Welcome to my journal. Have a look at the most recent posts below, or browse the tag cloud on the right. An archive of all entries is also available.
Today was the first day of my second week at PML, and I appear to have survived so far. The work's pretty interesting; I spent the first couple of days writing Perl, and seem to have won; the last few days have been spent getting to grips with one of the major projects I'll be working on. It's a bit of PHP and a lot of Javascript, and my first task has been adding session support, rather than passing dozens of parameters in the URL (which will lead, hopefully, to being able to make the whole thing a lot more user-friendly, or at least developer-friendly).
This afternoon, I also started the second part of my role there --- I'll be doing some sysadmin-type stuff, on a rather more serious level than I've had the opportunity to do before. I'm setting up a brand-new (had to unpack it and everything) server to act as a master for a cluster, and then experiment with SystemImager so that we can easily roll out upgrades.
It's a pretty cool place to work, too; there's various sport and social groups (including cycling and running, helpfully), and there's also apparently an agreement with a gym nearby to allow PML staff to use their facilities.
Looking forward to the rest of the year. (Hopefully not famous last words...)
Posted Mon 07 Jul 2008 22:51:00 UTChttp://www.badscience.net/2008/06/all-time-classic-creationist-pwnage/
Biologist Richard Lenski recently published a paper describing the emergence of new traits in bacteria (they evolved the ability to metabolise new food sources when kept in an environment without food they could already metabolise). Andrew Schlafly, founder of that paragon of scientific endeavour Conservapedia [1] [2], got very upset by this and demanded to see the evidence. Lenski responded quite politely, but after further demands, threats, and insults, replies with an impressively snotty letter.
| [1] | He's also, apparently, teacher of "one of the largest homeschool classes in the country"; isn't that a contradiction of terms? When you're teaching 58 kids, that's not homeschool; that's actual school; presumably, the claim to be "homeschool" is to avoid the necessity of teaching the kids actual science. |
| [2] | Because we wouldn't want people to actually correct Conservapedia, it's actually very difficult to get to edit a page, despite the fact that it's a wiki; for example, the page on Phyllis Schlafly, mother of Andrew, is locked, preventing people changing the statement from the (true but inaccurate) "a fraction of people present protested her honorary doctorate" to the more-accurate "a third of people present, etc."; this despite that the numbers in question are in a news report cited elsewhere in the article. Hurray for selective blindness to the facts! |
I'm a little amazed that, after eight years of Bush, there's actually the possibility that the USA will have a presidential candidate who doesn't suck. I'm still not convinced that Obama would be a better president than Clinton, but either one of them is fine by me (or, even better, either one of them with the other as vice-president).
Posted Fri 06 Jun 2008 02:11:00 UTCThis wiki is powered by ikiwiki.