I didn't get to play with it for long but I'll say this, it's not terrible. It ran well and was responsive. Physically it was a little too think and too heavy for my liking. The biggest issue I had was that it didn't feel like either a tablet or a netbook which was mostly, if not entirely, due to Windows 8.1. Metro was actually pretty good as a touch UI (not so good with a mouse) but once you launched an app you were in desktop Windows space which is design for mouse interaction and not easy to interact with via the touchscreen. The end result being I was constantly switching from touchscreen to keyboard which just felt counterproductive .

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

http://xkcd.com/1326

Random comic from the Archives

I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.

http://xkcd.com/806

I have Wiggles songs stuck in my head. Again.

I like this watercolor tile map. Not so great for navi, but looks super cool.

https://dperkins.org/gal/2014/html/2014-02-04.01.Musashino University.jpg.html

Let's be careful here. In science, it is quite often the case that there are not "two sides." Therefore, the exercise of free speech falls into conflict with the reliable weight of the evidence. People are free to propose testable explanations for a phenomenon, and then test them and assess their claim, but they are NOT free to hold a position counter to the weight of the evidence - that is considered "useless at best, harmful at worst" to the progress of knowledge in science. As the article notes, we do not give equal weight to a "flat earther" when somebody from the ESA or NASA goes on TV to talk about the latest scientific mission orbiting the Earth. Why do we give equal time to people who use pseudoscience to make a values argument in the vaccination issue?

In science, you draw a conclusion based on the weight of the reliable evidence. Absent such weight, you cannot draw a conclusion. Vaccine efficacy and safety has a clear weight, and that weight is toward supporting vaccination for all who can receive it (e.g. you obviously cannot vaccinate infants before a certain age, and you cannot vaccinate immune-compromised individuals). There is a SEPARATE issue that has much less to do with the scientific assessment, and that is the values issue regarding your policy for vaccination. For instance, you might ask, "What is the balance of personal choice and community good in the vaccination policy discussion?" That is primarily a values issue - and there is little or no scientific assessment of either side, except to tell you the consequences of vaccinating more or less. Raise the values issue, and there will be thousands of sides - thousands of personal nuanced opinions. There is a healthy place for free speech, because there isn't conclusive scientific evidence for one side or the other.

Free speech that flies in the face of the weight of the scientific evidence does a disservice to both science and values discussions. Science journalists should feel NO obligation to give false balance on the matters of vaccine efficacy and safety - there are NOT two sides there. As a society, we need to learn better to separate the scientific issues from the values issues; science journalists are an important part of the solution, learning when fairness in speech is appropriate (e.g. a values question) and when it is not (e.g. opinions counter to the weight of the evidence, and absent their own reliable evidence, deserve no weight in a discussion of a purely scientific question).

Continuing with my re-watch of Farscape. You haven't lived until you've seen Claudia Black watch Sesame Street and get angry because the little girl can't remember the alphabet.

This girl is slow. Again with the Cookie Monster!

Had me a real Belgian wafel and earlier some Belgian fries drowned in mayonaise

That was originally "girlfriends" not "partners", but then I realised maybe I'd just been lucky to have had boyfriends who pick up their own poop.

(That's a joke, no one picks up their own poop)

-33°C!!!!

I don't know if hell is freezing over, but Canada is!

On a general level, this is great. A good question about Android apps. Three people with three good suggestions for apps, all of which are free and in FDroid. The system is working well, I feel. :-)

Not the Onion, eh? The Wall Street Journal actually published this on their website. Amazing.

Friday. Great!

Sorry identi.ca/pump.io, you just don't fulfill my social network needs. I registered today om quitter.se just to see how status.net looks nowadays. Not really good (compared to the old times), but in the past few hours I saw far more life over there than I see here in a week. Plus it had all the features that I loved when I started using identi years ago, things like:

- plain text messages (I have no need for formatting)

- simple tags - # @ ! (these make finding relevant notices extremely easy)

- groups, groups, groups!!! (essential thing for me!)

- 140 character limit (I like how it makes each note a small mind game to compress your thoughts into so few characters, but still say what you want)

All this was thrown away on pump.io just to get a single visible thing in return (probably more stuff under the hood but that's not something a user interacts with) - html, the nasty formatting, embedding, etc... I can't even simply paste a paragraph from a website to send it here, as it carries colors, font styles, even a background! It's so frustrating.

I felt so happy using status.net today that I can't put it into words - I found how much I was missing the simple, yet perfect (for me) microblog format. The sad thing in all this is that the awesome community that was on identi.ca before pump.io, has nearly completely dissapeared in both places. Some people here, some people there and a pretty large group that went to proprietary networks.

That's why I'm going back to status.net. *I'm not leaving identi.ca though*, I'll still post here too when I'll have anything interesting to say, but it's going to be my secondary social network. Sorry, I think I waited long enough for pump.io to get back on track where status.net was at the moment of the change. It's not there today and I don't anticipate it in the forseeable future.

Sorry Evan, JanKusanagi and everyone else who put hard work into making pump.io and tools around it - it's just not ready to use yet. It dropped/replaced too many features, that haven't been brought back. I hope that one day pump.io will be more awesome than status.net, but it's not today.

I feel bad for saying all this, but that's how I feel now.