tlambert | June 19, 2005I broke my RSS feed -- it started reporting the message
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
I thought I should post the fix in case any other WordPress users have the same problem. The plugin I had just added (disemvowel.php) had an extra blank line at the end. Removing the blank line fixed the problem. Simple really.
tlambert | June 18, 2005The gentleman who I disemvowelled emailed me complaining about the lack of vowels in his comment. I wrote back:
[Name deleted], you are not banned from commenting on my blog. If you can work
out how to post something other than flamebait, I'll leave the vowels
in next time.
His reply is below the fold because it contains bad language.
Hi Tim (Lambert):
Thanks for coming back but go fuck yourself.
If your posters are an indication of the company you keep, any normal, self respecting individual wouldn't come anywhere near your bog.
You know what is really nauseatingly disgusting about you. It…
tlambert | June 16, 2005One of the drawbacks of switching to a more popular blogging platform is more spam. Spambots just did not know how to comment on the old blog -- I got two just spams this year. In the last 24 hours spambots have tried to post about 100 comments. The spam filters stopped all of them, which is good, but they also sometimes catchlegitimate comments. I fish those out, but it's still a pain for everyone concerned. If your comment gets caught please be patient and blame the vile parasites that run spambots.
I've also changed the technique I'll be using against trolls. Posts by trolls will be…
tlambert | June 15, 2005Tim Blair's ability to detect fake
quotes
mysteriously deserts him when the fake quote supports his
anti-environmentalist agenda. After quoting the usual falsehoods
about how the ban on DDT killed 50 million. (It was only the
agricultural use that was banned, and far from costing lives, this
saved lives since it slows the evolution of resistance.) He has this:
The likely reason was spelled out with chilling clarity by Charles
Wurster of the Environmental Defence Fund in the USA in 1971 when it
was pointed out to him that DDT saved the lives of poor people in poor
countries. He said: 'So…
tlambert | June 14, 2005This
[story](http://theage.com.au/news/Science/Global-warming-cyclical-says-climate-…)
on Bob Carter in the Age is a good one for playing
[Global Warming Skeptic
Bingo](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/04/gwsbingo.php). Though I think I
should add a rule to the effect that if a numerical claim is wrong by
more than an order of magnitude you get a free square on the bingo
board. Look at what Carter claims:
>Carbon dioxide was a minor greenhouse gas, responsible for 3.6 per
>cent of the total greenhouse effect, [Carter] said. Of this, only 0.12 per
>cent, or 0.036 degrees Celsius…
tlambert | June 14, 2005Tim Blair writes:
Michael Gawenda, The Age's man in Washington, reports:
The majority of Americans believe in creationism rather than evolution.
And I bet Gawenda can't name a single one of them. Also, his data may be a little astray; according to this round-up of polling on the issue, creationism—although widely supported—is yet to reach majority-belief levels.
The round-up of polling reports that about 45% of Americans that God created humans pretty much in their present form at some time in the last 10,000 years. But this is just the number who believe in Young-Earth Creationism, which…
tlambert | June 13, 2005The Australian Environmental Foundation is a brand new environmental
organization. Unfortunately they have chosen a very similar name to
the long established Australian Conservation
Foundation, so similar that the ACF has sued for trademark infringement. Probably
the best way to keep them apart is to remember that the Australian
Conservation Foundation is a grass roots organization with a goal of
preserving forests, while the Australian Environmental Foundation is
an astroturf organization with a goal of preserving logging companies.
The AEF's spokesperson is Kersten Gentle, Victorian State…
tlambert | June 12, 2005Writing in the Australian, Christopher Pearson likens mainstream climate science to creationism
When Charles Darwin unveiled the theory of evolution, the world at once divided into rationalists and creationists. The theory that man-made greenhouse gas is causing potentially catastrophic climate change is another great divider. On one side are the sceptics, who want compelling evidence. On the other are the true believers.
Now there are some interesting parallels in the debates about evolution and global warming, but they don't go the way Pearson insinuates. In both cases, the domination of…
tlambert | June 11, 2005Links to the old blog should now get redirected to the appropriate entry here, so you don't have to adjust any bookmarks. Though it will load faster if you do adjust them.
After experimenting with several themes, I'm leaning towards adopting the current one. What do you think of it?
