When I hear that scientific studies are untrustworthy, I ask "well... in comparison to what?"

I understand skepticism born of awful things like evidence being cherrypicked to support a study sponsor, at the expense of, you know, actual sick people. Ugh. But I also understand that while science doesn't resist these biases every time, other ways of learning about the world are usually even more subjective and biased.

I see other people make very binary decisions about this. "Science is always right!" Well, no, it's an iterative process, carried out by flawed human beings.

"Science is always wrong and changes its mind all the time!" Well, no, iPhones work as well as they did yesterday and they're chock full of bits that wouldn't work for beans unless gobs and gobs of science was correct to a tremendous degree. If you disagree, may I please have all your electronics and your car?

Science has the toughest time making accurate statements about big, complex, chaotic systems (like bodies) with lots of emergent behavior, with a lot of money on the line. It's challenging to eliminate both the "confounding factors" (everybody in the study was a bottle-fed white male) and the biases (the study was sponsored by Megafoodco). But nothing else is perfect under those circumstances either.

Issues of imaginary-animal-cruelty aside, every time I complete a major project, I have this irrational expectation that a parade will immediately follow.

Today we completed a project at work that has taken over a year.

This time... I did get a parade. Or at any rate a round of bourbon and several rousing toasts with the gang at work, plus lunch with appreciative folks at F&M. Who also kicked ass on this project.

Y'know how everybody else "relaunches" their school's website with a new look and the same crappy content? Yeah, they didn't do that. They threw out essentially all of it and started from scratch.

Visualize a college website that isn't musty. Livin' the dream, y'all.

Now, my responsibilities shift. I'll be spending 50% of my time working on Way to Health, a research platform for behavioral economics — the science of getting people to take their darned medicine — which we built in collaboration with researchers at Penn, and 50% working on Apostrophe, our open-source content management system based on node.js and other cool technologies also found in One Post Wonder. More importantly, APostrophe is vastly friendlier than Drupal for the folks actually managing the content. Such as our friends at F&M.

It's taking time for me to get used to this concept. I'm ready for a new challenge, but I'm also having trouble grasping that I am no longer pregnant. A year is a long time to be pregnant with anything.

Could be worse. I could be a lady elephant.

Thanksgiving here at Casa Iguana was a good time, mostly. Roberta cooked her ass off. My father in law took a welcome interest in our inability to control the basement den lights from within the den; he's a retired engineer and has already rewired at least one son's house. We ate pie. Today we're thinking the Pennsylvania academy of fine arts museum.

My kid is participating in MIT splash which means I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the weekend.

This morning we waited in the longest, most efficient line I have ever seen or heard of. Then I got the hell out of her hair. The undergraduates who run splash make it very clear you should exit helicopter mode when dropping off your young person, who can competently manage her own schedule of Arduino whispering, Estonian street slang and whatever else the MIT students feel like teaching. There is a Parent's Island where you can be entertained to make you feel relevant but I already feel relevant.

So I went to the MIT museum. I admit I was expecting something, well, triumphantly techie. What I got instead was a poignant exhibit of nineteenth century daguerreotype photography. France gave Daguerre a pension instead of a patent, and the daguerreotype became essentially open source, especially in America where everybody had their own variation. I am surprised that the exhibit didn't draw this comparison.

The museum also features many kinesthetic sculptures, all of which are notable for their emotional impact as much as anything. And the collection of Polaroid cameras feel just as much a piece of the past as the daguerreotypes.

Of course there is some straight up geekery. Ah, the LISP machine! From a time when LISP programming was going to give us artificial intelligence and a purpose built computer just for LISP made sense. Currently the closest analogue is a custom bitcoin mining rig. Except that has no admirable air of mad science.

This gadget flunked my Turing test.

Afterwards I rented a bike- cheaper these days, with the city bike system in competition- and pushed off down Massachusetts Avenue. I pressed on past Harvard to the edge of the next town before returning for a late lunch / early dinner.

Tonight the cold I thought I had defeated came back. So I thought about taking a nap. But somehow I wound up pedaling down Broadway, across the Longfellow bridge and up Beacon Hill. Because I am crazypants.

I rolled down the other side and into Boston Common and looked at the skaters with longing, but with Eleanor's laptop on my back that wouldn't be cool. So I continued down beacon street and discovered a park on the Charles River.

Finally I returned to Cambridge via the Boston college bridge and went for Loop around the MIT campus. Where I discovered a building that clearly indicates lysergic acid is still a research tool.

Of course the building is full of robots.

Now it's time to meet up with my kid. The aquarium for me tomorrow I think.

Hey guys, no robitussin for me tonight. So I managed to shake loose some time to work on OPW's link-sharing features. The jump from the hack I had before to handling this... closer to properly... was a big one, but there's definite progress.

Here are some examples:

This strip has nonexistent semantic markup, which is geek-speak for "it's hard to embed it right," so I'm pleased with how they turn out now when you just paste a link to that day's comic page. I had to edit the title a little, and supplied my own description; it automatically picked the right image (the largest one, by area). You can also tap on the image to cycle through alternatives, if any decent ones were present.

Girl Genius looks good too. There was a problem with overlap— oops, I fixed it.

XKCD: 100A.

This one has an automatic summary, because they supply a proper og:description element. The best available image is pretty crap, though; reminds me that I need to add an option to remove the image entirely.

I also found a few links just now that don't work at the moment. Probably I need to specify a user agent string and then they will cooperate perhaps.

