Knowing me, knowing you

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

“Breaking up is never easy, I know, but it’s time to go” – ABBA
This will be my last post on Nature Network.
I’ve been blogging here since January 2008, and I’ve greatly enjoyed being part of the community. I’ve “met” and become friends (no quotation marks) with some wonderful people, and I’ve had a whole heap of fun. However, there have been several times over the last year when I’ve wondered whether it’s all worth it – as a blogger, not as a commenter, I hasten to add. Some conversations I’ve had over the last few months – some private, other more recent ones on NN (e.g. here, here, here, and here ) – have made me realise that really, it’s just not worth it any more.
Put simply, the benefits of the status quo should outweigh the drawbacks. And they don’t.
Here’s my reasoning:
Drawbacks
When I started blogging here I kept up my original Blogspot blog for my many non-science related posts, and almost immediately realised that it takes a great deal of extra effort to compartmentalise my blogging efforts by splitting them over two sites. I usually have a good sense for which ideas belong on which blog, based on category – but then depending on the tone of each individual post, some categories (notably my grant-related posts) get split between the two sites.
There’s also the problem of motivation. Like any blogger, I go through peaks and troughs of activity – sometimes I have more ideas than I have time to post, and at other times I wait weeks for inspiration and motivation to strike. The specific kind of motivation I need in order to write science-related posts waxes and wanes even within that overall variation in output, meaning that if I happen to hit a trough within a trough, I sometimes have so few ideas for posts on this blog that it starts to feel like a chore to keep it up.
Besides, the split feels increasingly artificial. There’s not a Scientist-Cath and an Other Interests-Cath – they’re all just different aspects of who I am as a whole. Things would just be so much more natural (not to mention easier) if I was blogging on just one site.
So much for the drawbacks of maintaining two blogs. What about the drawbacks of blogging on a network provided and controlled by a corporate entity?
Well, this is another thing I’ve struggled with. I have nothing specific against NPG, but they’re still… The Man. There are always going to be restrictions on my blogging – for good reason, I do understand that – but it still grates. Earlier this year I had the experience of asking permission to write a specific post, and being allowed to include most, but not all, of the features I wanted. Again, I understand the reasons for this – that’s why I asked – but there are no such restrictions on my other blog (compare and contrast). Plus over there I get control of my header, blogroll, stats, comment policies, and other features (such as my popular “Bragging Rights Central” feature where I quote and link to my favourite comments and posts of the week in the right sidebar).
Benefits?
When people talk about the benefits of blog networks, they usually mention increased traffic and visibility.
Well, yesterday’s events confirmed a suspicion that’s been nagging at me for a while.
I already knew that I have far, far fewer subscribers to my NN blog’s RSS feed than to my other blog’s feed (based on Google Reader stats). But that’s OK, right? Because it’s a network, so you don’t need RSS! People will find your blog from the main blogs homepage!
Erm, no. It turns out that even other NN bloggers, who know the site and the system, can’t find my blog that way and forget that it’s there.
Hence my little “if you read this blog, please click through to where I can see some stats” experiment yesterday.
Here are some graphs showing the relative hits I received from that NN experiment post over 24 hours, compared to the first 24 hour’s worth of hits on the last post on my Blogspot blog (the two were written ~8 hours apart and I tweeted both links. According to my j.mp URL shortener stats, the NN post tweet got 50% more clicks than the Blogspot post tweet). My RSS subscriber stats are also shown.
NNstats
Yeah. Not so much of a benefit, eh?
The hits on my recent Blogspot blog post are almost certainly an underestimate, as I don’t know how many of the people who viewed just my main front page over those 24 hours read the post in question, so I didn’t count them. However, I’m confident that I captured every single person who clicked through from NN.
A silly post I wrote this morning consisting of a photo of my dental floss has more hits in 8.5 hours than that NN post managed in 24.
The interesting thing is that the majority of the people who clicked through from my NN blog weren’t first-time visitors to my other blog. In fact many of them are frequent visitors and/or regular commenters. But they don’t comment over here – and I’ve had two people confirm that this is because of the NN login requirements, which I understand are not going to change.
Conclusion
I’m sorry, but the drawbacks of blogging here far outweigh the benefits. It’s clear that the best thing *for me* is to consolidate all my blogging on my Blogspot blog, while continuing to read and comment here so that I can enjoy the community and hang out with my friends.
This is not about MT4 – the technical problems will eventually be resolved, I’m sure. This is a personal, selfish, and lazy decision based on what’s right for me.
It’s not you, it’s me. No, really, it’s me.
Staying in touch
I do >80% of my blog reading through RSS feeds (and the rest through blog rolls), so I’ll still read all the blogs I currently read, and can easily follow them wherever they may wander over the years.
If you’d like to stay in touch (and I really, really hope you will), I’ll be blogging here.
I’m also on Twitter.
See you around… probably tomorrow morning, in the comments… you don’t get rid of me that easily!

