Paul Orwin has been bugging me for evidence that asteroid impacts have actually had an effect on humanity in the past (the post in which this occurred is actually the lead for my Fox News column today). I replied that it was certainly conceivable that the biblical flood and other mythical catastrophes could have been the result of such an event.

Someone via email pointed me to this article at Space.com from November that says exactly that.

As a public service announcement, and not to pick on the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, but I just happened to notice it here as the latest inadvertent offender. Strict HTML requires that tags like <i> be opened and closed on each paragraph. If you don’t, HTML-compliant browsers like Opera will display only the paragraph that has the tag in it as that font–the rest of the grafs will revert to standard text, even though the tag wasn’t closed on the first graf.

This problem doesn’t show up in Explorer, because it’s either more forgiving, if you want to consider it a Microsoft feature, or non-HTML compliant, if you want to consider it a bug.

Anyway, as an Opera user, I often find it hard to tell excerpted text from the blogger’s because the italics or whatever disappear after the first paragraph. Please fix this, if possible. I’ll give Mr. Slotman a break, because I can understand the the tag supply may be limited in an insolvent republic…

Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging, and be careful out there…

After some discussion, I’ve decided to put it back up, for now, but I’ve reduced the checking frequency from twice a minute to once, and I’m only getting headers rather than the entire blogspot page. I’m going to close up the source again also, because it really could become a problem if lots of bloggers start doing the same thing.

I think that if this really shows up as significant traffic at Pyra, they’ll figure out which IP to block. But as Steven Den Beste says, they have hundreds of thousands of sites, and get millions of hits per hour. I suspect that right now it’s just spitting in a hurricane in terms of bandwidth.

Dave Kreiger has some amusing anecdotes about his adventures as a scientific fact checker for Star Trek:TNG

It confirms what I’ve said before about television and movie writers and producers being willfully, even joyfully ignorant about basic science and logic.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

I have nothing to say about yesterday’s atrocity in Israel but, as usual, Lileks does. The contrast technique of his prose is staggering.

Also, lots of good related discussion over at Charles Johnson’s site.

Den Beste has a good piece debunking much of the press hysteria about “dirty bombs“.

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, “…when I interview Israelis, it’s almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians…no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution…” And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, “Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy…they’re just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me.”

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, “…I just don’t see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system.” Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just…well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.

Reader Randolph Addison writes:

Peter Jennings is in the Palestine/Israel region right now [on ABC radio] interviewing people and getting their feelings on the violence. Had I not heard this from his own mouth, I would have simply not believed the depths of moral relativity that exists in this man. To quote as closely as possible, he said, “…when I interview Israelis, it’s almost exactly like interviewing the Palestinians…no, wait, not exactly but very close to. They are both mired in distrust for the other side and feel as though they are entrenched in violence and cannot think of [this is the best part] an imaginative solution…” And he said some more about their distrust and similar feelings, etc.

Yes, because Palestinians who celebrate the death of babies are exactly like Israelis who just want to exist and will retaliate against Palestinian soldiers and militia infantry. I figure if I interview a rapist and his victims, I will get exactly the same interview from both sides. The rapist will say, “Gosh darnit, them there people were asking for it by being all damned snippy and haughty towards me after I cleaned their windows, looking all fancy…they’re just trying to rub their wealth in my face by hiring me.”

And the victims will have roughly the same story of, “…I just don’t see why I had to provoke him by acting as though I was better just because I go to work every day and make a good living. I should not have hired him to clean our windows because it just highlights in the financial disparity of our backwards capitalist system.” Yep.

I never liked Peter Jennings for his haughty more-pious-than-thou attitude on everything (even when he is clearly wrong and should know it). This took me over the edge. To draw moral equality between them is just…well, amazing.

One more reason that fewer and fewer watch network news.