This is an iterative improvement; more are planned. Please do open issues via the bug button.

Thanks!

I attended Barcamp Philly today.

"What the heck is a barcamp?" you cry. A barcamp is an unconference.

"What's an unconference?" you ask. An unconference is a DIY conference. People who want to speak show up bright and early, write their name and the title of their talk on an index card, and slap it up on a grid of times and conference rooms. The board fills up, aaaand... that's the conference! Attend whatever talks strike your fancy.

"Why's it called barcamp?" you inquire. Because O'Reilly Associates, the people who publish those technical books with the animals on the covers, sponsors an annual conference you're not invited to called foocamp. And programmers like variables named "foo" and "bar." (Plus: "Friends Of O'Reilly.") Thus the joke.

"Why foo and bar?" you persist. The generic term "foo" dates to the 1930s and was popularized by a Smokey Stover cartoon, according to Internet RFC 3092, "Etymology of Foo." It was likely derived from the Chinese character "Fu." During World War II, GIs popularized the phrase FUBAR (F****d Up Beyond All Recognition). Thus after the war it was natural to think of "bar" as what comes after "foo."

"What talks did you attend?" I went to "You Are Not the User" by Shawn Berven, who covered a table with diabetes test gear and then explained what it takes to design products that are right for actual people... people who are not you.

I went to "Come On... It's in the Requirements" by Sloan Miller and Abby Fretz, who discussed the concept of the HIPPPO... the HIghest Paid, most imPortant Person in the room... who is guaranteed to be ill-informed and have strong feelings about everything.

I went to "Urban Exploration," by phillystomp, who showed us what she found when she snuck into abandoned Philadelphia public schools.

I missed an awesome talk by an eight year old girl about how to use iMovie because I was giving a talk of my own.

I went to "Web 0.9," where Greg McGee told us about headspinny new toys like WebGL and WebRTC.

And I wrapped up my day with "Geek Theater," an improv experiment by Lauren Galanter and friends. This turned into a panel discussion between an eight-year-old boy, an angry Philly cyclist, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hilarity ensued.

"Hey wait up! Did you say you spoke today?" Why yes, I did. My talk was entitled "javascript games, a HOWTO: thanks, Obama!"

"Why 'thanks, Obama?'" Because my friend turned 40. My friend sells health insurance, and his career got going as Obamacare was gearing up. I happen to think Obamacare has helped millions of people. It's also been an administrative clusterf***, no question. That created opportunities for people like my friend. So for his birthday, I whipped up a video game in which he must intercept as many potential customers as possible without running into any Tea Partiers. Because that makes Obama sad, you see.

This morning, I realized the game was just a talk waiting to happen, so I made a few changes to respect his privacy and "Willy Loman Sells Obamacare" was born.

"Why JavaScript?" It's the language of the web browser. And lately, the webserver too, but that's off topic. Everything can browse the web at this point, and it's a very easy language to code in, so if you want to whip up a game in a hurry that's your ticket.

"So you spent 45 minutes explaining a simple video game?" Well yeah, because details matter. But it was also a trojan horse for my favorite geeky rant, "this" considered harmful, in which I tell JavaScript programmers to stop stuntin' and frontin' and doin' things that are hard and save their best energies for the actual problem they are trying to solve.

"So how was it?" Oh, it was a blast, straight up. I've attended barcamps before, but it's been a while since I spoke at one, and I'd forgotten how good they can be. I attended JSFest in San Francisco this year— which required I get on airplanes— and honestly I got just as much out of barcamp today in many ways. I just love the vibe. I like the technical stuff, but I think I like the nontechnical stuff even more. You should absolutely attend the next barcamp in your area.

SHAVE ANOTHER DAY (2014) - James Bond (Ryan Gosling) pursues a hipster jewel thief through the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn. When he finally catches up, the thief just hands him the jewels and says they "used to be cool." The Brooklyn scenes are credibly artisanal but Gosling's portrayal of "neckbond" is insufficiently ironic. B-

On a tangentially related subject, I continue to be delighted by the two most recent They Might Be Giants albums.

As you may have noticed, OPW had an outage today. Our host is playing silly games, reporting inaccurate disk space numbers. This caused our database to shut down politely lest it become unable to save your content fully. I am officially Peeved. We're working on it with them.

As soon as I get a moment, I'll be working on a "status.onepostwonder.com" site that is not hosted by the same company, as well as a standby display on the main site for those cases (like today) where you would have been able to see it.

* * *

Today I had a group of guests in the office. These fine folks work for one of our clients. Unusually for us, I'd done a special sort of project for them in which I never actually met their team.

I'm glad that finally happened. There's nothing like face time to help you see folks as talented individuals who need a hand with their highly worthwhile work. As opposed to, y'know, generic timesink #23094823094823.

I am eating the breakfast I was fantasizing about last night: omelet on lavash. Mmmf.

Last night we watched the second Hunger Games movie. Roberta and I are thoroughly sucked in and eager to see the new movie and we don't want to see the trailer, hear any spoilers from the book, or otherwise know anything about it. My kid is eager to tell us all about the politics of the movies vs. the books and what her Tumblr peeps are disappointed about— but has neither read the books nor seen the movies. I am resolved not to listen to a word until I've formed my own opinion.

We are getting ready for the house painters. Everything smaller than a breadbox must go to the basement. Soon we will be blue and yellow and green and...