Who is this, and in what bit part do we see him here?

According to the Dr. Who Fan Site on Google+

Matt Smith will be carrying the Olympic Torch this weekend when it reaches Cardiff in the latest leg of its 70 day trip around the United Kingdom.

Smith will bear the torch early on Saturday morning, at the start of its journey from Cardiff, the capital of Wales and home of Doctor Who, to Swansea a few miles along the coast. The day will see the torch visit the communities of Barry, Merthyr Tydfil, Rhondda and Bridgend.

“To carry the Torch is an honour, one I thought I’d never get, I’m very excited!”

Daleks will be following close behind, saying of the Olympic Flame, “Exterminate … exterminATE!!!!”

Photo from BBC One Dr Who Galleries

At the moment, Scienceblogs is still undergoing technical difficulties. This is fully expected. The database this network is built on is many gazugabites in size. Despite its power and elegance, the WordPress platform (especailly the multi-user version) is complex and there are all sorts of tweaky things that must happen between the server’s system software, the database server, the PHP installation, the core WordPress software, and the localized version. When FTB.com upgraded a while back it took a few days for the dust to settle and a few weeks for things to top breaking and screwing up.

I can’t reliably post at the moment, so I’ll be busy with other things for the immediate future. Keep an eye on The X Blog where I’ll be blogging a bit (just put something up on Romney’s education plan!)

_{Photo courtesy of kamshots}

As you can see, Scienceblogs.com has a new look. There is no more left sidebar and the right sidebar looks different, the cute banners different blogs had is replaced with a new standardized banner usually with a picture of the blogger. The 24 hour page and some other bits are (depending on when you read this) not functioning yet but will be soon. And, up there in the upper right is the National Geographic Brand.

I no long have an “about” page but pages can be created and I will eventually do that. I think pages will be accessible from a drop down or menu or something on the right sidebar.

The little icon that goes with each post is currently my mug from Gravitar (I think). But, that can be adjusted. For instance, say I insert a picture and select “use as feature image.” I just did that with a picture of Julia SCUBA diving in the Dominican Republic. Maybe that picture will appear instead of my face. Maybe it will appear in the post. Maybe it will appear on the front cover of National Geographic!

This new blog platform is WordPress and I’ve used WordPress quite bit. I use it at The X Blog, and I use it a 10,000 Birds and I use it a Greg Laden’s Blog, and I’ve used it elsewhere. But as you may know, WordPress is a powerful tool with lots of capabilities, and no two installations are alike (well, there probably are identical installs, but not that I’ve seen). I’ve never used the “featured image” thing before ….

One of the great things about WordPress, and for WordPress users this may seem totally stupid but the old Scienceblogs platform did not have this, is the ability to click the word “edit” (or a symbol) on a post you are looking at and suddenly you are in edit mode. This did not happen in the old Scienceblogs platform … you had to find the post on a list of posts, then edit it. This means that is was trivially easy though somewhat time consuming for me to go through a bunch of categories last night and fix them up so they make more sense. See my excellent category list on the right side bar!

There have been some problems reported. Please poke around the site and see if anything goes wrong, and if you survive whatever goes wrong, let me know.

I will be adjusting commenting to allow only approved commenters. This means that the first time you comment, you use your name and something that looks like an email address, and I’ll find it in a waiting queue, and approve it. For those of you who have not had to do this in the recent past, I apologize, but this is the only way to keep out that idiot from Madison Wisconsin and others.

I am not using threaded comments.

Let me know what you think!

^{Photo courtesy of Holly Tappen}

A while back, the National Geographic Society entered into an agreement with Seed Media Group, the latter being the owner and operator of Scienceblogs.com. This agreement had to do with advertising (simple version: NGS will broker the ad space on Scienceblogs) and branding (simple version: Scienceblogs.com will look all golden-yellowy and otherwise be updated to have National Geographic stuff on it). There really aren’t any major interactions to speak of other than this, yet, though you may have noticed if you read NGS’s blog that Scienceblog posts are often linked to over there.

