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.

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).

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:

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.

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.

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?

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

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. 

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.

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;