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Game time!

10 comments

How was the universe…created? Do we even know that?

Short version:
THEORY: Not created, formed. Space/everything began, grew. Before? *shrug*

Long: Read more here.

I was always terrible at physics. Why is [light] both a wave and particles?

Short version:
Light reflects/refracts like waves, has energy/momentum like particles.

Long: Read more here.

Submit a science question to me either in the comments, to my Gawker account, or to my email. I will answer it in ten words or less. If you ask me a question that neither I nor anybody else has the answer to, I will pretend I never received the question.

Just kidding. If any of you can answer this, there’s a Nobel waiting for you. Is the multiverse real?

We are Billy Graham’s favorite writer!

8 comments

Thanks to the fact that I switched to a ridiculously common WordPress theme, I was able to Google image search the dimensions of the header photo and got tons of random images from people’s goofy sites.

I was going to grab one from a Jew-fro’d lawyer who looked suspiciously close to Sean Penn’s character in Carlito’s Way. But like my pappy always said:  If you’re going to blatantly steal, try to steal from greatest writer in the evangelical world. He’s probably much less likely to sue you than the Rosenbaum Law Firm of Jersey City, N.J.

We need to dress this place up a bit

18 comments
We have to look our best

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking we need to dress this place up a bit. The free theme we’re using is a bit too plain and there are bunch of issues I’m seeing:

  • The kerning in the headlines is way too tight (letters are running together).
  • The name of the user who posts a comment is impossible to read.
  • The sidebar is kind of boring and appears to have some sort of margin issue that I’m not exactly sure how to fix.
  • There’s absolutely no color other than white.

So here’s how you can help us win the the internet: Let’s all try to spend a few minutes looking for the best WordPress theme for how we want our site to look and feel. If you’re not sure where to look, just start with a google search for “Free wordpress themes” or something similar. There are tons of sites dedicated to distributing themes.

And try to think about how you want the site to function. We could just pick another basic, simple bloggy type theme or it could be a theme that gives the site a more “magaziney” feel like The Awl. If you stumble across a theme that you like, please post it in the comments. Then I’ll see if I can put together a list of themes in one post and we can vote on which one we like the best.

We dodged a very trollish bullet

5 comments

According to our favorite elf Adrian Chen, Tumblr and 4chan are waging some sort of troll war. We could have been attacked by kiddie porn immediately after landing in Tumblr-land. This is exactly why I’m glad we went with WordPress.

P.S.

If you create a post, MAKE SURE YOU GIVE YOUR POST A TITLE. For some reason the theme doesn’t seem to handle it well if you don’t.

P.P.S.

Let’s all create a category for each user name and put your posts under your own category to make organization better. Just click “Add New Category” on the right before publishing your post.

Housekeeping

16 comments

Now that the site is up…

– I basically just picked the first half-decent WordPress theme (template) that looked clean and simple. I’m not crazy about it, especially how small the commenter’s name and avatar are. We can either pick a new template or customize this one if there are any web designers among us.

– WordPress uses Gravatar.com for its avatars. So if want an avatar, go there and log in with the same email you used to log into WordPress. It’s really quick and easy to do.

– PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE change your password. The one I sent to you is just a default password and the site will be much more secure if everyone has their own unique password. And obviously make it a reasonably strong password, not “1234.” Don’t be a Sarah Palin.

– If any of you are experienced with web programming, php, apache, mysql, etc. PLEASE let me know. I could use some help with some of the back-end setup.