New template

The chaps at Squarespace have released a new version of their content management system which has lead to a bit of a change in the template for this site.  If I had the time or the inclination I might change things more radically, but for the minute it's still pretty much the same.

The upgrade has brought some natty new changes. I particularly like the ability to manipulate images from within the WYSIWYG editor - resizing, captioning, changing the text wrapping and so on.

It's nice to be appreciated

My posting about gun control the other day has been nominated as post of the week by the Watcher's Council, a group of American blogs.

It's nice to be appreciated. Thanks guys!

Who says bloggers never do anything useful

OK so we've had the fake George Bush memo exposure, and the odd factual inaccuracy spotted, but this is quite a good one: a blogger in the US has found a factual error in a ruling of the Supreme Court. The justices' mistake is so important as to invalidate the whole ruling.

What do they do now, I wonder?

A proud moment

I think I've just had a comment deleted for the first time!

I have a policy of always being polite when visiting other people's blogs, particularly if I'm disagreeing with somebody. Todays deletions were not one of those occasions though. What is odd is that I didn't even think that I was being particularly probing or contrary.

The culprit was (and it will probably surprise few of my readers to learn this) Real Climate, a site with a certain reputation for deleting inconvenient comments. My comments were in response to a posting by Gavin Schmidt about ice (or lack of it) at the North Pole in which he said that the situation being observed at present was different to previous instances.

What is being discussed here is large expanses of almost completely ice-free water. That would indeed be unprecedented since we've been tracking it.

My comment merely asked what he meant by "large". The comment sat in moderation for twelve hours or so, and is now gone completely. I can only assume that it has been deleted.

Another commenter posted a comment about "denialists" arguing that volcanic activity might have contributed to Arctic ice melt. He said:

The mean global sunlight absorbed by the climate system is about 237 watts per square meter.
The mean global geothermal flux is about 0.087 watts per square meter.
Divide A by B. Discuss.

To which I pointed out that the mean geothermal flux couldn't be a relevant measure.  That comment has gone too though.

It's a strange feeling of pride one gets when a scientific bigwig reckons that your arguments are probing enough to warrant summary deletion. A feather in my cap, I would say.

Update: I'm wrong. It has now appeared. Why it should appear to be in moderation and then disappear completely before reappearing again is beyond me.

A new tool for bloggers

This looks like a useful tool for bloggers - WhatDoTheyKnow? - which publishes successful Freedom of Information requests. You can get all the answers on an RSS feed too.

It's brought to you by My Society, the people who created TheyWorkForYou, the website with the ironic title.

Respect.

Bigger Bishop

There appear to have been enough people who found the font size 'ere a bit on the small side, so I've upped it a bit. I await a rush of new readers....

Is this too small?

One of my readers tells me that my blog's font size is too small. Does anyone else agree with this - should I up the size a bit?

Lots of good stuff around this morning

Is it just me, or are there a lot of interesting blog posts around this morning. Try these, for example:

Eamonn Butler on why plastic bags are better than paper ones, and why lots of packaging is better than none.

The Englishman on why hedgehogs are in decline.

EU Referendum on why we should be expecting power outages next winter. 

Who'd read a newspaper these days? (Although having said that, it's worth reading this article in the Telegraph about the EU's latest attempt to crush dissent).

New in the blogroll

This is the first addition to my blogroll for a while - Head of Legal, the blog of a barrister turned writer.

Civil Serf is down

The Sunday Times has a story speculating about the identity of Civil Serf, the anonymous Whitehall blogger.

The Civil Serf - as she calls herself - claims to be a 33-year-old fast-stream civil servant ready to expose the daily chaos of the Labour government machine while lampooning ministers and highlighting the idiocy of mandarin colleagues. There are also moans about drunken advances from the opposite sex.

It's a great blog - she writes beautifully, or at least she did, because as of this moment the whole site appears to have been deleted.  It's a shame, but it was certainly good to have a light shone on the inner workings of the mandarinate for a while.