demographic phenomenon:
   

   Iowa suffers from an alarming brain drain: It loses more of its young, single, well-educated adults than any state except North Dakota. In search of bigger cities, hipper crowds and warmer weather, young Iowans flee in such numbers that demographers predict the state will face a drastic labor shortage within two decades.

   Desperate to keep the state's future from bolting, the Republican leadership in the state Senate is proposing trying to entice young adults to stick around by abolishing the state income tax for everyone under 30.
   [...]
   Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, has tried [...] holding cocktail parties for former Iowans living in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. He boasts of recruiting more than 1,000 people back to the state in four years of aggressive promotion.

   But that's not enough to offset Iowa's losses.

   L.A.'s allotment of weather and hipsters is lovely, for sure, but if they had consulted me for the article, they would've mentioned the fact that Iowa's public universities are being systematically torn to shreds by the same people proposing this tax cut. Ditto public arts funding. Ditto public library funding.

   Also there aren't any earthquakes.

   (link via the shiny new LA Times Addict, which in turn was off BoingBoing)

2. If Language Log says it, it must be true: nerds are funny after all! At least for nerdy values of "funny":
   

   My reasoning, such as it was, involved several steps, or at least the interaction of several vague ideas. First, the phrase " for values of * that" indexes a subculture that includes programmers as well as mathematicians and others. Second, Michael Silverstein has already used the word metapragmatic to refer to folk reasoning about (reasoning about) meaning in context (in the phrase "metapragmatic ideology", which also sounds good, though I couldn't figure out how to use it in the space and time available). Finally, the originally cited remark was based on treating the interpretation of the word neat as if it were the instantiation of a variable. (I presume, FWIW, that it was in response to some remark like "That was a neat party last night!").
   
   [...]
   
   [...] I admit that it's not normal to limit the instantiations of a variable to the contextual interpretations of a word -- but the young woman overheard on Fulton St. was using the language of mathematics to express an insight about an aspect of her life not defined by any prior formalism. Our colleagues in the humanities call this a "metaphor", or sometimes a "joke".

It's unfortunate that the top Google result for Roe vs. Wade is a site full of anti-abortion propaganda. Following
RadGeek's suggestion, then, it's time to start pointing out more appropriate sources of information about abortion.

This has been a public service announcement. Now, I need some more ripe-key-limeade - in what universe does it make sense to have limes turn yellow when they're ripe? I demand that botany be rejiggered to look more like a cartoon.