Because he wants to run for President in 2012, Pawlenty is trying very hard to appear reasonable to the country as a whole while maintaining his bonafides with the insane 25% of the electorate that determines who gets the Republican nomination. Bottom line: don't believe a thing he says, and after you shake hands with the dude, count your fingers.

But given the choice between never deleting something or deleting it without leaving a record, I prefer #2 now. I admire Jim's impulse completely. Sometimes choosing to be kind creates new problems, but the world could use more problems born from kindness.

Availability of healthcare has always been one of the biggest dividers between upper and lower classes. Welcome back to pre-revolutionary France...

However, speaking for my shimmering and dispassionate self, I don't find "the mere presence of beings like yourselves" to be "intensely painful"*.

-----
* no, not even when you make puns

This actually happens.

And Paula #20, the problem with letting "regular posters" disemvowel themselves is the same as with letting them edit or delete their own posts -- it would require an account system, which our hosts have so far managed to resist (at considerable inconvenience to themselves).

Hey! The image is a painting by Karl Kofed! Woo woo!

Alas, from my experience, the saner and more reasonable you try to be, the higher and more unreasonable the standards people will try to hold you to. (Often those who are quite unreasonable themselves.) All you can do is keep on doing what seems right to you.

In my opinion, all the moderators are doing a damn good job.

A pox on their houses, all of 'em.

Love, C.

Hmm.... I'll try putting one in a slash fic and see if it can remain dispassionate.

Please stop. You're making my eyes hurt.

I think there's a pretty bright line between asking to have your own post disemvoweled and demanding that other people's posts get the same treatment. While I don't have any more of a legal right to my posts than I do to anyone else's, I do feel that I havesomething of a moral right--after all, they are my words, and they are what others will judge me by. If I regret saying something enough that I want to ask for it to be removed--well, I'm not sure it counts for enough, but it does count for something.

The bigger issue for me is that ML's "no takebacks" policy really affects how I comment. Fear of being stuck with a really dumb comment forces me to think about what I'm saying, proofread way more, and basically makes me a better commenter. I think it has the same affect on most people, and having a back way out might diminish the self-discipline encouraged by knowing that your posts are forever.

"Earl, if I disemvowel it, what am I going to say to people far less reasonable than yourself who demand that I disemvowel entire strings of comments they posted in some thread?"

That was what I meant to quote.

Who among us hasn't wished for that wonderful email get-back button? Up until today, the mods on Making Light had it. I vote we give it back to them.

The moderators here have been chosen (from on high) because of their individual ability to, among other things, think about the effects of their statements on both the individual responded to and the fluorosphere as a whole. Occasionally that insight, like a fine Scotch whisky, takes awhile to come to its fullness. To claim some sort of a moral authority over Those Shimmering Brilliances is, in effect, telling our hosts, "thanks for inviting me into your living room, but I suggest, nay, insist that you recover the couch and change out those tables and the rug."

I trust our hosts and the other moderators to second guess themselves when it will maintain and improve the cohesiveness of the community, and to insist that we, who make up the rest of the fluorosphere, think twice before we post, or keep our public retraction chops polished. After all, for some of us, taking back our already-written words is the ultimate apology.

Except it's really not at all like that. Having different rules for commentors and moderators isn't cosmetic, it's functional. You can argue whether it's a good idea, but it's not equivalent to couch color. Furthermore, there was no insisting, no coercion. If our hosts thought the suggestion was bunk, nothing stopped them from ignoring it entirely. That they have the final word in how ML is run is well established at this point, but that is not the same thing as having the only word.

I suggest you reread Patrick's line on those "shimmering brilliances" again. Wise as they are, they are still human and benefit from the same constructive criticism and advice as everyone else. More to the point, the site could be run by Jesus, Ghandi and the Buddha themselves and I'd still think their moderation should be as transparent as possible.

A point I haven't seen mentioned yet -- an unfortunate comment from a moderator is in many social / political ways (impact on the community) more serious than one from somebody without official local authority.

Disemvoweling has a different impact than deletion. Its intention is to slow the reader down, so that the immediate emotional impact of an inflammatory comment is lessened. Reading it requires the head as well as the gut, but it's still comprehensible content.

But sometimes deletion is the best choice. As David Dyer-Bennet @37 points out, what we as mods say has a disproportionate influence on the conversation. If that influence is going to send the conversation down the toilet, in a way that no peer-level fury could, then the comment might be better entirely removed.

I know mysteries are maddening. But a conversation gone bad is worse.

Hary Payne #40: I suspect an unfortunate coincidence -- the output from the toy is presumably funneled through the same plugins and drivers as any other audio from your web browser.

My computer has, on a couple of occasions (although never playing with this particular fun toy), emitted a loud POP! and thereafter only produced rather ugly noises. Rebooting fixed the problem both times. If you've alredy tried rebooting, I'm afraid I can't offer much help.

