Most excellent news!

I'm glad. But the white type on black background needs to go.

And what's with the html (or whatever the "revealed codes" might be) that kick off every paragraph.

Little nits: awesome illustrator of life's wonders.

Woo Hoo! I am so glad. I loved reading it up until May, when it left off. I kept hoping and hoping, and now I can read it again.

"Old parents. After so many years, I find myself a caregiver. Dealing with the beasts. Flagstaff and New york." Yes, I might understand this person.

Dang. March. I didn't think it had been that long.

I presume having more great prehistoric pictures for everyone will be a good post-election consolation prize...

In another bit of good news...

Democrats now control the House!

Santorum is no longer a Senator!

dems are 50% of the way to controlling the senate, too.

now, to make it really good news, the dems need to show some backbone and kick some ass for a couple of years, at least.

Speaker Pelosi! I'm partying like it's 1974.

Well, now Bush isn't a lame duck.

He's a dead duck.

I've just caught your entry about Simon Conway-Morris on your previous blog (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/curse_you_simon_conway_morr…). I bought Life's Solution yesterday but because of what I've read about SC-M in the meantime (particularly a transcript of a lecture he gave in 2005 in which he seems to repeatedly claim that you have to be a God believer to see the wonder in the Universe), I was seriously considering taking the book back.

Between your post and the fact that I just bought a book of Mark Twain essays, I think I'm going to get my money back.

What a disappointment.

And although I'm Scottish, yay to the Election!

Look who has egg on his face, Alon.

(Psst: it's Alon who has egg on his face!)

Speaker Pelosi!
Speaker Pelosi!

I'm glad. But the white type on black background needs to go.

Nooooo! Keep it that way. Black text on a white background is the worst thing to read on a computer screen. We have been cursed by default web page colors!

Will, you obviously do not yet suffer from "boomer-vision."

Not too worry. Your time will come.

If I keep reading black text on white background, I'm sure I'll have eyesight problems soon enough. Black text is great for books, not for screens producing light.

I believe Firefox will allow you to override the default background and text size/color for most websites:

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/options

Normally, web pages are displayed in the default font set by your browser or in a font chosen by the web pages' authors. Here, you can select the font and font size used when web pages don't specify one. For more advanced font options, click on Advanced..., or for colors options, click on Colors....

in internet explorer:

To override website font and color settings
If you want to have the fonts and colors you specify in Internet Explorer to be used for all websites, regardless of the fonts that have been set by the website designer, follow these steps.

In Internet Explorer, click the Tools button, and then click Internet Options.
On the General tab, click Accessibility.
Select the Ignore colors specified on webpages, Ignore font styles specified on webpages, and Ignore font sizes specified on webpages check boxes, and then click OK twice.

I haven't tried it for this site, but it does work for a lot of sites.

update:

at least for IE, this works just fine.

you can set your choice of colors for background and text in:

tools/internet options/colors

I just changed the background to black, the text to white, and the font to times roman, and it works fine.

... and a little more:

you will notice that all of these things ignore the colors used as highlights and backgrounds for individual posts, etc.

you can change this too, but you will have to create your own style sheet, and tell IE to use that instead of specific colors/ fonts.

final addendum:

research done in the 80's indicated that white text on a neutral blue background is supposedly the most "viewable" over extended periods of time; so you might want to consider trying that combination to see if it helps.

for me personally, I always liked black text on a dullish pale seagreen background.