S
serak_the_preparer
Guest
Hello. Good to see old friends (and old enemies, too, believe it or not) on these boards again. But there's no denying the extreme disappointment I'm feeling right now, and I don't doubt I've a lot of company. Some of my misgivings lie in not even knowing where to direct that disappointment: Toward the administrators of Space.com's forums, toward Infopop, toward manufacturers of defective hardware, toward someone else? When you're hurt, you want to blame someone and exact justice; moral outrage is a human privilege. We come into the world (most of us, anyway) surrounded by parents and family who - by rewarding good behavior and punishing bad - give our world a structure and a sense that some things are right and some are wrong. It's one of the things which draws us to religion; we're taught to expect the universe to play fair and stick to a set of rules of which we can approve. Of course, the real world could care less about our expectations.<br /><br />And there it is: A classic long-winded serak_the_preparer ramble. You're still here? Still reading my pointless meanderings? Then perhaps all those deleted posts weren't for nothing, after all. : )<br /><br />Serak is back?<br /><br />Well, no, not really. As with so many others here, thousands of posts are gone and, via an impulse I can no longer even recall, I ended up with caps in the UserID. I like the old lower-case sign-on better.<br /><br />I've never been one to initiate threads. My own sense of order has me preferring less clutter; I like to see related ideas and materials grouped by subject, consolidated in a minimum of threads. Remember the 'amino acids in space' and 'Where are other Earths?' and 'Life on Mars' threads? They went on forever, true, but you always knew where to go for what you wanted.<br /><br />So this is the first - and perhaps also the last - of a few threads I want to try to launch before I say good-bye to Space.com. Since the administrators will not be bringing back old materia