Lovely!

I'm sure not all are worth saving - but I've seen some of the folks here do an absolutely lovely job of linguistic assault. But that, of course, is subordinate to the overall need for quality conversation.

And while a mod might have an extraordinary ability to lower the level of conversation, the fact that the mods are all well-known to the regulars seems to serve as a break on this.

Certainly regarding the deleted posts, the response seemed to be that the mod in question was upset and out of character, and the people who posted in response did so in a manner calculated to calm the upset mod and point out that they were acting out-of-character.

As long as the general quality of 99% of the mods' posts remains where it is 99% of the time, for the remaining 1%, the response will probably remain "Poor mod, feel better soon!" rather than "Yay! Mods gone mad, free-for-all at Making Light!"

See! Vicious pile-ons on polite, friendly newcomers!
See! Egregious drive-by trolls keep their vowels!
See! Vox Dei praised as sane and fair-minded!
See! Phlp Shrpshr return in triumph!
All that and more awaits as the insanity of all the mods unleashes a freeforall at Making Light in...Mods Gone Mad!

I believe that's a Flash implementation of a physical instrument called a Tenori-on, from Yamaha.

There's a British performer who goes by the name of "Little Boots" who uses one. There are performance videos of her where at the start of the song, she uses a stylus to draw a pattern on the Tenori-on, starts it on a beat, and then starts playing piano along with it

My only source for the equivalence was a comment on the toy's site. Has anyone here actually played with one?

That's not as bad as enormous jets of water vapor shooting out of Uranus.

SOMEBODY was bound to say it; just think of it as me taking one for the thread.

The device seems to be somewhat more featureful and thus a bit less simple. But then, you'd expect a bit more for $999.

Oddly, the 16x16 version (their largest) is even more expensive than the tenori-on, but they apparently can't keep in stock of any of their models. Admittedly, they're only producing them in small batches... maybe somebody should hook them up with a venture capitalist and a full-scale manufacturer.

I dunno, the Yamaha looks pretty 'pro', and is priced accordingly. It's more of a self-contained appliance, like any drum machine or effect box.

As noted above the monome is pretty much just a user interface device, that is controlled by the attached computer.

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/puking-noon-alien-worm-ball-edition

(SFW, but possibly not safe for lunch.)

(Also, my personal jury is out on whether this is actually a scientific phenomenon, or a viral marketing video of some kind.)

That's not a hard and fast rule, of course, and it's not a value judgment--making things easier for beginners at the cost of making them less versatile for experienced users is a perfectly valid design choice. Some instruments that make that choice even sneak into pro status eventually (e.g. the autoharp and both kinds of dulcimer). And people have made good music with Casios.

*To confuse matters, Casio has also made a few pro-ish keyboards, e.g. the CZ-1000.

There was also a concern among aquarium enthusiasts that given the locations that these things were collected from, we might be introducing all sorts of nasty microorganisms into our tanks.

I eventually switched to Daphnia and mosquito larvae.

I figure that pulling posts is the perogative of the hosts; they get some benefits from it, in exchange for the sense they have to be more careful in response.

Tim Walters #63: You can also load samples onto the Tenori-on. Synth programmer Damian Taylor describes how he used the machine during Björk's 2007/2008 world tour on the Yamaha site.

Looking back at the video, these blobs had a grossly smooth appearance*, with striations or tangled lines visible on the surface, and sometimes portions of the mass stretching out to splay across the substrate. (See especially 1:42-2:00, where splayed bits are withdrawing into the central mass) Also, they were pulsing in a manner that suggests bits of the surface moving around semi-independently, rather than attachment to an underlying framework.

While I wouldn't speak to particular species, they certainly look more like agglomerations of linear creatures, than colonies built around a central structure. (Also, the annelid ID was attributed to DeepSeaNews, which presumably has its own biologists.)

* emphasis on the gross ;-)

And now it's definitely time for me to go to bed... perhaps there will be more information available tomorrow.

The money quote:

The crew at DeepSeaNews.com sent the video over to Dr. Timothy S. Wood, an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association ... and he had this to say about it: "Thanks .... No, these are not bryozoans! They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids"

Actually, the Tenori-on frame is apparently made out of magnesium, so it ought to be pretty sturdy.

Actually, the Tenori-on frame is apparently made out of magnesium, so it ought to be pretty sturdy.

Good for hot music, then.

Back in the day, live Tubifex was displayed in a large shallow dish or metal plate filled with water at the aquarium supplies store. The worms clumped and moved exactly as shown in the video.

If you teased the wormy mass apart with a stick or similar object (I must admit I used to play with my fish food), the clump would re-form fairly quickly.

But seeing the roiling mass at the fish shop was always fascinating.