Reader Norman Fraser in his amazement despises this site: I am amazed at how intellectually short-winded most of your posts are… Yet mothishly he flickers to and fro around its warm glow. See his latest comment on my posting below about those climategate email Source Code Hiccups: Still kidding yourself in ever […]
Perusing Hacker Factor I found this notable device, a Gender Guesser programme for (yes) guessing the gender of a writer from 300 or so words of prose. Worth a try. So I cut and pasted this passage from a recent blog entry of mine: The strength of the Iranian protest […]
Another Browser link, this time to a fascinating interview with Stephen Lucas, a heavyweight expert on Soviet Law. This is well worth reading since it casts some light on an area largely neglected in Western analysis of Communism, namely the way the Soviet regime tried to give legal effect to […]
Here via the Browser, going from strength to strength with its insightful and witty links, is a terrific piece deconstructing what at first glance looks like a photograph of a fine example of curvalicious womanhood. But on closer inspection see how the image has been … manipulated. Does it matter? Is this […]
With the diplomacy of Climate Change in some disarray after Copenhagen, back to all those emails. Here is a powerful piece from Dale Amon at Samizdata which looks at the technical methodology. Namely, if (big assumption) one pulls together a great mass of reliable data, how to present the data […]
The popular rising in Iran against its revolting regime is gaining momentum. But will that be enough? A good WSJ piece on the Big Picture: Much has been written about the fact that Iran’s democratic movement today combines the three characteristics of a velvet revolution—nonviolent, nonutopian and populist in nature—with […]
A busy few days for old-fashioned diplomacy, with China taking no obvious notice of British and other pleas for clemency in the case of Akmal Shaikh, and the Tehran regime hauling in the British Ambassador Simon Gass to issue dire warnings about a ‘slap in the face’ from Iran. Some thoughts. First, […]
I hope by now that you have all read The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the most profound science fiction short stories ever written, because it has at its heart the core question of science and indeed existence: Can entropy ever be reversed? What is entropy? […]
Britblog Roundup 253 is hosted by Amused Cynicism. It links to Two Doctors greenly blaming leading planetary Leftists for the Copenhagen debacle: This betrayal was therefore delivered by the most left-wing American president since FDR, a notionally communist regime (although more accurately an authoritarian capitalist one), the more left of the […]
Having got nowhere in 2009, I am going to have another self-indulgent shot at the 2010 Orwell Blog Prize. 2009 winner was Nightjack, a UK policeman writing his blog anonymously who was later ‘outed’. He is on the jury this year, so my own thoughts on the fact that his […]
