Woops!

I may have some of it on my disk; if so I'll repost what I have in a day or two. (Unless somebody else does it first.)

Henry

I had just explicated the meaning of life in a 10,000 word thesis in one comment. It was my only copy, too! Don't tell me you've lost it!!!

Ian, at least you didn't get erased by the Vogon constructor fleet putting in the hyperspace bypass.

Man I haven't updated my program for the new site layout. Otherwise I would have had most of the comments you lost...I miss listening to PT :(

I posted a theory of ID. Shucks.

I suppose you materialists think that this has a "natural" explanation.

Anyone can see that it's the work of an angry Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Obviously a comment about the New Panda Site by an angry Old Testament God, I mean Designer.

I can cut you a lot of slack, since this is a cooler place and you put so much unappreciated work into it.

(I don't say cool stuff, but yes, one of my smaller comments - is gone. Has deceased. Is pushing up daisies. Listened to the fat lady. Moved to the fjords. Is now spicing up the Flying Pasta Monster.)

But really, why corrupt data bases? Corrupting young minds are so much more fun, just ask the creos.

bump

Checking...

Testing...

I said a lot of cool things, and I had never said anything cool before that, so thanks a lot.

”

I'll reinstate my expression of hope for the return of the "last read comment" cookie system.

Shebardigan: I'll reinstate my expression of hope for the return of the "last read comment" cookie system.

Torbjörn, can you check to see if your name is not garbled by our system? I fixed the comment you made earlier today after our system had garbled it. I thought that I had fixed the issue. I've made another try at fixing it. Let's see if it works for you.

bump

The "main entry" pointer is off-screen at first, faint, and in miniscule type size. Took me 15 minutes to find it. Please revise it for improved visibility. Thanks!

--- Lynn

Ha ha, you'll never know the wonders I wrought on this forum yesterday, for I'll never repeat them here again.

Seriously, though, how about telling us how the upgrade is going, and whether or not further glitches are to be feared? I appreciate the work that goes into it, definitely. It would be even better, though, if we could know what sort of timetable is involved, as well as the potential hazards.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

When I click on "Comments" from the main screen, the resulting screen has the comment area raised vertically, cutting off part of the tabs. I'm using IE6, Windows.

You simply must retrieve the comment where PZ said he liked and admired me, and he wanted to be my graduate student.

...stupid search and replace...

— Reed A. Cartwright

In the absence of a reply from Torbjörn I wish to tell that the Swedish/German
letter ö shows correctly on my Norwegian computer. I list here all the
unusual Scandinavian letters: æ ø å ä ö Æ Ø Å Ä Ö

They are garbled, however, in the typing window on the preview page. I have
had to correct them there each time I previewed this message.

Don't feel bad. I had a paper rejected once when I did a universal search for Pb and replaced with Pd. The paper was incoherent. Then, both I and my co-author had medical emergencies involving surgeries and neither of us could respond to the reviewer's laughter. This was for an invited paper even.

The old Panda's Thumb clearly left cookies demarking how much of the comments one had previously read. The new Panda's Thumb so far lacks that fine feature.

The old Panda's Thumb had a spell checker, such as it was. The new Panda's Thumb so far lacks one.

Please, Reed, as soon as may be?

Spellchecking interim solution: use the page here to copy in the text of your comment and do spellchecking.

Torbjörn, can you check to see if your name is not garbled by our system? I fixed the comment you made earlier today after our system had garbled it.

the unusual Scandinavian letters: æ ø å ä ö Æ Ø Å Ä Ö

They are garbled, however, in the typing window on the preview page.

Sometimes the Preview seems to change or force the FF (default) view character encoding as well. I guess FF is sensitive to XML/CSS specifications.

Reed,
Did you get my email yesterday about the copies of 6 threads that lost notes the other day? (I used the "contact us" button on PT)

Those should catch up the replies through about 7:53 Mountain time for those threads.

Henry

People are bummed when you tell them they can't have their ID. It's like you peed in their cornflakes. I think you have to point out that there are a lot of other "unproven" "theories" in science. Nobody has ever seen an electron. The electrons running my computer and cellphone are totally theoretical. It could easily be teensy angels with Jesus wands that run my cellphone. We would never know. I think people would feel that their cornflakes were more pee-laden if they didn't have their cellphones and other electronic equipment. People who are skeptical of science frequently feel that things are "relative". They may not identify false either-or arguments but they can wrap their heads around relative pee levels in cornflakes.

Jake,

Good point. Here is what I tell my class when I introduce the section on evolution in Introductory Biology:

I don't care whether you believe in the theory of evolution or not. I didn't ask you if you believed in the law of segregation and I won't ask you if you you believe in the theory of evolution either. In fact I promise you that there will not be a true/false question on the exam asking whether you believe in evolutin or not. However, in order to be entitled to an opinion you have to be familiar with the evidence. That is my job, to present the evidence. You can reach whatever conclusion you want, but until you examine the evidence, your opinion will not be worth very much.

If someone wants to characterize that as jamming something down someone's throat, so be it. However, if you ever sat through a hellfire and brimestone diatribe threatening you with eternal damnation, perhaps your definition of jamming something down someone's throat would change somewhat.

The scandic letters are OK in earlier comments but garbled in Torbjörn's. Shoemaker's children and so on...

testing again (fixed in preview before submit): åäö
submitted directly: åäö

It’s like you peed in their cornflakes

hmm, not a bad idea.

David's comment reminded me of my high school biology class. It was in 1962; we used those big green BSCS books -- remember them? We had one kid in class who was some kind of hard-shell Baptist. As I recall he never made any noise in any other class we shared, but in Biology it was Onward Christian Soldiers all the way. He always sat front and center with his King James Bible on top of his desk, ready to smite the Evil One. But when he tried to start an argument (as opposed to a discussion) our teacher, Mr. Rob Stob, stopped it short. He was not about to get into a shouting match with a teenager. He just explained to him what David said: This is a science class, not a religion class; I'm not here to convert anyone; you will be tested on this material; and if you choose not to learn it to prove a point, well, it's going on your report card, not mine.

As far as Neal is concerned, the entertainment value of having him around is well worth the bandwidth he uses up. It is difficult sometimes to figure out exactly what he's saying. I went to Catholic grammar school and diagrammed sentences from fourth grade on, but I'm not sure I could even make a start on his productions of the 21st.

Henry J: Reed, Did you get my email yesterday about the copies of 6 threads that lost notes the other day? (I used the "contact us" button on PT) Those should catch up the replies through about 7:53 Mountain time for those threads.

Lynn Y: The "main entry" pointer is off-screen at first, faint, and in miniscule type size. Took me 15 minutes to find it. Please revise it for improved visibility. Thanks! --- Lynn

Nathan Parker: When I click on "Comments" from the main screen, the resulting screen has the comment area raised vertically, cutting off part of the tabs. I'm using IE6, Windows.

but garbled in Torbjörn’s. Shoemaker’s children and so on…

Nobody has ever seen an electron.

Gaah! Lack-of-coffee errors:

- the Tag cloud and the Archives search doubles in some function.

- I forgot to say that I now sometimes see

- (unintuitively named) “unparticle physics”.

Well we are working on redoing our archives, simplifying our categories, and shifting much of the burden to tags.

Fixing the character encoding issues may take a while. It appears to be a bug (or several bugs) in our blog software. I've submitted a bug report, but I don't know if/when Six Apart will act on it.

bump

bumpage

bumpage

bumpage? Is that something like newage? :)

“multiple independent collection of selectable genes”

You might be able to recover something if Google crawled the page and indexed it!

Good luck,
Shepherdmoon