Slashdot

The physicist Freeman Dyson -- who made Feynman diagrams mathematically comprehensible to mere mortal physicists -- discusses some recent books about Global Warming. He accepts that anthropogenic global warming is a reality, though he departs from conventional wisdom about the urgency of fixing the problem immediately.

1. It's not clear how one is supposed to report bugs. Contact info is buried, and not well labeled. (I could just send email to taco, but he seems like an idiot... should I just email chromatic?). Ah, if you drill down through "Help & Preferences", there's a line how to report a bug. And as for mis-features?
2. There's some attempt at implementing "smooth scrolling" that's herky-jerky and irritating. Even if it worked right, it would still annoy me: when I punch "page down" or "down arrow" I want it to snap, not to stall.
3. Nested comments are indicated with a heavy side-bar -- this is unnecessary visual noise. Quotations inside of comments are also indicated with heavy side-bars and they've become very hard to see now.
4. Some comments default to a closed state, and I need to click on them to open them -- I hate this kind of thing myself, it forces me to read with my hand on the mouse. (Maybe this is fixable with pref changes? I'm trying it out).

Thus far, there's only one thing I've noticed about the new system that I like: I can get the entire current state of the discussion in one huge page: I've always disliked the way the old system split things up into several pages (it made it hard to use text searches to skim for mentions of particular sub-topics).

In any case, as the slashdot brain-drain continues apace, it's going to be harder to find things in the discussion that are worth reading. It's more like a place you duck in if you feel like arguing with 13 year-olds and government propagandists. The various "features" being added to slashdot don't seem to address any of the real problems with the system.

(Actually: there's one "new" feature that sort-of works: I was skeptical of the utility of a friends network -- it just seemed like imitating all those other sites -- but actually it's kind of useful to be able to identify a cluster of nominally intelligent folks and automatically, instantly, mod them up. Kind of like the stuff I've been doing with nn and/or gnus on usenet for many a year...)

The bradblog is carrying a request: Database Geek Wanted: Programmer Needed to Help Pima County, AZ, Election Advocates Sort Through Largest Stash of Diebold Data Ever!. This is a paid telecommute contract to do some open source programming and help save democracy. The catch? You need to know how to deal with the Microsoft JET database engine.

But according to the wikipedia article on North Pacific Gyre, some details of this are in error: "Some sources[2] have incorrectly reported that there is a 'floating continent' of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including Moore's, has verified this." The Chronicle was using the terms "marine biologists" and "oceanographers" very loosely: this is not a finding that's been confirmed by any degree-holding scientists.