Apparently, exploding underpants are to be banned on planes from now on. Security experts say that they never expected anyone to try this, but now that someone has they will look there too. They are considering banning exploding vests as well, but won’t bother until someone actually tries it.
[Sorry – couldn’t find the “war is pants” pic. This will have to do. Or you could take a more relaxed view -W]
[Speaking of underpants – don’t forget Felix -W]
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all the blogs were silent as mice.
The usual fare will return. For now, comments are off. Happy Christams to all!
[Update: comments are back]
The latest is http://connelleywatch.blogspot.com/. I’d be slightly more honoured if my watcher was watching closely enough to spell my name.
[Update: they have (silently) taken my comment to heart and moved it to http://connolleywatch.blogspot.com/]
[Late update: thanks to JG for the pic: 
]
Via dubious routes I ended up at the bizarre http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/22/william-connolley-and-wikipedia-turborevisionism/. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the original version. In what is presumably deliberate irony, he has coined the term “Turborevisionism” to describe his own updating. And it possesses the always-amusing feature of the ignorant trying to talk about wiki: that people complain about the unreliablity of wiki when they are clearly clueless about how it works.
So: assuming he hasn’t re-revised it (I’ve kept a copy in the “extended” bit below, so refer to that if you need to), Watts is quoting:
Found a msg from Connolley directly to me:
William Connolley I’m the original author of the paragraph at William Connolley that deals with the Lawrence Solomon article of December 2009. I note you inserted some specific detail that I acutally removed, as I believed it only caused confusion between opinion and fact, and isn’t really necessary, anyway. I don’t want to add any more reverts to that already poorly abused article, so I’m urging you to reconsider your addition of the detail. Cheers. -Ħ MIESIANIACAL 05:58, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
This is badly confused/ing. The text above was posted [1] to the talk page of [[User talk:Certayne]] by [[User:Miesianiacal]] (I’m not familiar with either editor). This is relating to edit-warring or whatever at the wiki page about me [2], which shouldn’t be confused with my wiki user page [[User:William M. Connolley]]. If you’re interested in whether I’ve edited the wiki page, it is trivial to check, or you can rely on TOAT’s summary. If you want to edit that article you can’t, because it is now protected. If you want to annoy me by posting stuff to it once it gets unprotected you can’t, becasue I learnt not to watch it :-).
BTW, if you’ve come here cos you want to read fun stuff about clueless folk abusing me, you’ll like I am all powerful (part 2). If you *are* a clueless person come here to abuse me – can you at least try to be original?
Continue reading “Poor old Watts”
Carbon prices drop in wake of climate talks.
Carbon prices plunged on Monday in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, dealing a blow to the credibility of the European Union’s carbon-trading scheme. Prices for carbon permits for December 2010 delivery, the benchmark contract for pricing European permits, dropped nearly 10 per cent in early trading, before recovering to end the day 8.3 per cent lower at â¬12.41. One dealer described the market as like “a falling knife” but said that a rise in European gas prices had helped to support the carbon market. UN-backed certified emissions reductions for December 2010 delivery fell 7.9 per cent to a low of â¬10.89 a tonne, a six-month low.
Continue reading “That Copenhagen climate conference, in full”
Actually it turns out that this is part 3! But I’m not going to revise the title now. Part 1 and Part 2 refer, as does some digging.
[Update: this made the [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-28/In the news]] ]
An exciting new blog aicomment.blogspot.com. However, I’m insulted that An Open Mind has got on their bad-boys list and I’m not. I thought I was notorious for rejecting inconvenient comments? Anyway, *I* suggest that you all try to make a comment on this post here, I’ll reject them all, and you can get me added to their list of blogs. Of course, if they reject your comments then we can start a blog for that.
[Comments here are now closed]
So, it snowed. I got stuck in traffic after a curry and Miriam had to walk home through the mighty blizzard. The photo doesn’t really capture the full horror of a full 5″ of snow – who knows, perhaps more by tomorrow. Madingley hill was chaos and I shall certainly cycle to work tomorrow as it will be quicker. And I still haven’t dug the dahlias up. Oops.
Update: it turned out to be wonderful snow, just right for children, Daniel was out in it all day. I was at work, and it proved possible to cycle in and back. We had a brief exciting power cut which reminded us how fragile our western life is; the heating goes off too, of course. More forecast for tomorrow. Did Piers predict all this?
The mighty Chesterton Men (Ralph, James H, Chris W, Dave B, Me (special guest appearance on strokeside), Michael S, Andi R, Mike PJ; cox James T) powered to victory in Saturday, though admittedly not in the prestigious “best fancy dress” category but in the less hotly contested “novice M8+”. I still don’t really understand the category system (or care much) but I think it means we don’t have any / many ARA points; and since this wasn’t an ARA competition I think we still don’t. Still I do (I hope) get a Pot. And we did beat the COWS.
Results (silly xls format, sorry).
Somewhat against my will, I find myself obliged to post about Hulme, if only to stop people arguing on other talk pages. Come and argue here, folks :-(.
Anyway, KK pointed me to two Hulme pieces, and I’ll take those as my texts:
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8388485.stm
* http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571613215771336.html
My immeadiate reaction is that these are both about science-n-politics. Which immeadiately says the the hacking incident has told us nothing interesting or new about the actual science. Which in turn is one in the eye for the septics, who insist it puts yet another stake through the heart of blah wibble.
Continue reading “Hulme”