Posted in Uncategorized | 42 Comments

This is my dental floss

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

That is all.

(See last post if confused!)

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Experiment

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Please can y’all do me a favour?
If you usually read this blog, please click this link to my other blog (random post chosen because it’s old and has no comments on it) so I can get an idea of my reader numbers.
If you don’t usually read this blog, please don’t click the link! You’re not missing much, unless you’re really interested in gene duplication in yeast, in which case maybe click the link in a few days once I’ve forgotten all about this post.
Thanks!

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Catho the Sane visits Canadian Tire

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

In So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth of five books in the Hitchhiker trilogy by Douglas Adams, our hero Arthur Dent travels to California to meet a man called Wonko the Sane. Wonko’s house is inside-out, with brickwork and a nice garden inside (or “outside the Asylum”, as he calls it), and nice wallpaper, carpeting, and outward-facing furniture against all the outside walls. Wonko explains the purpose of his inside-out house as follows:

“I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, the poor thing, and hoped it would get better.”

The words that inspired this final realization are displayed “inside” the house, above the door that leads into the Asylum, to discourage Wonko from entering. They read:

“Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion”.

————-

“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

Now, I think old Wonko might be slightly off-base here. I mean, I once had to teach my Dad, an intelligent and educated man, how to use dental floss because he professed not to know how it worked. So maybe we do need instructions in our packets of toothpicks.

However, I do agree that the world has gone insane and needs to be put in an asylum of some kind.

I had my own final realization yesterday, in the camping equipment aisles of Canadian Tire. While Mr E Man perused collapsible coolers and gazed longingly at hunting knives and fishing gear, I entertained myself by looking at all the little plasticky gadgetty things.

Now, I’m a sucker for gadgets. I’ve bought the Scoop’N’Strain and the Grip’N’Flip off the TV – but those are actually useful things that serve a unique purpose. So I did have to restrain myself slightly in the camping equipment aisles, with my usual refrain of “that’s cool, oh but I don’t need it, but it might come in handy, oh right but PLASTIC IS TEH EVULS!!!”.

Until I spotted my Wonko the Sane item.

At that point I abandoned all restraint and whipped out my iPhone to take a photo for your amusement:

That’s right, folks – someone has seen fit to design, patent, manufacture, and market a piece of plastic that has the sole purpose of propping open your cooler lid while the inside dries. No longer must you improvise with wads of newspaper, sticks, stones, pencils, or any of that other primitive nonsense – what are you, a savage??!! Nope, you must buy this item that will outlast you, your species, and probably your planet in a landfill somewhere….

…because the world has gone stark raving bonkers.

If anyone needs me I’ll be moving all my furniture outside and planting trees in my living room.

Posted in camping, environment, freakishness, photos, rants, shopping, silliness | 39 Comments

That Round-Headed Kid-ding

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

The movie industry is a harsh mistress, all boom and bust. When a big production comes to town, there’s plenty of work (and overtime) to go around – but the lean times can be very lean indeed for Mr E Man and his fellow spaceship builders, and there’s always the fear that shiny new tax breaks in Toronto or Australia or elsewhere will lure the big money away.

This uncertain environment is a fertile breeding ground for speculation and rumours of The Next Big One. Mr E Man often reports back from the studio with tales of the film he might be working on next, some of the tales plausible, but others more on the “what on Earth will Hollywood think of next?! Who watches this shit?” spectrum.

So, yesterday, Mr E Man decided to start his own rumour. He made it as preposterous as he could, but apparently he has several people believing that after the current show, the whole crew will be moving on to a big budget, live-action remake of…

A Charlie Brown Christmas.

With George Clooney as Charlie Brown.

And Angelina Jolie as Lucy.

Image source. All the other Peanuts images were copyrighted.

Mr E Man has given me permission to blog this story, in the hopes that my readers can come up with even more preposterous rumours for him to spread once this one dies down.

Posted in silliness | 9 Comments

Out of this world?

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Before work this morning, I read part of an article in New Scientist[1] about the history and future of unmanned lunar exploration. The moon was referred to as “another world”, as in (and I paraphrase) “[some robot that landed on the moon] was the first [robot thingy. Lander?] to bring back [stuff] from another world”[2].
I’ve never really thought about this before, but now that it’s on my mind, I’d say that my concept of what this world is, includes the moon.
(It definitely includes tides, too, but probably not werewolves).
My concept of what this world is may be incorrect in an astronomical sense, but it feels right in a cultural and human sense. I mean, a world without a moon? That’s Krikkit just not cricket!

