Over the weekend I've been playing around with Wordpress, having set up a blog over at wordpress.com, where you can set up a blog spectacularly quickly (as you can over with Google's blogger.com).  As a fairly experienced Joomla! user, I found the hosted blog slightly restrictive (for example I would have to pay a daily rate of $0.04 just to be able to edit the theme's css file).

I ended up doing a test installaion on my notebook, firstly using a dedicated database, then trying out incorporating its database within my main Joomla! database.  It turns out to be pretty straightforward to migrate content (though I imagine one would exceed the import limit quite quickly on an active blog).

I reported the other day (BBC gifting private data to a USA-based company) that the BBC were using a cookie-based method to send off your browsing history at their website to a company based in the USA, Omniture.  It now turns out that several other companies are doing similar data transfer, though not using cookies.  Annoyingly, the list includes The Guardian.

In that thread, there are instructions on how to block transfer of this data: for Windows, and Linux.  Another contribution to that thread offers this crontab based approach for Linux, while there are observations for Vista users.  I think an approach for Macs will be forthcoming.

Picked this one up via Ben Goldacre's Bad Science miniblog, in turn linking to the Daily Mirror's site, where an article by some investigative journalists questions the efficacy of Ecoflow magnets.

It's a pretty straightforward debunking of the claims that these magnets when strapped onto fuel pipes improve fuel efficiency, cutting costs by 5-20%.  Similar devices, marketed as Bioflow are claimed to be benficial for arthritis sufferers.  Amusingly the company leaves any such claims to its network of distributors following a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority:

Via the excellent Pharyngula blog, I came across this ridiculous article by Bryan Appleyard in The Times:  For God's sake, have Charles Darwin's theories made any difference to our lives? - published on 11th January (so I got to it a little late - I'm more of a Guardian reader!).

Yes, Bryan, they have made a difference, and not the spurious negative ones you build up to in your article.  To be charitable, one must suppose the point of Appleyard's article is to point out that many (usually from the under-educated religious wing) do not accept evolution by natural selection (and I come back to the difference between comment and reportage later).

Now, another protest against the atheist bus, this time from a christian bus driver, who is taking exception to the phrase "There's probably no god...".

The bus company apparently will endeavour to ensure that Mr Heather won't have to drive one of these buses.  So, I suppose end of story.  Except of course, I spend much of my atheist existence being popped at by bizarre religious ramblings, not least via my morning radio listening, which is invariably polluted by "Thought for the Day".  If you are really keen to listen, you can do so here.

I picked up on this new blog at ScienceBlogs - "Blogging the Origin" via Science's Origins blog.  In this blog, science writer and evolutionist John Whitfield, who bravely admits to never having read The Origin of Species before, is conducting a book club cum blog as he reads the text, chapter by chapter in this anniversary year.  As I write, he's covered the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, with the next instalment due on Friday.  He plans to finish in time to celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday.

I haven't read The Origins since I was a teenager (which is an upsettingly long time ago), and this has inspired me to read it again.  But which version?   The old Pelican paperback edition I read all those years ago is a later edition of the tome, while the edition reprinted in the compilation From So Simple a Beginning", edited by E. O. Wilson, is I think the first edition (but lacks a certain portability - the volume also has Voyage of the Beagle, Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions, all in a hardback binding).  Perhaps I should limit myself to the 1858 pair of papers by Darwin and Wallace?

According to The Register (IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting), explanation of the loss of access to the internet archive to customers of some UK ISPs is due to an IWF blacklist, containing URLs contained within that archive.

The Register asked the IWF what URLs were blacklisted, who at the ISPs were responsible for implementing the blacklist, and why ISPs were blocking the whole archive, but the IWF refuse to comment on the URLs on the blacklist (it's their policy), and refused to (or were unable to) answer the other questions.

Here is a visitor map - it should show where visitors are located!

The Register reports that the UK ISP Demon has removed access to a larcge chunk of internet history.  The error pages that users are presented with apparently imply this is in response to the site being listed on the IWF blacklist.  Amusingly, El Reg reports:

One Demon customer tells us he was unable to visit archived versions of websites run by the BBC, Parliament, the United Nations, the Internet Watch Foundation, Demon Internet, and Thus. In other words, this customer points out, Thus is blocking its own web history. "It is nuts," he says.

This does seem to be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  I presume there are dubious sites archived at the wayback machine, but to block the lot seems a bit extreme.  Presumably the internet block derives from the way Demon have sought to implement the IWF blacklist.

Well, Andrew Brown (in who's blog at the Guardian I first read Clifford Longley's dopey ASA complaint) has written a little bit more about the affair, and judges that "Clifford Longley has been silly".  At least it would seem that the text that Longley appears to have sent to newspaper columnists up and down the country was sent by him.

His defence is that the quotes are genuine even if he did not collect them and he that he never claimed to have collected them himself. It didn't seem to him the important thing about them. Some of them he had in his own library, or could remember reading; others were new to him, but all seemed germane to his general point, that there are distinguished scientists who take the strong anthropic principle seriously as evidence for design in the universe. This was the point he wanted to make to the ASA, which offers a web form for complaints on its web site into which he cut and pasted what he had found. 

It's a few days now since Clifford Longley's supposed complaint to the ASA was released on the internet via the wonders of blogging (for example search Google for the string "According to growing numbers of scientists, the laws and constants of nature are so").

