My story on climate change and national security ran in this morning’s paper. It gave me a chance to take a stab at explaining the idea of “no regrets” policies – climate change responses that are robust to the endless and apparently unsettleable argument in our political arena over the nature and causes of climate …
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Elise.com has a thorough discussion of techniques for fighting comment spam. What seems to be the most widely used is Jay Allen’s mt-blacklist. But since that would have required an MT upgrade, I opted to first try this simple hack. It is based on the assumption that there is brainless automation on the other end …
Aaron yesterday suggested children may be an expensive luxury. Dude, there’s good science backed up by badass mathematical analysis to support that suggestion. One of the puzzles of demography has long been that as societies get richer, they tend to have lower birth rates. This seems evolutionarily counter-intuitive. As you get richer, you ought to …
One day into my little hack and I am comment spam free. I also am free of other comments, which either means I’ve also inadvertently disabled all comments (my testing suggests that is not the case) or that I’m just exceedingly boring, that whatever it is I have to say is not worthy of comment.
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Assuming the blog comment spammers are stupid, lazy or both (reasonable assumptions, at least for starters), I’ve added a simple hack to keep their automated instruments of vile torture at bay. We’ll see how long this works. (A thought: Is there any kind of torture that isn’t vile?)
I did some smart things, made a couple of big mistakes, and made, for about an hour and forty seven minutes, the hardest physical effort of my life. About an hour and a half into it, on a long gentle climb on a clean, clear road with the wind at my back, I had a …