Diffluent petrosomatoglyph

diffluent (adj.): Flowing apart or off; dissolving; not fixed.

petrosomatoglyph (n.): an image of parts of an animal or human body incised in rock.

Well, I don't have much to say again. Petrosomatoglyph also happens to be Greek-based, but if you want, look up the roots yourself this time (if you have a decent vocabulary, you probably know them, actually). So, first some random news (shamelessly stolen off the Google feed):

Apparently, at least in some parts of the world, snail mail is now as slow as snails. Of course, this isn't too surprising, when you take into account some parcels are lost and never delivered - and thus much slower than snails. This is probably also a pretty isolated case - but even if snail mail isn't quite as slow as snails, it's still pretty... slow.

There have been some UFO sightings in Texas, and the Air Force claims that the UFOs were actually jets. Nevertheless, given the general mentality of people, there's definitely going to be a spike in conspiracy theories for a while. In fact, MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) - which coincidentally has a site that looks like a practical joke, but I am assured is quite real - already thinks there's a conspiracy involved, and says that if they were really jets, the Air Force should send them to fly around Texas again! Even despite the fact that the Air Force mission was apparently clandestine to some extent ("What we do down there falls under operational procedures that cannot be released because of operations security for our mission"), I very much doubt the Air Force would repeat this exercise (or whatnot) just for the sake of MUFON =).

Obama won the South Carolina primary last night. Not at all surprising, considering that South Carolina has one of the biggest black voter populations (but of course, race doesn't matter in politics).

The name of the 22nd James Bond movie will be "Quantum of Solace", again starring Craig. Hopefully there'll actually be some action, this time.

Wikinews has crosswords, by the way. Considering I can actually do them, they seem to be pretty easy, but whatever.

Okay, enough random news. I think I'll also talk about blogs now.

So, Josh talked a bit about blogs yesterday. Mainly about proper blogging/commenting conduct. And indeed, there's a lot written/understood about such etiquette.

But some of what Josh posted is pretty misleading. Especially "if you ask questions about something answered in the blog post, it means that you either didn't read well, or are questioning the author's credibility, both of which you are not supposed to do".

Questioning the author's credibility is perfectly fine. In fact, it's desired. Go ahead, and challenge our credibility. That leads to good conversation.

Secondly, lurking isn't so bad. You can't honestly expect everyone to reply to all blog/forum posts they read - that would take way too long, and most of the replies would probably be rather pointless. Of course, replies are good - if you have something meaningful to say, please go ahead and comment! But it's much preferred that if you only have inane things to say, keep them to yourself.

Thirdly, don't worry too much if your comment is inane or not. Chances are, if it's logically consistent, not horribly grammar-ed, and not something oversaid and meaningless like "LOL", "wow...", "wtf?!", etc. it's good. Comments aren't supposed to be blog posts in themselves - they can really be as short as "The link to is broken." or "oh yeah, they mentioned in ... you might want to check it out". You just basically want to have some information content in a comment.

And trolling is pretty unavoidable, so it's probably going to happen. But it happens on practically every blog/forum, and it's usually just moderated away one way or another. Boing Boing had a funny method for dealing with trolls a while ago - disemvowelment.

And bleh, the Latex server died (go look at the monism bruit post). I'll have to find some more reliable server for it.

Anyway, that's all for now. Oh, and if I go to Indiana in March I get a free $250, but that's another story. Until then, ciao.

-squidout