I did just that search, along with a few others to see whether Clifford Longley had indeed made that complaint to the ASA with the plagiarised text.  (See my post Rebutting Clifford Longley), and I'm unable to see any  evidence that (a) the complaint has been made and (b) that it is anything to do with Clifford Longley.

The journal Science has launched a new blog to celebrate the Darwin 200 anniversary, entitled Origins. There's an rss feed.

In the current issue of the journal are articles by Peter Bowler on Darwin's Originality and by Carl Zimmer entitled On the Origin of Life on Earth. [subscription may be required].

Ars Technica reports that SCO, the bankrupt (both morally and financially) company with a tangled history of amalgamations and renaming, and which has been fighting a losing battle against Linux (via courtroom debacles with Novell, IBM, Autozone and Red Hat) has filed a fourth reorganisation plan.  The whole sorry saga of how SCO's deluded CEO Darl McBride dragged the company into a legal morass can be read at the famous and excellent Groklaw blog.  With SCO's claims mere dust in the wind, Groklaw appears to be entering a phase of consolidation, as it sorts through the astonishing quantity of court filings and other documentation and comment the site has generated over the last four years or so since SCO launched is big action against IBM.  During that period, the story has been spectacularly convoluted, ultimately revealing that not only does SCO not own Unix copyrights, but that they actually owed Novell a significant wad of cash (still unpaid as SCO use it to bankroll continued legal action).

As far as I know, and despite his role in the company's looming demise, McBride seems to remain at the helm and is presumably one of the four top executives in line for continued remuneration.

Apparently the 1911 England and Wales census is now online, and I feel a renewed enthusiasm for a spot of internet genalogy (registered users in the apprpriate group have access to my genealogy web pages on this site)!  When the 1901 census data went online a few years ago, demand for access hugely exceeded the capacity of the servers.  It would be nice if the system this time round could cope, and in fact this seems to be the case!  Woohoo!

Link to the 1911 census website;  BBC News report on the 1911 census;

Many tropical diseases are transmitted by insect vectors - malaria (which is caused by Plasmodium parasites) and yellow fever (caused by a virus) being examples of diseases transmitted by Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes respectively.  Dengue fever is another viral disease that is transmitted by Aedes aegypti.  One crucial feature of the disease transmission cycle is that once the disease organism is collected by the mosquito in a blood meal, it takes some time to develop within the insect before it becomes infectious.  In the case of both malaria and dengue fever, this period of time is about two weeks.  This paper evaluates the use of the endosymbiotic bactera Wolbachia to shorten mosquito lifespan in the hope that this will reduce disease transmission.

In a sense, this is an attractive strategy, and one that makes use of one of the properties of some Wolbachia strains to shorten host lifespan. I have previously blogged about some aspects of Wolbachia biology in the immune system of insects.  Wolbachia infection is maternally transmitted, and spreads through insect populations because of a reproductive drive known as cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) - infected females mated to uninfected males yield infected offspring, while uninfected females mated to infected males yield no offspring.  This reproductive drive is presumably sufficient to drive even strains of Wolbachia which have negative effects on viability (such as reduced lifespan) through the population.

I was interested to know more about Stephen Green, the man who has filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority against the Atheist Bus ad campaign.  The blog site mediawatchwatch has an interview with Stephen Green, dating from June 2005.  In it, he demonstrates an astonishing lack of understanding of biology and evolution by natural selection.  For example, on one of the classic examples of sexual selection, the peacock's tail:

Why does the peacock have such a magnificent tail? ‘So he can attract a mate', the evolutionist replies. So how does the hedge-sparrow do it? 

The ASA complaint about the Atheist Bus ad campaign, as reported in the Guardian website supposedly emanates from one Clifford Longley.  In fact, the complaint is largely plagiarised from a religious website, and makes the same strategic cock-ups as many a creationist tract does: old quotations, out of context quotations, quotations incorrectly attributed, quotations that may never have been made.  Add to the mix an argument from authority, presumably right up the street for someone who can accept the most improbable drivel from an priest figure, and you have a classic set of misapprehension masquerading as an academic exercise.  Perhaps the whole thing is a hoax?

I read in the blogosphere that over 50 complaints have been made to the ASA - if they are all as pathetic as this one and that of Stephen Green, I say bring them on!

I fancied a change from the old website template, which has been going for more than a year.  The new template is a modified Siteground template.

I had a few issues making the header image work with Internet Explorer 6 and earlier (the notorious png problem), but seem to have cracked that.  As usual, the the site has been tested with a variety of browsers on Linux (Firefox 3.0.5, Epiphany 2.24.1, Konqueror 4.1.3, Opera 9.63).  In Win XP I've looked at it on IE 6 and 7, and it seems to work (now the png fix for IE versions =<6 has been implemented.  I haven't tried Chrome, or any browser on Mac OSX.

Introduction

Here's another attempted broadside from religious wackos. A comment article on the Guardian website from Andrew Brown presents a statement that "distinguished religious affairs commentator" Clifford Longley (who? Presumably this Clifford Longley, who's website hasn't been updated in a while) has made, in addition to the crackpot Christian Voice, complained to the ASA about the atheist bus advert.

In an astonishingly inane piece, Longley maintains

it would be honest and true to say the opposite - "There probably is a God."