Can you say 'ad hominem'?

There used to be a time, or maybe not, when science was decided by facts. But in an age where science is faced with empirical evidence of climate change that requires computer simulation to interpret, things are not so clear cut.

Recently, I've noted a disturbing trend in the global warming "debate." I use scare quotes around "debate" because only folks who question the conclusion that global warming is caused by humans seem to want to discuss the issue. Intellectual giants such as Al Gore and his ilk don't need no stinkin' debate, of course, because the scientific consensus - even among people who don't actually work in the field of climate science - is that global warming is caused by humans and can be controlled by humans, if only the right people are given the means to enforce their will on the rest of us.

I mean, that's what governments are for, right?

So recently, those who doubt the certainty of human-caused global warming have been described as "deniers," an emotionally charged word that has, up to now, been used to describe those who, over the past almost two generations, have maintained that the death tolls in Nazi concentration camps - especially that "6 million" number that describes the number of Jews killed - is an elaborately crafted lie.

Just now, I read a story on Wired in which doubters of the causes and effects of global warming are accused of manipulating data and are basically likened to the wags hired by the tobacco industry decades ago to discredit data on the apparent link between smoking and lung cancer.

Presumably, anyone who doubts the party line must do so at their own personal expense, in their free time, just to even things up with pro-party-line bureaucrats and scientists, who, in their entire careers, have been provided with, literally, billions of dollars in staff, salaries, and budgets to promote an outcome that would aggrandize said careers, staffs, salaries, and budgets and boost the agendas of parties who seek to aggrandize political power and who, if they worked for Monsanto or Halliburton and had the effrontery to make the kind of claims they are making, would be shipped off to the loony bin as delusional.

I wonder what's next? I wouldn't be surprised if people like Gore start accusing their opponents of being Nazis.

Cheers...

Things are looking up...

A client sent about 40,000 words for the 23rd, which put a big smile on my face (even if that loads me down to nearly 100% of my time between now and then). That back-of-the-envelope estimate fortunately takes account of the fact that the actual deadline will likely be the 20th, since I have a tentative interpretation gig planned starting the 21st.

In other news, I got a check in the mail today - nothing dramatic - but as far as my records show, I've never done work for the company that sent me the check. To further compound the mystery, I could not find the invoice number shown on the check stub in my records (it certainly wasn't one of mine, nor was it associated with any job I've done).

Fortunately, the translation business being what it is (where one gets paid by the word), it's exceedingly rare for two invoices to be for the exact same amount, and the amount of the check happened to match an invoice that was issued in the appropriate time frame, to a company in the same geographical area. I shall thus consider the mystery solved (with a notation entered in the appropriate paper client file).

Assuming I'm interested in building traffic to my work web site, it would appear that packaging the information in a TiddlyWiki isn't a very good solution. When you click on the html link, an entire Wiki engine gets loaded into your browser, and any user activity that results in the display of new information - tiddlers, as they're called in TW-speak - is kept entirely within the wiki and doesn't register with whatever logs file access on your host's server. This is something to think about, but later.

I've been slacking all day. I allowed myself to do so in the morning, to let Natalie get some sleep (as she and Kyle - who left for the Great White North today - stayed up late last night), and then I went out to do errands and started to feel tired, and then napped upon my return, and here I now am, and it's nearly 8 pm.

I'm going to have to get more on the bounce, here, and right quick.

Cheers...