Another Blasted Weblog

Unapologetic

Jeremy — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:29:40 +0000

If Malthus is wrong, then why is it necessary to prove him wrong again and again, every decade and every century?

Answers on a postcard, please.

Minor tweakage

Jeremy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:40:06 +0000

Just having a little play with the sidebar (which is down the bottom rather than to one side, but no matter). There’s a spiffy WordPress plugin called Comment Remix that lets you do good things, like display the latest comments at the top, rather than at the bottom, and makes it easier to reply to specific comments and to quote from comments. It also lets me display latest comments in a slightly friendlier fashion. At least, I think it does.

But, see those little pictures next to each commenter? Those are Gravatars. I used to think they were useless baubles, but I’ve discovered that actually they make it easier to recognize who is saying what, even when the image isn’t a face.¹ And the nice thing about Gravatars is that once you have enabled one — by going to www.gravatar.org — it is available in all sorts of places. So, if you don’t want to be a faceless silhouette, go and do it.

I could wax evolutionary about that, and suggest that our skill at recognizing faces is so great that we can easily associate any image with a personality, but I won’t.

Obliging as ever

Jeremy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:40:02 +0000

It’s a scandal! Jonathan Eisen says that Hollywood is making a movie tentatively entitled Tree of Life. Plot summary?

In a mystical world of folklore, several individuals embrace in a race to find the Tree of Life, said to give immortality, fertility, and other supernatural powers.

Eisen wants to protect this holiest of holy phrases from the attention of a gazillion celebrity-sucking bloggers etc who, he fears, will cause “uses of the Tree of Life by evolutionary biologists [to] lose their google rankings. The term “The Tree of Life” is at risk of a form of extinction.”

And the solution? Link to the real McCoys. Which I’m happy to do.

I do, however, need someone to explain to me just when “fertility” became a supernatural power.

A modern dilemma for the Inner Economist.

Jeremy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:47:47 +0000

“I’ve joined a gym,” said a friend and colleague. We agreed that this was a good thing, then she said that she hoped she’d keep it up. Cue my Inner Economist.

“What you need is something that’ll hurt if you don’t go,” I said. “Like a contract, and if you don’t go, you pay me.”

Not much happened for a couple of weeks and then she raised it again, and I agreed to help out by taking her money. Her goal is to go three times a week. So I drew up a sliding scale of penalties. Miss one session and it hardly hurts. Miss two, and it hurts more than twice as much a missing one. Miss three and you’re in a whole world of pain. We agreed exceptions for sickness and duty travel, and everything seemed fine.

Then I thought I’d add a little incentive: when the pain tops $25, I’ll put it towards another Kiva microloan.

That messed everything up, because my colleague, sharp as a tack, pointed out that because she thought this was a good idea, it could be an incentive for her deliberately to miss workouts in order to lend money through Kiva.

I promised to spend it on booze and broads. (Of course, I’ll lie about that and microlend it anyway; she’ll never twig.)

You speak, I listen

Jeremy — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:52:46 +0000

The new design seems to be going down pretty well (although I need to tweak some more) but at least two people want to see recent posts, in case they’ve been away for a while. So there it is, down below on the right. Now, do I also need to put Recent comments down there too?