I’ve gotten a number of comments on various posts here in the last few weeks. Most of them were quite obviously spam. A few, though, seemed almost but somehow not quite on topic. A closer look showed names with homepage links to sites with terms like “payday” or “sex” in the url. In those cases I’ve been marking them as spam and deleting them.

Then there was this comment by someone named ocljlwijlmcds which says merely “ocljlwijlmcds”. So why didn’t I delete that one, too? Because as strange as it is there is no link or email associated with it so I have no reason to believe it’s spam. It’s possible that it was made by someone who has had previous comments deleted as spam and was just testing to see if I was indiscriminately deleting comments.

If so I just wanted to assure everyone that I’m not just deleting comments just because I feel like it, or because I don’t like the comments. In all cases they’ve been deleted because I have good reason to believe they are spam. In the future, if you want to make a legitimate comment, please try and make sure that it’s on topic and meaningful in some way. If your homepage URL has something “spammy” in it, mention that so that I know to take that into account when assessing your comment.

I’ve just recently realized why this blog has been so lame lately. I used to hang out at blogs whose owners I disagreed with, such as Uncommon Descent or Telic Thoughts. I’d get into debates about this or that and find myself really having to research and understand things that I would never have looked up on my own. I had something interesting to say because I was always learning something new by having to defend my own knowledge and beliefs.

Since being banned from those sites I’ve visited less and less because as an onlooker who has no chance of participating it’s not any fun. That means I’ve spent more and more time at places like Pharyngula and The Panda’s Thumb. I agree with most of the posts that appear there, so the posts here have slowly declined in value as I have nothing much more to add to such discussions. Instead of building on something like “You’re wrong and this is why…” I’m trying to build on something like “Yup…you’re right…” which doesn’t lend itself to much more than agreement.

Knowing this, I’m adding those two sites back into my normal site rotation in the hopes that they will kick start my blog again. I may not be able to interact with those people directly, but hopefully I’ll see enough that I disagree with to make this site interesting again.

I’m out of town on family business, so I haven’t had much of a chance to post anything lately. Here’s a few things that have interested me in the last week. I’m not gonna elaborate much, but here they are:

• Obama Team Continues Effort to Isolate Fox News – Of course Obama isn’t saying anything that isn’t known by pretty much everyone anyway. However, I’m not sure if this is the way to handle it. First pass impression is that this will backfire. However, what are the alternatives? Simply ignore it? Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll give it some thought and get back to you.
• Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute – A very good spoof on ID and their quest to work their way into the US schools.
• Futurity – I heard about this site from an NPR story. I’m not sure exactly what to make of it yet. So far it seems great. However, since the stories are direct from the sources, rather than being vetted by a professional Science journalist (a dying breed), they may not be as accurate as one would like. I’m keeping an eye on this one, and I may be making posts about stories found here soon.
• New view reveals how DNA fits into cell – I want to make a post about fractals soon, and I think this might be a good jumping off point.

That’s all I really have time for at the moment. I’ll try and get back to this as soon as I am able.