I've added a page on how to comment on this blog to the sidebar.
tlambert | June 11, 2005I welcome comments here, especially from people who disagree with me. There is one rule that I ask commenters to follow -- please do not make personal attacks on other commenters. Such comments tend to cause discussion to degenerate into a slanging match so I will usually delete or disemvowel them. If you think some other commenter is dishonest or stupid, you should show us, by presenting evidence and letting the rest of us make up our own minds rather than telling us.
Trolls are posters who try to disrupt the discussion by posting specious arguments, inflammatory comments or off-topic…
tlambert | June 9, 2005 I've switched my blog to Wordpress. I've imported all posts and comments from the old blog using this handy script.
It turned out I had 10 megabytes of posts and comments to transfer and I had to break it up into smaller pieces to avoid choking the script.
The old blog will be replaced with a redirect to this blog once I work out how to rewrite the URLs correctly.
tlambert | June 7, 2005 Our old friend John Brignell has uncovered "The greatest conspiracy in human history". According to Brignell that's what global warming is, and:
It is not that the proponents are simply mistaken---that would be forgivable. They know that they are lying: otherwise there would be no need for all the manufactured and selective evidence, the appeal to a claimed consensus (the like of which has never had a place within the scientific method), the gross attempts to censor any contrary argument, the abandonment of the essential scepticism of science, the vilification of doubters, the direction…
tlambert | June 6, 2005 The Australian has published a piece by William Kinimonth arguing that global warming is a natural phenomenon. His argument in his book was that the models used by the IPCC were one dimensional and didn't account for the flow of energy from the tropics to the poles. This is, of course, wildly incorrect as anyone can find out in minutes on the net. So he's dropped that argument, but that means that all he has left is this:
IPCC has made much of the apparent ability of computer models to simulate the climate system; computer models that have been tuned to reproduce the main statistical…
tlambert | June 6, 2005I wrote earlier about John Ray's profoundly ignorant arguments about ozone depletion. Now he's back, posting something even sillier:
Despite all the information you may have read, there is not one shred of supportable evidence that CFCs have found their way 40 miles up above the Earth. No one has ever found any up there because they are roughly five times heavier than air. They are like a brick in a swimming pool. It is not often that you will see a brick floating to the surface of your pool. CFCs are so dense that even as a gas you could fill a bucket with it and pour the contents of one…
tlambert | June 4, 2005 One of the many factual errors in Parkinson's piece on deaths in Iraq was the claim that the Lancet study only surveyed 788 households (actually it was 988 households). I did a Google search to see who else had made the same error, and what do you know, it first appeared in a error-filled May 25 article by Andrew Bolt:
Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households. The UN surveyed 21,668 -- or almost 30 times more. You figure which is more accurate.
Parkinson's column was drafted just two days after Bolt's, and like Bolt he failed to mention that the ILCS only covered the first year of the…
tlambert | June 3, 2005 OK, fine.
1. Total volume of music on my pc: About 12Gb---all of my CDs and LPs converted to Ogg. This is just a back up, since I just play the songs on my Iriver player.
2. Songs playing right now: Steel Monkey by Jethro Tull.
3. Last album purchased: Dial a Song by They Might be Giants
4. Seven songs I've listened to a lot lately, from several genres:
Helpless by kd lang
When Doves Cry by Prince
Van Diemen's Land by U2
Sounds of Then by GANGgajang
Imitation of Life by R.E.M.
Irving Berlin by Ian Tyson
Bob by Weird Al Yankovic
5. Pass this on to five victims: I don't think so.
tlambert | May 31, 2005 Today's Sydney Morning Herald has several articles on blogs and blogging. I get a mention in this one, as "one of a handful of prominent bloggers covering news, politics and economics". It's nice to be mentioned like that, but I really think they should have included Ken Parish or Mark Bahnisch instead of me.
John Quiggin gets quoted:
"I have had occasional sharp interchanges with Tim Blair and some others but nothing that could really rate compared to Tim's other feuds"
I wonder what he is referring to?
tlambert | May 30, 2005 As my readers know, the reason why the Lancet study and the ILCS give different numbers for deaths in Iraq is because the studies measured different things over a different time periods. Of course, that fact isn't going to stop pro-war columnists from claiming that the ILCS refutes the Lancet study. Here is Tony Parkinson writing in The Age.
How many people, for example, still swear blind that 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war in Iraq? For some, it has become an article of faith that this is the cost of an illegal war of aggression waged by a ruthless imperial power.
For this…