Posts Tagged ‘bloggers’

April Thank-You Notes

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

To start with an aside, let me say that I have made the move from “thank yous” to “thank-you notes,” thus avoiding a “word” I didn’t like to see in print, but had nonetheless used a few times here. Sometimes the obvious solution to a problem takes a while to become visible. I will not be giving any “shout-outs.”

As usual, this blog got a ten-fold increase in daily visitors while MacSurfer’s Headline News™ had a link to a post (What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really) here. Thank you, Darren.

Other Mac sites that continue to send visitors here are PowerBook Central, and LowEnd Mac. Thanks, folks. I’m so glad that I actually have a solution to the MacBook overheating problem to point to now.

My post Some Observations on College Guides and Their Usefulness was included in the Carnival of College Admission: Kick A@$ College Links. Thank you, Elizabeth.

Joe, aka Coonass in italy, referenced and commented on Dante’s Heavenly Vision and the Physics of the Proton in his March 13 post “religion and science.” Thank you again, Joe.

David of D Dubs Reads found a lot to think about in the Dante post and added On-Screen Scientist to his blogroll. Much appreciated, David.

Denyse posted a long excerpt from the Dante piece on her Colliding Universes blog and linked to it. Thanks again, Denyse.

Harry of The Kudzu Files has placed this blog on his Blogopedia list. Thank you, Harry.

I’m programming an iPhone app (baseball related), which is taking a lot of my time, so posting will no doubt continue to be less frequent for a while. I’ll probably record another of the oldies for an audio post before long. Requests welcomed at the email address toward the upper right of this page.

Oh yes, I’m now on twitter as onscrn.

A Commercial (with Money-Saving Coupon), Some Thank Yous, and an Animal Identification

Friday, September 26th, 2008

First, the big news: OnScreen DNA’s price has been reduced by $30! The standard edition of OnScreen DNA is now $39, and the Pro edition, which empowers user-controlled simulations of gene transcription and DNA replication, costs $69. You can read the press release; but, if you haven’t already—just to get an idea of how much easier it is to visualize and understand DNA’s double helical structure and the chemical bonds that underly it when you have a three-dimensional model to play with—why not download OnScreen DNA Lite (it’s free)?

OnScreen DNA is a virtual model, of course, which is good from a number of standpoints. It costs a lot less than a hardware one, and it can be animated to show the essential three-dimensional details of how DNA works. If you know someone who teaches DNA at any level, please tell them about OnScreen DNA. If you’ve wanted to come to a deeper understanding of DNA and how genes work yourself, please note that it is now a lot easier and less expensive to do so.

As an extra inducement to readers of this blog to try OnScreen DNA, here’s a coupon code to save an additional $20: hs908. Just enter that code in the appropriate box on the order page to get OnScreen DNA for only $19. This won’t work forever, so don’t count on it being there a month from now. OK, commercial over.

I need to catch up on thank yous and acknowledgements. As always, another blog’s linking to this one implies no endorsement of views in either direction.

David, the Christian physicist and novelist who writes the He Lives blog, linked to Conversations in the Club of Truly Smart People. Thanks again, David. Another Dave, he of the Not the Religious Type blog, mentioned the same post favorably and linked to On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism. Thank you, Dave. Ropata of the Earth is My Favorite Planet blog also linked to the Bad Habits post. Thanks, Ropata.

Denyse, a very busy Catholic journalist and author on topics of religion and science, keeps three blogs going. We have exchanged some emails, and she has added the onscreen-scientist to the blog roll of Colliding Universes, which I’d say examines physics and biology from a thoughtful Intelligent Design standpoint. She also (with comments) linked to the two previously mentioned posts related to atheism and to the one on animal suffering, Cries in the Night. Thank you, Denyse.

My post about the anti-LHC campaign, Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?, coming as it did a couple of days before the first proton beam circulated in the LHC, drew more traffic than even the computer troubleshooting ones have in the past. John of the Refugees from the City blog linked to my aforementioned LHC post in two separate posts: Mixed Nuts, in which he makes a thorough exposé of the dishonestly exaggerated credentials of Walter Wagner, the main instigator of the doomsday hysteria, and also looks at Rainer Plaga’s background and work, and Whooooo Hoooooo!, which summarizes the credentials of all notable LHC opponents. Thanks, John.

I have also exchanged emails with JoWynn, who wrote to tell me how much she and her husband appreciated my Reading Proust for the Last Time post. JoWynn, in addition to being a voracious reader (including books on particle physics!), maintains a blog largely devoted to her embroidery art (Parkview 616), despite a disabling condition that confines her to one room most of the time. Thanks, JoWynn. Judy of the Reading Proust in Foxborough blog said good things about the Proust post and also linked to it. Thanks again, Judy.

Finally, I’ve decided that the predatory animal whose strange wild sounds I couldn’t identify in my Cries in the Night post was almost certainly a raccoon, based on some sounds I’ve found online. It’s funny that out of all the raccoons I’ve seen in my life, I’ve never heard one make a sound that I can remember. So, just to return to that disturbing death struggle I overheard in the middle of the night, I now imagine that it was a raccoon that had caught a squirrel. The raccoon, lacking big, powerful jaws like a dog, could have been holding the squirrel in its mouth waiting for it to die of blood loss, internal injuries, etc. The squirrel, being still alive, could have made its cries and also have mustered up the strength for a desperate struggle to escape every few minutes, which would explain the fierce raccoon sounds mixed with thrashing around that I heard periodically.