But there will be other arrangements made with respect to developing content and stuff. That will happen when it happens and I’m sure it will all be very good. We will also see the actual implementation of our Code of Conduct, which will change very little on this blog as I’ve been implementing that for months now, without anyone (who matters) really noticing.

Anyway, at about 7:00 PM May 21, 2012, Monday, which is in a few hours from now as I write this, the process will start. You won’t see anything happening until late in the day on Tuesday, or perhaps Wednesday (things always take longer than expected). At that time, we will be branded. You’ll see.

Here’s the important thing to know: From 7:00 PM Eastern Time Monday night until the branding is completed, anything I post or anything you say in comments will not survive. Posts and comments made prior to that will be transferred during this period of time.

The main page has info on it, but I don’t think there is anything on there that I’ve not said here.

I am very excited about using the WordPress platform for blogging here. It will be like having a hot poker removed from my left eye. Not that I’ve ever had a hot poker removed from my left eye, but you get the point.

Oh, one other thing. All Sblings are now required to have the National Geographic Theme Song as their cell phone “ring tone.”

^{Photo courtesy of mharrsch}

Missouri, the “Show Me State,” had two bills in the state house that wuld have promoted Intelligent Design in the public school science class. The legislature adjourned a couple of days ago without advancing the bills, and that is how a bill dies. RIP bad bills in Missouri.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Evolution is Real! The Asbury Park (as in The Boss) carried out a poll along with Monmouth University which asked if citizens “believe in” evolution. 51% said yes, 42% said no, and 7% said they didn’t know. I would apply a 1% correction to that to account for Snarky Skeptics who would say “Believe in? Belief? What’s that? I accept evolution. I don’t believe in anything” and could therefore not be counted as a “yes” even though that is clearly what was meant.

The poll showed that Democrats and independents, males, college grads, and folk between 35 and 54 were more likely to say yes. Those with a high school education or less and people over 55 were more likely to say no. This was reported here by the NCSE.

Alabama had a bill that would have created a “credit for creationism” course as part of a release time for religions instructions scheme. That is an interesting idea, and I suspect we will see more plans like this one. According to the NCSE,

While released time programs are generally constitutionally permissible, a controversial feature of HB 133 was its allowing local boards of education to award course credit for participating in religious education. A case currently before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Robert Moss et al. v. Spartanburg County School District No. 7, concerns a local school district’s implementation of the South Carolina Released Time Credit Act, enacted in 2006, which similarly awards course credit for participating in released time religious education. Besides the question of the bill’s constitutionality, the state board of education opposed the bill when it was introduced as HB 568 in 2011, according to WAFF.

The bill died when the Alabama legislature ended its regular session. RIP bad bill.

^{Photo courtesy of elmada}

Science Magazine is running a “Science Voices” series of short essays by members of the science community on the topic of Human Conflict. So far there are four or five, and they cover conflict from a wide range of perspectives. You can see them all here.

I’ve written one on conflict in the blogosphere which will probably be up on the Sciencemag site by the time you read this.

The topics I touched on in my short essay are very familiar to you as readers of this and other blogs, and they mostly have to do with social and to a lesser extent political problem in “meatspace” and how those conflicts play out in the blogosphere. A few days back I wrote two “hub” posts intended to tie together some of these discussion. One addressed gun control and homeschooling as topics we’ve dealt with here (and on The X Blog). That post has engendered quite a bit of discussion about both topics, though mostly in the area of Homeschooling which, in my opinion, is a topic where we have NOT made much progress.

The other post–Does the Internet need an HR Department?–is very closely related to a topic that emerged from the recently Women in Secularism conference organized by the CFI. That discussion is currently developing quickly at the Richard Dawkins Foundation site and at Almost Diamonds. It appears that people are taking my suggestion that we look to professional HR experts to find a good solution to sexism in the secular community and elsewhere.

I hope you pick a spot–this post or one of those referenced above–and join the conversation!

^{Photo courtesy of Feggy Art}