William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
March 22, 2009
It is spring, the daffodils are out, the hour has nearly changed, and longen folk to go down to the river again. In fact I've been rowing all winter (Emma blogged our last race in rather different weather), but this Sunday was the Cantabs "taster" session for junior scullers; and my son and a…
March 22, 2009
The recipe (apparently: I was out) is a jar with a little honey in it that you wish to soften; place in the microwave and accidentally type "20 mins" when you meant "20 secs"; go away and return when the room is full of smoke. But the effect is good.
March 20, 2009
Via Quark Soup, a reminder to look at the sea ice data. IJIS have a nice pic http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm which is better than the cryosphere today pix. I have a somewhat different take on it to DA: looking at that pic it is clear just how exceptional 2007 was. If you look…
March 18, 2009
mt has a a transcript of the Copenhagen closing plenary. Let's have a look. Better still, go read it yourself. I'm not going to cover it all.
Our conclusion is that recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse)…
March 18, 2009
Janice is Menno Simons, who Ive never heard of, in the Which famous theologian are you? quiz on facebook. I'm an aetheist, which isn't a promising start, but I thought I'd have a go. Question 1 rather stumped me, since there isn't a "Through grace alone" option; if I did believe in a god it wouldn'…
March 18, 2009
Would you believe that people are having an edit war over this [1]? Should the article say "Foam takeout containers are typically discarded after the food has been consumed and are rarely [[Recycling|recycled]]" or not? It is a burning issue.
All right, I know: people will war over anything.…
March 15, 2009
Although I can't really be sure if they are new this year or overwintered. See one of them has orange legs - this is a good sign - bringing pollen back in.
Today was a lovely warm still sunny day in Cambridge and environs, and at this time of year a middle-aged mans thoughts turn to the jungle at…
March 14, 2009
Only this time they are "warmers" rather than septics, and even include some IPCC folk. That seems to be the take Nurture is using for the recent Copenhagen meeting. Ah well.
How dangerous is climate change? It is hard to say for sure, we will have to act in the face of uncertainty. But what is…
March 13, 2009
I claim to have originated the label "septic" for the malodourous end of the skeptic range, and I have the evidence (in fact I can go back further) for the context-less jonny-come-latelies.
I also claim "going emeritus" [1], but admit I got that from Jack Vance (the Languages of Pao, possibly the…
March 12, 2009
Time to break my lengthy science drought by trying to get back up to speed on what sea level is supposed to do. Sea levels rising faster than expected: scientists says Reuters, and they lead with Stefan Rahmstorf predicting more than a meter in 100 years. Reuters make the common mistake by saying…
March 12, 2009
The Corpus Clock is at base a gratuitous display of wealth and pretentiousness; but grousing aside the main problem with it is that there is always such a crowd watching it that I haven't been able to get a decent picture of it. It has been around for a little while, but I've only just noticed.…
March 5, 2009
My son found the Incredibots site months ago, and showed me, and I made a few cars and stuff and though oh how interesting and then let it drop. But there are now any number of wonderful machines built there... today's is the pendulum clock. Now (assuming I have it right) the mechanism isn't…
March 4, 2009
All the George Will nonsense has had one good result - "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 89 Iss. 9 " is up at number one in the AMS charts. But there is more of interest in the list if you look further..
1. The Myth of…
March 3, 2009
It seems to have become axiomatic in some parts that Gore can do no wrong; Joe Romm has a long column (disclaimer: the column is too long for me to bother read it all) devoted to this implausible assumption, with which I disagree. It's yet more of that tedious business with the slide that got…
March 1, 2009
Well I have been listening to Slim Shady recently:
I don't speak, I float in the air wrapped in a sheet
I'm not a real person, I'm a ghost trapped in a beat
I translate when my voice is read through a seismograph
And a noise is bred, picked up and transmitted through Royce's head
Trapped him in his…
March 1, 2009
As organisations that downsize too aggressively discover, having people around who actually remember what happened in the past can be very useful (no, this is no reference to CSR; though I have noticed that one of the most valuable and oft-forgotten ways to solve some new bug reports is to simply…
March 1, 2009
And I'm not talking about me being appointed captain of Men's boats at Chesterton. No, the jobbery I'm talking about is the new house being constructed just by the Fort St George bridge. it's been a while a-coming, and when first laid out I was impressed by how small the ground plan was - how self-…
February 28, 2009
Hansen has finally realised why cap-n-trade is more "popular" than a carbon tax. Of course I said this ages ago. JH says (I think it's in there somewhere; the text I'm quoting is from an email):
In my testimony I noted that a "Cap" raises the price of energy, just as does a simple honest carbon tax…
February 26, 2009
BS has the definitive answer to the George Will nonsense. Or read John Fleck, who conveniently links to our joint paper. Until I started typing this, I had an even better answer: I ignore it, it's a pile of toss. But alas, I'm unable to resist joining in, even though I have nothing new to say. And…
February 23, 2009
This isn't going to turn into a photo-blog. But since my S10 started playing up ("lens error") I got a D80 off ebay (so its not really a new camera at all, but nikon owners other than me seem to look after them well). And then took the S10 to bits, on the off chance of fixing it. But it is really…
February 22, 2009
A thin excuse for no blogging, but I've been away and fighting off the wackos. In the meantime, what is this:
[Some creative answers so far, but no-one has come close. Answer soon -W]
[My favourite answer is the Harley handlebar... I can just see a custom harley hand-crafted from antique silver.…
February 15, 2009
Wiki has an article on the subject, created by over enthusiastic folk. I tried to kill the witch on the grounds that it had no good definition; alas that didn't fly. My best effort at a defn that fitted reality was this but it didn't last. The wiki article will die a long slow painful death, but…
February 15, 2009
Someone refererred be to As Effects of Warming Grow, U.N. Report is Quickly Dated . It's yet another piece of the std.nonsense that one swallow does a summer make, and anyone who feels like quoting the odd warming factoid can throw away the IPCC, whilst of course sneering at the people who say it…
February 12, 2009
I was going to rant about Lord "I know what you should hear" Ahmed but that's just the religious suppressing freedom of speech, which is hardly news.
But then along comes a much more interesting rant, from Vicky Pope, about the good old Arctic sea ice. 'Apocalyptic climate predictions' mislead the…
February 11, 2009
We're branching out into new areas, see video.
Certainly beats our video; and Broadcom's is even more boring, though they know how to dance.
All of which is a preamble to noting that we're merging with SIRF. Or perhaps we're buying them. Who ya gonna trust - PC mag or the FT? Not a tricky one,…
February 8, 2009
The idea of putting some kind of barrage across the Severn has been around for ages, but there are always problems; now another new scheme comes along: the Severn Tidal Reef Project. At the moment, it looks like a rather small-scale effort (details available via the downloads page), but who knows.
February 7, 2009
So there I was, happily settled in Heffers with a nice large cup of coffee, looking forward to reliving the Newton-Leibnitz controversy via "the system of the world" when I thought I'd have a quick browse of "The Cult of the Amateur" by Andrew Keen, since it was on a nearby rack. It's the std.rant…
February 5, 2009
I thought to myself as I cycled in. More snow! And in that delightful state where left alone it is beautiful and white, but as soon as touched it squelches into sodden slush. So my sandled feet were sprayed with freezing gunk, and the thickly falling flakes covered my glasses. Such fun! School's in…
February 5, 2009
Stoat, always first with the news. Too busy with real work and the pub, sorry. Yes, its the RP teacup.
Life is too short to wade through the full skewed mess. Read John Fleck for the summary and Coby Beck for pages more detail. Or better still, don't.
Part 2 appears to be a total pile of toss - I…