Category Archives: Science And Society

My Lawsuit

It’s now been two years since we requested an en banc rehearing of our case before the D.C. Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, twenty-four news organizations have filed amici on our behalf. I actually knew about this a few weeks ago, but decided to link this when Anthony’s site noted it.

[Afternoon update]

Here is the original report, which has several misquotes and misattributions (e.g., it misspells “warm mongers” and attributes some of my words to Mark Steyn).

Ashe And Ember Update

Remember the sister kittens we adopted just before Christmas?

Kittens

Well, we took them in for their third vaccination yesterday, and (SURPRISE), it turns out that Ember (the one on the right) is not a sister, but a brother. The other couple who adopted the other two of the litter discovered that they had one of each, which meant that we did as well, and upon inspection, yup, things are sprouting down there that were less obvious when they were six weeks old.

So we’ve been misgendering him for several weeks; hopefully it won’t give him a life-long complex.

We’ve decided not to rename him; it’s not clear that combustion byproducts of wood have a gender (though they probably do in German), but now we’ve got to get used to saying “him” instead of “her,” and “he” instead of “she.” Fortunately it’s not a long-held habit. We’re looking at him with new eyes now. It’s funny, because he’s the smallest (he was probably the runt), but he’s fearless, and loves to attack his big sister.

Save The Far Side!

This seems a little overblown to me, certainly currently.

I agree that it’s a special place in terms of radio silence, and would be a great location for very large radiotelescopes. But I don’t know many people who would want to live there, and never see the home planet. And they could do comm via lasers — no need to pollute the local “air” waves with spurious RF communications.