Indi in the Wired

Once Again, Testing New Toys

When I edited this blog to serve as proper XHTML, I was required to disable the footnotes plug-in I originally selected. It was a bummer, to be sure, because I really wanted footnotes. It took me a while to sum up the cojones to try again, but I finally did decide to test out a couple new plug-ins.

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Fun with Google in the Luminiferous Æther

Archaeology is the devil’s work

While I was Googling around to find links for my last post on the motivation behind my blog’s subtitle, “Just another dark star in the luminiferous æther”, I stumbled across a couple of interesting links that I thought I’d share with you. In fact, the experience was so delightful that I may even make this something I do regularly in the future. I shall pick a strange and rarely used phrase – preferably something amusingly quaint – Google it, and see what pops up. If anyone has any suggestions for phrases I might try, I would welcome them enthusiastically (just post a comment!). For now, let’s see what “dark star” and “luminiferous æther” turned up.

Continue reading Fun with Google in the Luminiferous Æther…

Equations Enabled, for Better or Worse

Depending on your personal perspective, you may greet the news that I have figured out how to enable equations in WordPress with anything ranging from a cheer to a roll of the eyes.

Continue reading Equations Enabled, for Better or Worse…

Now Serving: Proper XHTML Content Type

You may call me anal for it, but I am a bit of a standards freak. My default installation of WordPress was serving XHTML 1.0 Transitional web pages using the mime-type “text/html”… and that just grated on my nerves. Not only was I bothered by the fact that I was using the transitional XHTML subset (ugh), I was really ticked off that it was being served with the wrong content type. Not finding any options to change these settings in the administration pages, I resigned myself to having to dick around with the PHP to fix these shortcomings. Happily, I was only partly right.

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Putting My Face On

Aside from my first blog post, my other blog project for today was making the first baby steps into customizing my blog. Thus far it has been a wonderfully hassle-free and pleasant experience.

Continue reading Putting My Face On…

Embarking Upon My Circumnavigation of the Blogosphere

For years I have been inundated with hyperbolic rhetoric about the “blogosphere”. I remember when it was new and young, and sites like LiveJournal were still shaping up as little more than online personal diaries. I had little interest in sharing the details of my life with any reader pathetic enough to find them interesting, and so I watched from a distance with detached, academic amusement as the then-unnamed blogosphere was born (or, to be more precise, the name may have existed, but was not in common use at the time).

As these online diaries evolved more toward social networks (as in the case of LiveJournal and MySpace), I saw more and more people requesting that I jump on and join in. However, as I am an avowed anti-social bastard by determined choice, the prospect of joining a globe-spanning social web was entirely underwhelming. Once again, I declined to participate, and opted to observe the phenomenon from the sidelines.

But then everything changed, and blogs became less of online diaries and nodes in giant social networks and more of a new kind of collaborative journalism. I followed this new development eagerly at first, but it was not long thereafter that the “professional” media caught whiff of the wind of change… and the next thing I knew I was flooded with hype about the “future of amateur journalism”.

At first, I followed the news reports, because as a tech nerd myself, I am always pleased to see technological innovations touted positively in the media (although, of course, being the soul-sucking bottom-feeders that they are, they did manage to find negative angles about blogging to focus on). But eventually the sheer volume of coverage was just too much, and I found myself burnt out on “blog overload”. Just hearing the word made me roll my eyes.

The heat has died down somewhat now, and I came around finally to considering joining the blogosphere. I still have no interest in the social networking aspect, and even less in sharing details of my personal life, but I am disturbed by the volume of bad content I see on the Internet – bad in the quality of both the writing and the content – and I see this as my opportunity to do something about it, however small. It is just my admittedly unscientific opinion, but there seems to be far more illiterate tripe on the Internet than real, thoughtful content. And even worse is the proliferation of bad science, including crackpot theories and oft-repeated lies, that I feel I must do my part to fight against. My contribution may be ultimately futile and forgettable, but it is my firm belief that everyone who believes in rational, balanced thought should do their part and speak out against ignorance and anti-scientific nonsense.

Thus, the time was ripe for me to join the blogosphere, and armed with a mission to speak for honest, rational thought and the defence of science against those who would try to undermine it for religious and political motivations, I installed the WordPress blogging software. This being my very first entry (other than editing some of the default text supplied), it is too early to speak of my impressions of the experience so far.

But it feels damned good to speak out – especially when one has the possibility of being heard and making a difference, however small.

Hello, blogosphere. My name is Indiana. よろしくおねがいします。