Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Meat Life
-
I have got involved in a Saturday-morning stoush about genetically modified (GM) crops at Professor Quiggin’s blog[1]. For those who don’t know him, John Quiggin is a left-wing economist and blogger who wrote the book Zombie Economics, and I think is generally well-respected for his sensible policy views, though he can be spectacularly wrong. I…
-
Many people have pondered the real reasons for the Iraq war, the stated reasons being so blatantly false. Most critics have claimed it was a war for oil; some have suggested it was a stupid mistake by a clique of idiots; others have proposed the darker conspiracy theory that it was intended to unleash chaos…
-
I just got a nice new macbook, solid state drive and quad core (I guess), a very pretty screen and much lighter than my last one. It’s really fast! But it has had a huge problem since I got it – the wi-fi is hell slow. My 12Mbps connection dropped to 0.6 Mbps when I…
-
Nelson Mandela’s passing was only a few days ago and already the left-wing press and counter-press have managed to come up with a wide range of criticisms of someone who should, ostensibly, be their hero. Slavoj Zizek, that staunch opponent of anything modern in the left, is recycling the old claim that Mandela simply changed…
-
China and Japan are in a dispute over the Senkaku islands. China has pulled out of UN negotiations over a territorial dispute with the Philippines. Both of these disputes (and a few others) are about possession of the oil and gas resources under the South China Sea. If the world is to avoid warming beyond…
-
I follow God on Facebook[1]. Not the real God, obviously, but this one has almost as many followers: just over a million people follow God. God does a couple of weekly regular updates that get a lot of attention: he does a weekly smite where he finds someone really annoying in public life and threatens…
-
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the Philippines was just hit by a monster storm that killed more than 1000 people. It’s likely that this is going to be the third year in a row that the Philippines experiences a new record-setting disaster, and this is also probably the fourth biggest storm on record anywhere in…
-
Last weekend the Guardian had an interesting article about the New College for the Humanities, some dodgy knock-off rich-kids proto-university in the UK, land of inequality. Apparently it’s being run by someone left-wing, so we have to take it seriously even though it charges 18,000 pounds a year (twice the cost of Oxford) for a…
-
Earlier this year I posted a prediction of the minimum arctic sea ice extent, in which I used a simple regression model to predict the average September extent. My final conclusion: My final estimate for sea ice extent in September 2013 is 4.69 million square kilometres (95% CI: 4.06 – 5.32 million square kilometres). On…
-
Today’s Guardian has some new notes on the ongoing scandal that is the British education system. This time it’s a new OECD report ranking countries by numeracy and literacy, and the United Kingdom has fallen near the bottom. Worse still, the study finds that on average 16-24 year old Britons perform worse on both numeracy…
Compromise and Conceit 