Blogs

This whole Los Alamos National Laboratory thing should be studied by someone interested in organizational communication. The lead: "A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos."

And later in the article:

The blog runs a petition for Dr. Nanos's immediate removal; it has garnered more than 100 signers, although most have concealed their names.

One who signed openly in February was Dr. Brad Lee Holian, a theoretical physicist who worked at the lab for 32 years. He retired a month later.

"People were feeling like they were in a pressure cooker," Dr. Holian said in an interview last week. "Nanos is so abusive, not just to the general staff but his underlings. People were afraid to say anything. On the blog they could vent without fear of reprisal."

Interesting in terms of its implications for leadership, communicative norms, scientific/technical communication, privacy, etc.

Who else is watching it? Want to post your thoughts here?

I should probably create a category for comics.

ComicLife is addictive; at least for me it's going to be, I can already tell. I'm actually late for a dinner for Cristina because of this fool thing.

One day my comics might be as good as Collin's. Not today.

Went to theory.org.uk to see if I could download that theory screen saver for my iBook, and I found these theory Lego sets, just added, including Anthony Giddens in his study:

More here. No Zizek though, bummer.

Read Jodi Egerton's birth story. So beautiful and touching. [UPDATE: Or just go to her main page and scroll down to "Birthing Arden." I don't know why the permalinks aren't working.]

Soon it might be legal to hunt cats in Wisconsin, as it's apparently been in Minnesota for "decades." (Via Mike.)

The morning-after pill will soon be available over the counter in Canada.

I'm thinking about getting this program Jeff recommends. [UPDATE: I realized I can download it free of charge, so I did, and I played around with it. I love it!]

Eugene Volokh discusses quotation marks used with other punctuation. No response yet from Ben Wolfson.

Don't miss Media Girl's Earth Day post.

You might notice that I've added my OCB buddy Rachel Raimist's blog to my blogroll. Definitely check it out. I think it would be a great addition to the blogroll at Blackfeminism.org; I point that out because Tiffany was asking for suggestions of good blogs to add not too long ago.

Songs I've had in my head recurringly throughout the day: "Red Skies" by The Fixx -- better than "One Thing Leads to Another," I guess -- and "Mediate" by INXS.

Okay, so ever since I bought this iBook and hooked it up to my cable modem, I haven't been able to connect to the internet with my desktop (a PC). EVERY TIME it says "A network cable is unplugged." No it's not! It's plugged!! I've spent hours on the phone with Comcast tech support, and I've done the following:

• Turned everything off, unplugged everything (modem, machine), plugged everything back in, turned everything back on again (oh, and I have done this MANY times)
• Uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers for my network card (which is built into the motherboard)
• Done a System Restore

The people at Comcast think it's a glitch in the operating system. There's obviously nothing wrong on Comcast's end, and the modem is fine; I have no trouble at all connecting with the iBook. Why would everything work perfectly for almost a year now -- the whole time I've been living in this apartment -- and all of a sudden stop working completely? Aaaarrgh. Microsoft is crap. It's the only logical conclusion.

Here. I think I'd seen this blog before, but I just noticed that they started it to discuss a 2004 Computers & Writing workshop on Ethno Techno Pedagogies.