Over at CT, a link to two polls – here and here. The killer finding is that the same sort of percentage of the US population, and the same sort of people, deny that Barack Obama is a US citizen *and* that the American and African continents were once part of the same landmass. Specifically,…
Read More tectonic platesAfter some fiddling I got Jamie Zawinski’s Dadadodo, a program which analyses texts using a Markov chain and then generates random sentences based on their content, running. Obviously there was only one way this could go – straight to Melanie Phillips’ blog. I reproduce below the output from the machine, verbatim. DOCTYPE HTML public Melanie…
Read More The truth caught out in stockinged feetCrack BBC journo Peter Taylor’s film The Secret Peacemaker, about Brendan Duddy, the man who maintained secret communications between the IRA leadership and the British government from the early 70s to 1993, was a cracker; it provided rich detail about the practicalities of ending the war, the missed opportunities of the first ceasefire, and moreover…
Read More What if they staged a coup and nobody came?One of the many wonderful things about the Web is that its hypertext structure not only permits us to navigate it, and to invoke external resources (scripts, graphics, etc), but also to measure relevance and authority. Google’s killer insight was of course just this; to use links as votes for the relevance of a given…
Read More Anti-LinkFebruary 23, 2008: One of things that I find so frustrating about blogging is dealing with people who are either stupid, venal or willfully choose to misrepresent your views. More often than not, these people post anonymously and decide to tar their opponents with the epithet “racist”, “homophobic” or “fascist” in the hope that by…
Read More Donal Blaney: HypocriteI recently read about a Zimbabwean refugee who was sent a letter by the Home Office, which stated that his presence in the UK was “not essential for him to enjoy family ties with his new partner and her family”. The letter went on to demand that he leave “without delay” and that this might…
Read More Yours, Very Sincerely Indeed