Daily Archives: July 26, 2012

A Few Tips For Comments on Internet Forums.

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1) Be original.  Don’t repeat the same old bumper-sticker slogan everyone on the planet has seen ten thousand and six times already.  Example:   In almost every story about animal rights loons, a subject I still follow, some idiot has to comment,  “I belong to PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals, hur hur hur.”  OK.  It was mildly amusing the first time I saw it.  In 1997.  It stopped being amusing about ten seconds later.

2) Use a furshlugginer spell-check!  Taken from an actual forum only this evening:  “no coinsadence… (sic)”  Seriously?  You couldn’t take sixteen seconds to look up how the word was spelled?  You’re OK with looking like an ignoramus?  Speaking of which:

3) Don’t use lazy, stupid ‘netspeak.  “You” is two more keystrokes than “u.”  What does that take, nine nanoseconds?  Is your time that valuable?  Let me answer that – it’s not.

4) Fact-check.  Don’t post stuff that is stupidly easy to prove wrong.  Don’t pass on the stupid tinfoil-helmet horseshit your brother-in-law emailed you behind an endless string of “Fw fw fw fw fw fw…” headers.

5) CAPS LOCK IS NOT CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.  All caps can be used for emphasis.  Not for every word you write.

6) Don’t be a cheerleader.  Don’t post two or three word posts proclaiming “Great post!”  “I agree!”  “Right on!”  Stop it!  If you don’t have something substantive to add, don’t hit Reply.

7) Don’t spam.  I don’t care how convinced you are that the Bilderbergers are taking over the planet so they can sell it to the Quaagars from the Glixtonian Nebula; stop copy-and-pasting the same warning over and over into every forum you can find.

8) Grow up.  Don’t engage in juvenile name-calling.  From my own Rules of the Game page:  “In name-calling I include juvenile crap like “teabaggers, DemoCRAPS, Cantservatives, LIEberals,” and so on.  We’re all grown-ups here.  That kind of horseshit belongs in junior high school.  Leave it there.”

9) Don’t whiff off.  If you start a discussion, stick around to finish it.  Don’t drop a contentious statement in and run off to leave your post lying in the forum like a fresh cow pie.

10)  If you are, at present, doing any of the above – STOP.  Stop it NOW.

That is all.

Animal’s Science Thursday News

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At least we know who we can count on to protect us.

I, for one, welcome our new trash-can robot overlords.

Learning From The Enemy:  Harnessing pathogens for the good of mankind?  A novel concept, that.  Excerpt:

Bacterial pathogens are tricky little blighters, incredibly adept at infecting human cells and propagating disease. Certain tools in their arsenal are used to interface with host cell signaling pathways, allowing the invading microbes to fool and evade the immune response. Scientists are hard at work finding ways to deactivate these virulent abilities, but what if instead of disarming those tools, we could harness them? That’s exactly what researchers at the University of California, San Francisco attempted to do in a study just published July 22nd in Nature.

Perhaps, even, to catch this fox.

It’s a variation on setting the fox to guard the henhouse; it may even be possible to set the fox to catching other foxes.

Finally, and coolest of all:  Gliese 581 g Tops List of 5 Potentially Habitable Planets.  Excerpt:

The controversial exoplanet Gliese 581g is the best candidate to host life beyond our own solar system, according to a new ranking of potentially habitable alien worlds.

Gliese 581g shot to the top of the list — which was published Thursday (July 19) by researchers at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) — after a new study marshaled support for its long-debated existence.

The exoplanet was discovered in September 2010, but other astronomers began casting doubt on its existence just weeks later. Now Gliese 581g’s discoverers have rebutted their critics’ charges in a new paper, and have done so effectively enough to get the PHL onboard.

Who among us, True Believers, wouldn’t like to live to see humanity find out what’s really out there?

To explore strange new worlds – to seek out new life, new civilizations?  To boldly go where no man has gone before?

That would be awesome.