Anna Raccoon explains why she is stopping blogging – in good part because of the obnoxiousness of other bloggers and blog readers: … the world of blogging is fuelled by petty jealousies, vitriol, feuds, unsubstantiated allegations, apostrophe police, and a whole host of people who in another age would have been […]
Partly because it was designed not to work precisely in the normal way we might think of precision. I think. Huh? Yes folks. Welcome to this excellent piece by Joel Spolsky from way back in 2002 about Leaky Abstractions. I don’t understand it. But it is elegantly written. What a […]
Is the true issue about all those leaked climate emails that the underlying data sets used to make far-reaching UN and other climate predictions are so badly done that they are unable to withstand intelligent expert scrutiny? And that that’s why the scientists concerned were worried about FOI requests and other […]
President Obama’s sagging ratings are causing many people to wonder what is going on. Mark Steyn of course is no fan of the President bowing to kings and emperors, and calls the President the Superbower: Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is […]
Every now and again I swing by Instapunk, a powerful and unrelenting site which is part of the Boomer Bible phenomenon: … muddled politics, neither left nor right, designed to confuse and deliberately offend readers Yup, that peevish and baffled Amazon lead-off review about sums it up. For something a bit more […]
Mark Mardell, BBC North America editor, looks at the problems the Democrats are having in the USA in explaining their policies to an inceasingly unhappy electorate. He’s not taking sides. No sirree! But read this awesome passage (emphasis added): There is little doubt that the Obama administration is widely perceived […]
"Move along folks, nothing to see from all those leaked climate emails" say various people, such as these. And these. Well some people want to linger to look more closely at the wreckage. Where they seem to spot three serious issues: moves to prevent publication of rival views manipulation/massaging of data […]
What makes writing good or bad? Not always easy to tell. But if the writer is known to be a Great Writer, does it matter? Try this gripping sentence: The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had […]
Lots of interest in Ayn Rand, with two new books about her and her lasting influence: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Ayn Rand and the World she Made Which, perhaps, prompted this disappointing piece by Dan Hannan in The American Conservative which has a lot […]
Reader Norman Fraser quotes from this anti-Rand piece: In Rand’s novels the heroes pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They made big profits in unfavorable economic climates. Try pulling yourself up by your shoelaces. It can’t be done. Its all story telling, with no basis in documented experience. And of […]