On the one hand, I’d just as soon get those sounds and speculation about what was going on out of my head, but it’s also good to have the drama linked to known animals. It changes my view of raccoons, which I had known to be scrappy fighters by reputation (able to drown dogs that were foolish enough to pursue them into the water, for example), but had never seen or heard in action.

More Thank Yous to Start June

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

I need to get caught up on some thank yous to sundry fellow bloggers that have taken the trouble to visit, read, and then link, sometimes with very nice compliments included on their pages. It also gives me an opportunity to point my many readers in new directions. I find the blogosphere to be so large as to be overwhelming. Looking at the virtually endless list of blogs in a blog directory can truly make me a bit sick with vague dismay. But, along with the myriad dull plastic needles in that worldwide haystack, there are many sharp ones of genuine steel, worthy of close examination and perhaps useful for spiritual mending or embroidering. I was glad to come across a few more of these, and, believe me, I appreciate the needle-grabbing magnets other bloggers have supplied to their readers in the form of links to this blog.

Christina, who runs the Everything Worth Reading monthly blog carnival (one of the few “carnivals” a themeless blog like this one can submit to), honored The Perfect Italian Woman as one of the worth-reading selections for the April 23 edition and with the Link of the Week (think she meant month) designation. Thank you, Christina.

Baseball in Normandy mainly recounts the fortunes of the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks, an entry in the Normandy section of the French Baseball League (whose existence was a welcome discovery for me). I hadn’t heard of most of the towns in the league, but Dunkerque and Cherbourg are familiar from World War II. Chris, who is on the team’s roster and writes the blog, also occasionally reminisces about baseball in his younger days in the States. Chris refers to himself as an ex-philosopher, but how do you stop being that? A post called Best Baseball Memory and Rick Silva, which turned out to be very well written, was what drew me to his blog. I was looking for other baseball reminiscers after I’d written A Rocky Little League Start.

I emailed Chris, thinking he might be interested in my piece, and it turned out he was. He read it and liked it, so I also told him about the follow-up It’s Only One Game when it was posted. A bit later I was pleased to see a few folks coming to this blog as a result of a post of Chris’s called Introducing Bob Estes (a nom de correspondance of your On-Screen Scientist) with a link to the two Little League coaching posts. I haven’t checked on the Chucks’ fortunes in a few days. They finished in first place during the regular season and were about to begin playoffs last time I read about them. Earlier, their season had seemed in jeopardy due to the sound (like a gun shot) foul balls make hitting the slate roofs of houses (including the mayor’s) near the field. I’ve wanted to visit the D-Day Landing sites for a long time. Now I hope I can make that trip happen during the baseball season. Thank you Chris.

Helena, an Australian lady who blogs as Dysthymiac, emailed comments about the dangerous (naturally produced) drug testosterone in regard to the risky juvenile behavior recounted in my post Times I Might Have Died, which she came to having seen a comment I’d made about a beautiful photograph elsewhere. She has since read and liked Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I and has recommended it on a couple of blogs I know of. We have exchanged emails on various topics of overlapping interest (e.g., Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Billy Sol What’s-his-name, and the blogosphere), and she has added a blogroll-type link to here on her blog. Thank you, Helena.

Norm Geras’s links contain numerous interesting blogs. One I found that way is Far-South-of-I-10, which is written by Joe, a guy who has spent years working on oil rigs and is currently in Columbia about to move to Italy. I thought he might be interested in The Perfect Italian Woman, to which I referred him. He responded with a cordial and complimentary email. Later I saw that my post Times I Might Have Died may have given him the idea to write Dancing With Death about a truly harrowing job experience on an oil rig. Joe’s gift for humorous narrative makes the story—even if your fear of heights is as strong as mine—a pleasure to read. Thank you, Joe.

A few days ago I became aware of Sports Illustrated and Proust, another blog post that referenced my Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I piece. Seeing that I had found the 1958 reference in which Ronnie Knox mentioned Proust, Michael of Orange Crate Art decided to utilize the full Sports Illustrated online archives to see just how many times and in what way Proust had been mentioned by SI in its history. So far, no Petite Bande references in the Swimsuit issue. In one excerpt, I’m afraid an NFL player was pulling the sportswriter’s leg, but the player must at least have taken some review courses in college to be able to reel off the names that he did. Referring to his reading preferences, the player said that he couldn’t abide fiction, except for “Dostoevsky and Melville,” preferring to spend his time reading “sociology, philosophy and political thought” as found in “Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Mill.” And above all, Kafka. I don’t mean to say that stuff’s not there in Proust in Kafka, but it’s still fiction. Thank you, Michael.

Sure, I read political and news blogs, but I don’t think the world needs another one, so I am not planning to join in. I am delighted to find other sorts of blogs in which people far and wide are writing well about things from their lives and thoughts which can be of interest to a number of people outside the small circle of family and friends—if only to a very small percentage of all internet users. May this blog come to be one of them.