Meta
tlambert | January 22, 2005 Google has come up with a solution for comment spam. From now on, if a link contains the "nofollow" attribute (rel="nofollow"), Google will not count it for page rank. All you have to do is configure your blog so that this attribute gets added to links in comments left on your blog and comment spammers get no benefit. Of course, this won't solve the problem immediately, since spammers won't bother checking that you use the attribute, but as more and more people update their software, there will be less and less incentive to leave comment spam. Well…
tlambert | January 16, 2005 Not only are arguments not allowed in the comments on Tim Blair's blog, it is one of the most uncivil places in Australian blogspace. The rest of this post is below the fold because it contains quotes from his comment section. Please do not read if you are offended by obscenities.
Some examples of the sort of comments you find there are: "pimply pus-sucking facist-licking Saddam defending son of a syphallitic cock-sucking whore"
"You are a fuckwit lying scumbucket."
And directed at me:Do you jack off at the thought of 100,000 Iraqi deaths caused by…
tlambert | January 12, 2005It's now two years since I started this web log. Here is my first post. Originally it was just a page for me to join the discussion about Lott's fabricated survey, but the focus seems to have expanded beyond that.
To get an idea how much blog traffic has increaased, my first post got linked by Glenn Reynolds and several others commenting on the Lott affair. As a result I had almost 1000 visits after three days. Now I get almost that much traffic every day.
tlambert | January 7, 2005 I've been nominated for a Koufax award best single issue blog over at Wampum. They have me listed under the issue "Australian politics", which isn't close to being correct. I want to correct them, but how would you describe the issue that this blog is mainly about? "Junk science" would sort of cover it if the term hadn't been stolen by Steve Milloy. Any ideas?
Oh, and go over there, check out the fine blogs, and vote.
tlambert | December 15, 2004Nominations have opened for the 2005 Australian Blog Awards. I don't you should take awards like these too seriously, but they are a good way for folks to let others know about interesting blogs.
tlambert | November 15, 2004 The Site Meter counter just ticked over to 300,000 visits. I really appreciate all the visitors, especially the ones who have left comments.
tlambert | August 5, 2004 Wikipedia states:Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
The point of the tradition is that such comparisons are so offensive that further…
tlambert | July 24, 2004 After a comment spambot left spam on over a hundred of my posts, I've decided to close comments on posts older than 60 days. I had to write a small plugin to do this. Blosxom users can get it here. You'll also need Jason Clark's storystate plugin.
tlambert | July 1, 2004 Well, I now have 500 posts here, and only 399 are about Lott. The first post I made to this blog was on Jan 12, 2003, but to confuse things I just put up my first ever Usenet post to make it look as if my blog is older than the web.
tlambert | June 26, 2004 Site Meter says that I have now had 200,000 visits to this blog. The post that attracted the most visits was the one I made a few days ago on think tanks and Open Source, with about 35,000 visits, mainly because of a link from Slashdot. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
tlambert | January 15, 2004I've been nominated for another blog award. This one is for Best NSW Blog. I don't you should take such awards too seriously, but they do provide a way to find interesting blogs to read, so check them out.
tlambert | January 6, 2004 I'm one of the nominations for best single issue blog over at Wampum's Koufax weblog awards. Google tells me that Koufax is left-arm pitcher, so translating it to cricket that's the equivalent of a Wasim Akram award. (Sorry, I was at the SCG yesterday to farewell Steve Waugh and have cricket on the brain at the moment.) Anyway, it is an honour to be on the same list as so many excellent blogs.
Update: I also got nominated for best series. With 346 posts on Lott in 2003, I'd have a lock on most obsessive if that was a category.
tlambert | January 5, 2004 Site Meter says that I have now had 100,000 visits to this blog in just under a year. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by. It's gratifying to see such interest in my writings.
tlambert | July 11, 2003I've switched from hand-crafted html to using Blosxom for my blog. This lets me add some nice features like grouping postings by topic, an RSS feed, comments, search and so on.
After a couple of hundred postings about John Lott, I also feel like posting on something else for a change, so it's now Tim Lambert's weblog rather than a weblog examining Lott's research. For readers who are just interested in that topic, you need to visit cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/Lott and you'll only see the postings on Lott.
The old address (http://www.cse.unsw.…
tlambert | July 2, 2003 A deltoid is the concave triangular curve formed when a small circle rolls around the inside of a circle three times as big. Eric Weisstein's Mathworld has a nice animation as well as a description of its properties.
I use deltoids for the ends of the cartouches in the sidebar and the icon that marks the end of each post.
So why did I call this thing "deltoid"? Well, it's named after the computer I use to write these postings. How geeky is that? I name all my computers after plane curves (I have another one called 'cycloid'). My wife insisted on regular…