Website upgrade and other matters

If you look to the right of this site’s main page, you’ll see that the links have been revamped, to reflect my new book. (The name of the website will, of course, stay the same.)  The margin now looks like this: (Thanks again to Kalliopi Monoyios for doing this update; I’m completely useless at website design.) A […]

Website tweaking

Or, as the signs say, “A temporary inconvenience—a permanent improvement.” Actually, I don’t think there will be any inconvenience, but I wanted to let people know that we (and by “we,” I mean Kalliopi “Kapi” Monoyios, the artist who designed this website, illustrated both WEIT and Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, and co-runs Symbiartic,  a scientific-illustration website at […]

Dennis Markuze to be sentenced for online harassment

According to the Montreal Gazette, a figure known to many of us, Dennis Markuze, (aka “David Mabus”) is to be sentenced Thursday for violating his probation, which involved a conviction for making violent threats against many atheist writers and bloggers. I wasn’t Markuze’s biggest target, but I got the threats often enough to be a tad […]

Year end statistics for this site

WordPress has sent me the summary statistics for this year’s postings, and I thought I’d share some of them.  First, the total views: That “no conflict” post, sadly, does not reflect anything good I wrote; it’s this post that shows this sign: As always, the most popular posts are those picked up by reddit, and […]

Should I join Patheos?

The people who run Patheos and its atheist channel have asked me to join that channel. I haven’t made any decision, nor am I yet even leaning one way or another. I thought, then, that I’d ask the readers how they feel about this, both to see if people might abscond (I don’t want to […]

Diana MacPherson

This is the first post I’ve ever titled with a reader’s name, but it came to me instantly when I saw this picture. If you don’t know what this means, you ain’t been around long enough. But I’m sure someone will explain in the comments. Photo from Pet Stuff Web, in a series of ten […]

A new Rool

I’d like to add one more Rool to “da Roolz” list, and one that isn’t onerous. In fact it’s quite simple: please do not make any comments that consist only of a link.  That is often puzzling, because we don’t know why you’re putting up such a link.  Is it because you agree with it, […]

Read the Roolz

Traffic has continued to increase on this site—we’re up to between 25,000 and 30,000 views per day—but with that good news comes the bad. The influx of new commenters is, to my mind, changing the tone of this site. Perhaps used to the impoliteness and insults pervasive on other sites, some new commenters are engaging […]

Guerrilla Skeptics create and update Wikipedia pages (including mine)

About a month ago I received an email from Susan Gerbic—who helps run Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia (GSoW)—telling me that they were revamping my Wikipedia page. I was surprised, as of course I hadn’t solicited this, and had no idea who started the page in the first place—nor who updates it.  And I’d barely heard […]

Jerry Coyne at 7 weeks

I am flying to Boston this afternoon for R&R and won’t return until Monday evening. Ergo, posting will be light—unless, that is, my readers don’t want me to have a life.  But as a fare-thee-well-treat, here’s a video of my namesake. Reader Gayle Ferguson took and uploaded this video of ginger tabby Jerry Coyne at […]