Not that I personally have set the blogosphere on fire, but two issues that do have had some play here. My top visited in the past seven days have been:
- Home page 187 reads
- Open Letter from U.S. Scientists on the IPPC 43
- Climate change is real, real, real… 42
- SBY’s speech in the Australian parliament 37
- Some of my best friends are gay –- 29
- Not everything in this life is as simple 29
- The incomparable norrie 19
- A BBC2 documentary we haven’t yet seen in Australia 15
I posted about norrie, whose quest for official recognition of a gender neither M nor F grabbed world attention this week, because I know norrie personally.
I posted about climate change because it is there. Two commenters in particular have been vigorous in their replies: Roger from New Zealand, and my old sparring partner Kevin from Louisiana. Kevin’s main contributions have been to my page on the subject. Kevin, who really is a funny man (sincerely!), has a post of his own on climatology.
Kevin has, it seems, become angrier with me — well, not so much with me as with everyone who believes the mainstream climate scientists have generally speaking got it right. What finally pisses Kevin off may be seen in his more recent comments on my page, and that amounts, with all due respect, to the idea that there is a UN-sponsored plot to remove money from the pockets of US citizens and curtail their freedom to do whatever they bloody well like.
There is a converse conspiracy theory that has rather more merit, except that I would object that it is unfair to lump all who have doubts about global warming into this camp. Nonetheless I do believe when a sustained PR attack is made on a group of working scientists it may well mostly be a sustained PR attack rather than a scientific argument — and PR is always paid for by someone. The following video is admittedly insubstantial:
But see also Koch Industries multibillionaire Koch brothers bankroll attacks on climate change science and policy.
Meanwhile over on the photo blog things have been much more sedate. No individual post has really stood out in the past seven days, but this one has been top so far this month with 77 visits.
On how photography has undergone a revolution in recent years see THE NEGATIVE IS NO LONGER A SQUARE OF FILM.
Photography is dead. That news may come as a surprise, since obituaries about art tend to be written about painting. Invented in the 1830s, photo-graphy is still in its infancy as an art form compared to the centuries-old medium of painting. Despite inventions like portable paint tubes and fast-drying acrylic, painting has not undergone the transformations that digitalization is bringing to the medium of photography. Of course, I’m speaking about the death of film photography. Happy to save on the cost of film and the time taken to develop it, consumers embraced digitalization with such gusto that a whole industry is dying. In 2005, the film photography giant AgfaPhoto filed for bankruptcy. In 2009, Polaroid ceased the production of instant Polaroid film, and Kodak discontinued Kodachrome film. Digital photographs are not only cheaper and faster to produce; they can be stored endlessly and shared instantly with countless friends. Polaroids, though ‘instant’, could not be emailed and tweeted. For artists, such mass-market developments are turning film photography into a specialist field, like lithography…
Whatever happened to Autumn?
Adrian Phoon asked that question on Twitter earlier today. Down in Crown Street at noon I wondered myself…
Neil's final decade 