The Yorkshire Ranter

I notice that Yankeeblog is having a similar experience to us with random googlers turning up on their site despite searching for something – well – random. “As someone who finds internet search engines fascinating, I’m always curious to see what searches bring people to this blog (with the exception of the person looking for…

On Saturday, for the first time, I decided to peer down into my site stats. A few surprises awaited – not that the numbers were that impressive, an average of 6.8 hits/day. Wow. That’s going to make Instapundit quake in their boots, I don’t think. But the real surprises were down in the “last guests”…

They don’t like direct democracy/demagogy either, which is all good. My current reading is Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics, which is one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve seen in a long time. As a taste – “Revenge is a recklessness with the future in a vain attempt to repair a suffering that is…

A truly impressive blog just discovered. Run by two people – one a yank in exile, the other an Afghan in Kabul, it’s informed, aggressive and simple like blogs should be. Based on news and writing. Some samples: “We need to do a bootcamp and fast-track OCS school to put at least 1000 Arabic speaking…

“Shortly before dawn on Aug. 28, an M1A1 Abrams tank on routine patrol in Baghdad “was hit by something” that crippled the 69-ton behemoth. Army officials still are puzzling over what that “something” was. According to an unclassified Army report, the mystery projectile punched through the vehicle’s skirt and drilled a pencil-sized hole through the…

The Washington Post has a report today concerning the survivors of the shot-down CH47 in Iraq. Story. “It started out fun,” said Sgt. Christopher Nelson, one of 12 soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, based in Fort Sill, Okla., aboard the helicopter and in Iraq since April. “We were just ready to…

Our long-standing partner blog, ConfinedSpace – about halfway down on the right, with its RSS headlines – has had a terrible experience. Jordan Barab – the gun what built it, mate – has been campaigning furiously against one of those citizen-initiated referendums I don’t like. This particular one (Washington State initiative 841) was intended to…

Frankfurter Allgemeine story The commanding officer of the KSK, the German army’s special forces, has been relieved of his duties by the Defence Minister, Peter Struck of the Social Democrats, after he allegedly wrote a letter to the conservative deputy Martin Hofmann congratulating him on his now-infamous speech in which he described the Jews as…

A Microsoft employee has been fired for blogging a picture of Apple Macs being delivered to company HQ in Seattle. This is the post at issue. God knows what’s wrong with them. Despite the dull techie Windows vs Mac wrangles, Microsoft have been selling software to run on the things since I were a lad…

BBC story Apparently, researchers at Berkeley have concluded that 800 megabytes of information is produced for each person on the planet every year. That’s doubled since 1999, when they last checked. The conclusion is of course dependent on many other factors – just what is information? Does printing many copies of the same book create…