National Portait Gallery and everlasting copyrights
I had not intended to blog about the National Portrait Gallery threatening to sue Wikipedia over the latter’s publication of copies of paintings in the gallery, as I thought it would be obvious to anyone that this is a blatant attempt to use physical possession of a work to get around the expirations of copyrights. Tactics like this can effectively extend copyright indefinitely. (more…)
Comments disabled
Less free speech in Ireland
The Irish apparently do not like freedom of speech. Everyone will be subject to the same restriction to prevent speech that might actually criticise beliefs or encourage people to think for themselves, that British broadcasters are already subject to. At leas in Ireland it is the courts that have the final say, in Britain it is Ofcom and the completely unaccountable bureaucrats at the IWF (more…)
Credulous police and bad English
I cannot decide whether I am more shocked by the news that the police are relying on Wikipedia, or the bad English in this discussion of it (more of the comments that attempt to use the word “credible” get it wrong than get it right).
Comments disabled
Why blogs are better than newspapers
Here is an example. It is readable (even if you skip the calculations), explains the argument for expecting a strong recovery, and why it may not happen. (more…)
Comments disabled
Google hatred
The usually intelligent Willem Buiter has written a great example of the irrational hatred that Google seems to sporadically evoke. He attacks them with a list of charges, all of which are easily refuted.
Comments disabled
Scary Pew Research
Many people have called the recent Pew Research Centre poll that “showed” that only 26% of Americans believed in evolution. What is really scary is that no-one seems to have looked closely enough at it to see that it showed nothing of the sort.
(more…)
Comments disabled
Old news, but….
…just in case you missed it (I did till today).
The Guardian was fooled by an elaborate hoax into claiming that NASA conducted experiments on sex in space.
They believed the story because they got the claim from a “respected French scientific writer”, Pierre Kohler. Neither he nor Jon Henley (the Guardian journalist responsible) actually thought of doing some of the proper fact checking.
Comments disabled
Thomas Gall International School website
As a few people arrive at this blog searching for information related to Galle, it is worth mentioning that I have done a website for my daughter’s school: The Thomas Gall International School, Galle.
Update, Sept 2012: That website is no longer up, as the school failed to renew the domain name. I believe they have plans for a new site.
Update, April 2015: My daughter moved to another school some time ago as well.
Comments disabled
Here is the news: and its going to get better
Alan Patrick has a rather dismal take on mainstream news media’s loss of audience to bloggers. I am considerably more optimistic: I think Alan both over-estimates the quality of newspapers and TV news, and under-estimates the quality available from blogs.
Feed