junk
stoat | May 16, 2013I get an astonishing amount of comment-spam, nominally about dresses - wedding dresses, prom dresses, square dresses and how to fold them, and so on. None of it ever appears so I don't know why they bother, but simply deleting it all from my email queue is becoming ever more tedious. So I've changed one setting - old posts are now closed for comments after 60 days instead of 360, in the hope that at least some will now bounce off.
Oh, and a corollary of all this is that I'm far less careful than I used to be about wading through "comment requires moderation" emails. If you've got one that's…
stoat | November 10, 2010See the Grauniad for the proof. But ZOMG now I've proved him right so I must be wrong. <pfft!> - that is me disappearing in a pile of logical smoke.
More seriously: yes, vast numbers of blogs are full of junk, and probably rude aggressive junk (though I don't know this from personal experience, since I don't bother read those). Most (measured by volume) of journalism is junk too - it is just that in general it is fairly polite, well-written junk. At least in the UK the most obviously trash stuff gets conveniently dumped in the Sun, Mirror, Mail and so on. But there is plenty of rubbish…
stoat | April 21, 2010We interrupt your schedule of cats and rowing for a brief snark at the denialists: courtesy of mt, who clearly ventures where angels fear to tread, we have Newsletter: NZCLIMATE TRUTH NO 244 by Vincent Gray: THE FLAT EARTH... The attached graph is in all of the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and it is fundamental to all their activities. It assumes that the earth can be considered to be flat, that the sun shines all day and all night with equal intensity, and that the temperature of the earth's surface is constant. This is abysmal stupidity and ignorance at its…
stoat | March 26, 2010Eli has a wonderful post on the McLean mess. So wonderful I can't resist ripping bits of it off :-).
McLean et al. quote:
"But as it is written, the current paper [Foster et al. draft critique] almost stoops to the level of "blog diatribe". The current paper does not read like a peer-reviewed journal article. The tone is sometimes dramatic and sometimes accusatory. It is inconsistent with the language one normally encounters in the objectively-based, peer-reviewed literature."
But oddly enough they don't continue the quotation...
The real mystery here, of course, is how the McLean et al.…
stoat | July 8, 2008Lawrence Solomon seems to have a bee in his bonnet about wikipedia. He really should be writing about the exciting ongoing arbcomm case; but presumably thats too complex for him and would actually require some thinking or research. Instead, having called me Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate.... he has now said may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore.
Can you spot the similarity? Apparently the National Review couldn't, and are happy to print recycled cr*p from Solomon. And…
esiegel | April 22, 2008As you may have noticed from yesterday's unusual post, today is Earth Day! I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pictures from space of it, including the famous photograph from Apollo 8 known as Earthrise:
This combination shot made from NASA’s Terra satellite and NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite:
The known satellites at least 0.1 meters in size in orbit around Earth (there are ~11,000 of them as of April 2005, and another 100,000 between 1 cm and 10 cm in size):
Looking at the Earth and the docked Space Shuttle from the International Space Station:
And…