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 19th and 20th 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.