Whither now, my blog?

Hey, there’s a blog here. Oh yeah…

If you are coming here and see this at the top of my blog, then this is to inform you that this is not a very active blog. Heck, I have not posted anything of consequence in here for over a year! What has happened? Well, as I have been knee-deep in grad school stuff, I have also been blogging pretty regularly at Biofortified, and hosting my radio show again. Consequently, my urge to talk about science in all its various forms, especially for plant genetics, has been satisfied by these outlets. Discussions at Biofortified have been getting stronger and stronger, and although I haven’t posted any show recordings recently at Inoculated Media, it’s been nonstop fun being on the radio again. Bees have been buzzing in the field, and Basement renovations a-building at home. Time has become a bit of a scarce resource in recent times for me. This post is just to fill everyone in on what is going on here and elsewhere, and what my plans for this space are. (should you come a-knocking) Continue reading Whither now, my blog?

And for my next trick…

I am in the process of moving this blog, my podcast blog, the Biofortified blog, and everything else to a new host. I thought, let’s do this carefully and make sure not to screw up any of these sites. Starting with the podcast blog, I initiated the domain transfer on Saturday. While waiting for the transfer to occur, I started a couple more. My blog was going to be last. Since I haven’t actively used it lately, it could remain offline while I set up the others.

The first one switches over without a hitch, in just one day, things were back up and running. Of course, starting with that one helped me notice a malfunction in Dreamweaver that left some uploaded images on the server. So before the old hosting account closed I made sure to download every last data bit for the other sites. And contact with the new host’s technical support educated me that I could have changed the DNS nameserver to point to the new host and begin using the new location while waiting for the domains to move over. Only the less-used blog, this one, was left to do that with. (Also, due to the fact that inoculatedmind.com was the primary domain in my previous account – it had the working keys to to DNS changes and was the only change that was working.)

So to make a long story short of the old account being deleted and the sites going down, and the time spent chasing down who to talk to about what is taking the other domains so long and how the nameserver cannot be changed when a transfer is pending, we’re left just waiting for the domains to transfer. And I’m left with the irony that my own sites, which I used as guinea-pig and lowest-priority are the only ones that work!

And the one that I hold in highest importance and that others depend on, is still down. Files are all there, database backed up in triplicate, domain in limbo.

What did you do last week?

In my case, there was a the usual – I ordered DNA primers, sequenced some DNA, went through that sequence and assembled it into my model… I cooked some dinner, slept some. But last week was punctuated with something a little different.

Monday morning, the first new episode of my old radio show The Inoculated Mind Radio and Mindcast, aired on the local Madison student station, WSUM.  The show was pre-recorded the week before, because I was not going to be in Madison to do it live.

The same day, I was visiting the San Francisco Bay Area with Anastasia, zooming around the City, meeting up with PZ Myers, and oh yeah – having dinner with Michael Pollan at Chez Panisse! My review is up, as well as Anastasia’s.

As for the show, I used to host the Mindcast here on this blog, however, I have built a completely new site called Inoculated Media dedicated to hosting the show. Continue reading What did you do last week?

Getting my wish

After an abnormally warm fall it seems that Winter has finally arrived in Madison. Less than a week has passed since our first snowfall and we’ve had a second one. Furthermore, starting tonight we’re about to get one heck of a storm that could drop as much as 11 inches on Wisconsin!

I wonder, why does the Copenhagen climate conference always happen in the Winter? Maybe the response to the bogus ClimateGate should have been to move it to the summertime? Maybe it will be easier to talk about global warming if people aren’t freezing.

I wonder what crazy things people might misconstrue my emails to mean?

Update 9:30 pm: The University will be closed for Wednesday. I received an email at 9:20 pm (a little late?) telling me what I already guessed. All non-essential personnel are to stay home, classes are canceled, etc etc, but there was something ominous at the very end of it that caught my attention:

Happy snow day! I think I will spend it designing primers and writing my term paper.

Wishing for snow…

This summer, Madison was uncharacteristically cool. Now in the late fall, it is uncharacteristically warm. It’s already halfway through November and we’ve only just had our first windshield-frost. Where’s the snow?

In Colorado, however, the snow has already piled up, and Phil Plait got to show off his ubernerdiness earlier than most. Check out his Snow Dalek!

What could I do to top that?

Happy Birthday Carl Sagan

Tip of the pipette to Phil Plait for reminding me.

Today, Carl Sagan would have been 75 years old if he had not died in 1996. As a scientist, communicator, and humanist he knew the value of science and the importance of helping people understand its full implications. The notion that we need an army of Sagans to fix the problems with public understanding and acceptance of science is often criticized by communication experts as naive – we need more approaches than just his.

But you know what, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more Carl Sagans running around. There’s room for some more scientist-communicators like Sagan on this pale blue dot.

And the winner is…

Previously, I asked my readers to come on over to Biofortified, my new home for all things transgenic, and vote for it in the Ashoka Changemakers GMO Risk or Rescue contest. Due to a large amount of support from the science blogging community, we gathered over 800 votes, winning the contest by more than a 2 to 1 margin! Read more about it here. Now I’m enjoying a nice reward of oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips, early-season candy canes, and writing a paper due tomorrow. No rest for the weary!