And here is what I asked you to tell her.

Too many projects, not least The Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers wiki. Too many email mes­sages. Time to Get Things Done.

So I’ll write the losses here, so I can come back to them some­day, or at least pass them along to you.

• Alter­na­tive Pho­to­graphic Process has a Mail­ing List I’m no longer on (I hope).
• Pws –The Devel­op­ment list for CoWeb/​Swiki is no longer so inter­est­ing to me, though the Swiki project is.
• Soci­ety for Math­e­mat­i­cal Biol­ogy is less impor­tant now I’m not a math­e­mat­i­cal biol­o­gist, and am def­i­nitely not look­ing for a job of that type.
• San Jose Mer­cury News’s 60-​​Second Busi­ness Break was sortof a dotcom-​​era folly of mine.
• The MySQL AB Newslet­ter would be more use­ful if I were deal­ing with nuts-​​and-​​bolts infra­struc­ture, or cared about the newest releases.
• The Book_​Arts-​​L mail­ing list for Book Artists caters to peo­ple on the pri­mary pro­duc­tion end of the biblio-​​ecological web, not the sapro­phytic end.
• The Yahoo! ebook-​​community group is mainly about hard­ware these days.

Uncer­tain Prin­ci­ples responds to admo­ni­tions and poorly veiled undercurrents:

Not only does that take an incred­i­ble amount of gall to come out and say (accept­ing gov­ern­ment fund­ing does not pre­clude pri­vate polit­i­cal speech), it pretty much gives the lie to her ear­lier asser­tions that the admin­is­tra­tion and the Repub­li­can party sup­port sci­ence. Even leav­ing aside the issues raised by their cozy­ing up to cre­ation­ists and shady indus­try groups, if you really sup­port sci­ence, that sup­port should not be con­tin­gent on sci­en­tists hold­ing opin­ions that you agree with. The idea that pri­vate polit­i­cal speech by sci­en­tists would affect fund­ing deci­sions is another appalling exam­ple of the way the mod­ern Repub­li­can party places pol­i­tics ahead of policy.

Try­ing to jump-​​start
a very impor­tant and long-​​awaited wiki.

Back more tomorrow.

In my garage and base­ment are scores (no, I mean “mul­ti­ples of twenty”) of boxes of Old Maker Garage Crap. These are due to the dead: my father (a NASA physi­cist and ham radio oper­a­tor), my uncle (an engi­neer and ham), my lost friend Nancy (an anti­quer and accu­mu­la­tor of garage sale finds), not to men­tion the stuff we buy “inci­den­tally” at estate auc­tions in box lots along with the crap we really want. Vac­uum tubes, tran­sis­tors, glass bot­tles, insu­la­tors, diodes, old clocks, gears and clock­work… and of course, baby food bot­tles filled with screws and nails. Things to inspire the Mak­ers of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries.

Boing­bo­ing passes along this amaz­ing artisan’s work, today. Like all great work, this hints that you could do that. Go and admire, and be inspired.