I’ve been set back a bit on my posting schedule, thanks to a delightful combination of factors: I was going to try to integrate TypeKey identification into my comments sections in order to help control spam; but first I found out that I’d have the joy of having to reformat my hard drive and get back up to speed from a clean install and, thank God, up-to-the-minute full backups. (It’s a tale of woe, but also a boring one. Don’t ask.)

TypeKey is, I think, close to completed. Immediate effects you may notice: (1) you can now sign in using your TypeKey identity when posting comments on individual entries; (2) if you don’t sign in using a TypeKey identity, your comments will be held up momentarily for moderation. It’s not that I don’t love you all, it’s just that spammers run amok here as elsewhere, and I’ve had to deal with one no-conscience asshole too many lately. If you do comment pretty frequently here, and you don’t have one already, it may speed things a bit for you if you sign up for a TypeKey identity (all you need is a valid e-mail address). If you don’t, that’s fine too–your comments will just go up as soon as I have the chance to screen them.

Let me know what you think about the changes; and forgive me if things are a little dusty in the comments department for the rest of the night. Actual content should be resuming within (I hope!) the next day.

Today (or yesterday, depending on how you count these things) is the 6,000th birthday of the Universe, according to the calculations of Bishop James Ussher. I hope that Young Earth Creationists around the world are living it up over this sextamillenial weekend.

Well, not really: life, the Universe, and everything was calculated by Ussher to have been created around 6:00pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC; and from 4004 BC to AD 2004 is actually not a round 6,000 years, but rather 6,007 (remembering that there is no year 0). The cosmos’s 6,000th actually passed us by at this time of the year in 1997. But if a preference for nice round numbers can make 2000 CE the time to mark the beginning of the second millennium, it can make 2,004 the time to mark 6,000 years from the Beginning.

In the meantime, you can celebrate the occasion with a delightful article about Pufferfish genomes from The Panda’s Thumb, or Roderick Long’s post on the shared premises of creationism and (state) socialism from earlier this year at Austro-Athenian Empire. (Let me just add that Long’s comments on socialism apply to state socialism but not to those of us whose flags are Black as well as Red. There is no place for central production boards or Five Year Plans here, and spontaneous unplanned harmony is no problem for us in nature or in politics–just ask Prince Kropotkin.)

This isn’t a meme, damn it. It’s something worth mentioning, though, because it’s fun and remarkably accurate. Which OS Are You?

Which OS are You?

(Link thanks to Clancy at CultureCat 2004/10/15, who has the distinction of being Debian Linux.) Read the rest of Nerd Games …

If recent Presidential debates have not been entirely to your liking, then you might enjoy this vigorous, reasoned debate on foreign policy between two men with strongly held views.

(Link thanks to Alina Stefanescu’s Flippity floppity.)

Dear Porn-spamming Morons:

Just so you know, you are wasting your time.

Posting the URI of your website in the comments sections of my weblog does not increase your Google ratings, for even a split-second. My weblog software routes all links in the comments section through a redirection script; since search engines don’t see the address of your site anywhere on my pages, you get no Google-bombing benefit from it. If your aim is to boost the search engine ratings of your silly little wank sites, you are wasting your time.

Spam comments are usually deleted from my website within a matter of minutes. Your spam disappears and your IP address is banned from posting again. If your aim is to drive people who happen upon my website to your silly little wank sites, you are still wasting your time.

I won’t tell you to stop. It’s a little bit of annoyance for me to zap your comments as they come in, but I think that the pornography you are peddling is misogynist, pernicious, and ultimately very sad stuff. So I’m glad to put up with a little bit of annoyance, when I have the minor satisfaction of knowing that you are wasting your time, and your sponsors’ money, posting empty spam comments that spend 15 minutes or so doing nothing on a pedantic anarcha-feminist boy’s website before they are deleted. If you want to continue wasting your time, by all means do so.

But you are wasting your time. Just so you know.