people
stoat | October 24, 2011...as JMC said. Another one bites the dust. Not that I ever got on terribly well with LISP (I know, I know, don't tell me).
stoat | June 15, 2011For a fair while now I've defended Lindzen {{cn}} on the grounds that he is actually a Real Scientist, albeit edging ever further off onto the sceptical wing. And this has been difficult because whilst his papers have, I think, been reasonable his public pronouncements and his congressional-testimony type stuff has been poor.
But, happily, the recent "peer review gate" nonsense he has been spouting allows me to declare him Emeritus. I was going to say he has jumped the shark but I think that is wrong; this isn't some Curry-like stupidity, this is more the kind of full blown Black-helipcopters…
stoat | February 27, 2011
Scenes from a ski-ing holiday to Les Deux alpes a few years back. This is La Roche de la Muzelle, which I think is gorgeous. Maybe I'll get to climb it one day. Summitpost says it is PD / II (though not in winter) and the route to it goes over that beautiful roman bridge.
These are the reasons I was digging around in old pix: at the after rowing curry Andy said he could find a pic of me with pony tail on my wiki page, but it has gone. And I said, aha, but I have far better than that. Note that the beret is a Pyrennean one.
And in a token bit of climate don't miss The good…
stoat | February 19, 2011
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.
In simple trust like theirs who heard
Beside the Syrian sea
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word
Rise up and follow Thee.
O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of…
grrlscientist | May 26, 2010tags: Stevie the Professional Regurgitator, jobs, hobbies, passtimes, offbeat, strange, funny, people, The Tonight Show, streaming video
This man makes a living by swallowing strange objects, like light bulbs, and then vomiting them back up. I think at least a few of these stunts are illusions -- how did he do the sugar trick, for example? -- while other stunts (the fish trick) are really just gross.
Okay, how the heck did he do the sugar trick? And the fish trick? [and tell me, what does HSUS say about this fish trick?? or are they too busy writing legislation to outlaw people's pets to…
grrlscientist | May 25, 2010tags: This Man and His Marbles Are Rarely Parted, marble racing, hobbies, passtimes, offbeat, strange, funny, people, Belgian Television News, streaming video
This Belgian Television News video documents a man whom some of you might think is very strange. I don't think he's strange, though. Of course, I am probably telling you too much about myself, but I did this, too! Like this guy, I had a collection of hundreds of marbles that I'd race for hours at a time through intricate obstacle courses that I had constructed. I not only recognized each individual marble, but yes, I named each one, too…
stoat | February 16, 2010Wolf Hall is a now-immensely-well-known tale of a slice of Henry VIII's reign; a period I know little about: we skimped it at school and it gets throroughly mythologised anyway. The chief hero is Cromwell (not Oliver) who is portrayed (correctly,as I understand it) as a brilliant administrator and generally competent chap; as to whether he was really nice underneath, I neither know nor care.
What is chiefly interesting is the playing out of certain grand themes in the period. It was part of the development of civilisation, really, a time when people, under pressure of necessity, realised that…
bioephemera | May 18, 2009My first thought on seeing the new Toyota Prius commercial was, "are those cells and membranes?!" No, they're people in costumes, but the resemblance of the Prius' cartoon world to a cell animation is pretty remarkable. The sun TOTALLY looks like it has transmembrane receptors on it.
My second thought was, wow, this is perhaps the first commercial I have seen to really make compelling use of high-definition TV. I kept getting closer and closer to my screen. So do yourself a favor, and click through to watch it in high-def if you have a decent connection. It's hypnotizing.
stoat | December 12, 2008Naturally enough, there is a wiki article [[Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley]]. And of course what to say about his views on GW is a source of controversy: being wiki, it can't just say he is talkin' tosh, it has to be more polite.
Unlike certain anons, who make comments like Removed POV contributions by a failed Green Party candidate in the pay of a convicted internet-gaming fraudster and money-launderer who now spends his time rewriting "deniers'" Wiki-biogs - my my, who could that be and who could he have in mind? Its a complete mystery [update: well maybe not so…
stoat | August 9, 2007 Continuing the non-climate theme for the moment, I offer you The Seeker Culture of the Thames Valley by my father in law, now a historian since retiring from the oil industry.
The photo is irrelevant to just about everything, a suggestion from Concarneau that is unlikely to overtake coffee breaks in popularity I feel.
stoat | May 1, 2007Who is the person that James "we're all going to die" Lovelock most admires? For the surprising answer, see Who are the brains of Britain? in the Indescribablyoverhyped.
goodmath | March 20, 2007 I just heard that John Backus died last saturday.
John Backus was one of the most influential people in the development of what we now know as software engineering. In the early days of his career, there was no such thing as a programming language: there was just the raw machine language of the hardware. Backus was the first person
to come up with the idea of designing a different language, one which was easier for
humans to read and write than machine code, and having the machine do the translation.
For those of us in the field today, the idea of not having a human-readable language is…
stoat | July 7, 2006RP Jr seems to find himself frequently mischaracterised, most recently by the AZ Daily Star. But how can this be? With language so precise, what room for misunderstanding could there be? Well...
Roger objects to it being said that he has "been critical of the view that human-caused global warming represents a major environmental threat."; this "grossly mischaracterizes" his views. Why would anyone think he held such views? Because of stuff like "the independent effects of changes in societal vulnerability are larger than the independent effects of changes in storm intensity by a factor of…