Update (3:00 Mountain time): Huzzah! The site is back up.
Folks– The web host for this site, BlueVirtual, is making some changes over the weekend (changing datacenters for you tech geeks out there). The site is running abysmally slow, and I suspect this is the reason. Hopefully this will clear up in a few hours, but for now, be patient. Ironically, if you’re reading this on Saturday morning, you probably already were patient to get this far! 
Since I’m on the topic, I am still working on the ads, cleaning out icky ones. For those of you getting the dread Pirate Roberts "invalid regex string" error when posting comments, I am working on that as well, though hampered by the slow connection issue. I may yet get that one licked today.
In the meantime, why not read this fun Scientific American blog post about how we’ll all be dead in 10-12 million years anyway? Get some perspective.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
[...] Today Bad Astronomy BAUT Forum Were all just down for a couple more hours. Now back. BA Blog: BA Hostiness Issues [...]
July 28th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
[...] Forum down July 28 BAUT Forum is back for a bit. I see this in BA Blog: BA Hostiness Issues[/quote] [...]
July 28th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Mikhail Medvedev, Michael Medved…
I’m not quite ready to call shenanigans, but I’ve got my shillelagh ready.
July 28th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Big Bob
If you are here, just so I do not have to go through several links to Ad Subtract to continue this.
When I went to my site, even before I could get it to accept the site I got this error
link
if that helps track down the issue.
It only happened with NoScript enabled
Getting back to the topic of the adverts, I am certain a nasty slipped through. I did a boot scan today and it is still saying my system is clean.
July 28th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
…fun Scientific American blog post…
…and in the vastness of time there will come a day, some three hundred thousand generations hence, when the mousers of the Earth, whether they be Gray, calico, Grim or tentacled, shall arise from their sunbeam slunders and lay themselves alongside each person on the Earth and the end will be nigh.
Ramen.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:35 am
I find it funny that the SciAm post is based on research by the guy who created the Nemesis hypothesis (conjecture?), then the author comments “Anyone else remember the ‘Nemesis’ hypothesis?”, in the context of “this may be just crazy talk”. But I don’t think he realized they were the same guy.
And like the second commentor on that blog, I was wondering about the horrific math: if mass extinctions occur every 62 MY and the last one was 65 MY ago, we’re 3 MY overdue, not 12 MY from being due. The KU guy says both numbers have a 3 MY uncertainty and they used 64 MY, not 65 MY, so if 64 MY becomes 61 MY and 62 MY becomes 65 MY, we could potentially be as far out as 4 MY prior–still a good ways off of 10-12 MY. And the KU guys says the 10-12 MY is before the *start* of the extinction event–not the part where major extinctions happen.
I do like this quote (regarding Nemesis) from the SFGate article: “but no one except UFO believers has ever discovered a sign of it.”