1 from July 2008; I have a slight backlog

2 it was very, very early this morning

Posted in silliness, things I'm not really qualified to write about | 12 Comments

SIR YES SIR!

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Would it be wrong to interpret the first two words of this list as a direct order?

Posted in photos, silliness | 6 Comments

LMAO, eh?

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

An article called Canadian Beacon jumped out at me from my Nature Medicine RSS feed yesterday. As a good bacon (and pun) loving syrup sucker ice hole Canadian, I clicked through to read the whole article, and almost immediately attracted a colleague to my desk to see what all the laughing was aboot about.
For this, my friends, was the graphic used to illustrate the list of drugs most commonly purchased from online Canadian pharmacies by Americans:
Picture 25
The only way this could possibly have been any funnier is if they’d used an image of a lumberjack instead of a mountie in conjunction with the words “female hormone replacement therapy”
(Obligatory video:

)
Well played, Nature Medicine. This article made my entire week.

Posted in silliness | 6 Comments

Friday quiz: science mnemonics

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

From the same puzzle of the day desk calendar that gave us the science anagram puzzles post back in February, here’s an entry called “Abbreviated Science”!
There are six science-related1 mnemonics listed below. The actual calendar page also listed the six answers and asked you to match them up (answer = scientific field + description – e.g. for the “Every Good Boy Deserves Football” mnemonic, it would have said “Field: Music. Description: the lines of a treble staff”). However, the combined expertise of this audience should render the answers unnecessary; I got three without looking at any part of the answers (although two of them weren’t the exact mnemonics I was taught at school), and got another two once I knew which fields they were from.
As before, please submit only one answer per commenter per hour, to give people in other time zones a chance to take part!
(Also: I suspect this will be waaaaay too easy, so let’s spread it out).
Time permitting, I’ll update the post with the answers as they come in.
Have fun!
1) Big Boys Romance Our Young Girls Behind Victory Garden Walls
(Eva has it right that these are colours: Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White. But colours of what…?)
(Bob subsequently guessed the right answer – colours of resistors, in electronics, apparently)
2) Better Go Home Every Night Completely Paid
(Mod Scientist knew this one, and registered just to claim the bragging rights! It’s the nations of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. Not science, but I did warn you!)
3) Camels Often Sit Down Carefully; Perhaps Their Joints Creak

  • geological epochs. Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous)*

4) Kings Play Chess On Fine Grained Sand
(Guess who: it’s Bob! With the Linnean hierarchy – Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species)
5) Harry He Likes Beer, But Can Not Obtain Food
(Bob: First 9 elements of the periodic table. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine)
6) My Very Eager Mother Just Sewed Us New Pajamas
(Bob again: the planets of the solar system, plus poor little Pluto. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto)

1 One entry requires a rather loose definition of “science”

Posted in fun with language, science, silliness | 45 Comments

This rut is NOT the middle ground I’m looking for!

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

I’m in a real exercise slump at the moment. After the exertion of the ride down to Seattle, and all the training I was doing before that, I thought “I’ve worked hard for a long time and I deserve a rest as a reward. I won’t do any exercise for a few days”. Suddenly weeks have passed, I’m stuck in a pattern, and I feel like a slob*.

Unfortunately, this is a recurring pattern for me – and not just with exercise. For example, I went on a very strict diet for a few months before my wedding. When it was all over, I thought “I’ve deprived myself for a long time and I deserve to indulge myself as a reward. I’ll eat whatever I like for a few days”. Suddenly weeks had passed, I was stuck in a pattern, and I felt fat.

This is bad and self-destructive and needs to stop.

But what to do? I don’t want to never allow myself any rewards, ever – but once I start to indulge myself, I find it very, very difficult to stop. Any excuse becomes a good excuse, even though I know I’ll feel a hundred times better if I tell myself “no it’s not too hot / too windy / too much hassle, just go for a run already!” or “you’ll regret the chips, ask for the salad instead!”

Why must my bad habits be so much harder to break than the good ones?!

Why can’t I find some middle ground between “training all the time” and “being a slob”??!!

Ah well, at least there’s no chance of me falling into the same trap at work. Rewards, rest, and self-indulgence? HA!!! The Sentient Grant of DOOM may be submitted, but all that means is that it’s time to catch up on all the other work that got put on the back burner during the frenzy!

*I’m still cycling to work and back, which is better than nothing but not nearly enough.

Posted in exercise, food glorious food, personal, whining | 15 Comments