1) East Bengal Monkfish Curry at the The Plaza, Tynemouth
2) Remembering your jumper for the walk back.
Anyway, got back last night, and didn't get out birding today. Partly cos it was wet. So I will do you a blast from the past... call me Nostradamus, but I can foresee no possible repercussions from scanning pages out of your spouse's personal diary and putting them on the web without her knowledge. So here it is from the pen of the ex-Miss Lawson. Still a very good Scottish bird... the Blackness '95 Firecrest.
And this is my take on the thing.
I've been doing a bit of reading... and I think the most nonsensical thing I read was from here.
'On the grounds of parsimony, I find some of these criticisms, including those levied by Sibley et al. (2006), to be more contorted and dubious than the original affirmative evidence. Also, some of this criticism was levied by those who, despite searching many yearsfor the woodpecker and generally recognized as experts (Jackson 2006), were not part of the Arkansas discovery team. Candidly, in these and in other instances, one cannot entirelydiscount envy, turf-guarding, or other inherent human motivations as contributing to some of the criticism. At times, I’ve been hard-pressed to imagine any definitive evidence that might ever convince some of the critics, even film, digital image, video image, fresh feathers, or a DNA tissue sample of the IBWP'
I mean, honestly. And it still doesn't cite my paper. and I'm still not bitter.
Interesting stats (maybe accurate, can't vouch for the odd one or two out)... on Tom Nelson's blog by the artist formerly known as Ivory-bill Skeptic.
November 2006. Posts, 37, on IBWOs. C omments, 450.
November 2007. Posts 247 (!!), nearly all on climate change, Comments 12.
8 comments:
Regarding your suggestion about my blog stats, I'd like to gently suggest that once again you don't actually know what you're talking about.
1. I'm extremely happy with the number of daily visits to my blog.
I've got access to both my site meter and yours. As an example, I can see that I've already recorded far more hits in the first five wee hours of the U.S. night than your blog typically receives in an entire day.
2. The dynamic of blog comments in the climate change debate is vastly different than it was in the Ivory-bill debate.
In the Ivory-bill world, for a long time my blog happened to be one of the only active skeptical games in town, and as such it attracted a lot of comments.
In contrast, the number of blogs on both sides of the climate change debate is larger by orders of magnitude. On the skeptical side, a very small number of blogs receive the lion's share of all comments (Climate Audit and The Reference Frame are two). I know for a fact that many widely read skeptical climate blogs receive very few (if any) comments.
3. Because I'm tired of dealing with idiots, I also recently changed my comment policy to not allow anonymous comments. Note that in the past, the vast majority of my comments were from anonymous folks.
4. I think that a healthy minority of my current readers have recently been Ivory-bill skeptics yet "know-nothing" believers in climate alarmism. (I strongly suspect that you fall into this category).
I think these people are not commenting because they are incapable of forming a coherent argument for their side.
Regards,
Tom
Ooff...Doc, looks like you've struck a nerve across the pond...how pleased am I that I'm way too incoherent to read any of it.
Its your own doing you know, using 'their' english names just attracts them...:-)
Sorry I was so taken aback by it all I forgot to say that I liked the diary ( and firecrest too)...
I can see that I've already recorded far more hits in the first five wee hours of the U.S. night than your blog typically receives in an entire day.
Ooooohhh miaow!!! :-)
Hi Martin,
I'm going to give it to you straight--from my perspective, you haven't been behaving very intelligently lately.
I say this for two reasons.
1. You accused me of "p*****g on my legacy" regarding my CO2 arguments, when you very clearly are utterly incapable of refuting those arguments.
That's just not very smart.
2. You threw a rock at me specifically regarding my allegedly low blog traffic. When I threw a much more effective one back, instead of taking an intelligent, reasonable "Oops, maybe I was wrong" stance, you chose the classless response above.
Again, your handling of the "blog statistic" issue was just not very smart.
Regards,
Tom
P.S. Just FYI, again yesterday my blog received about as much traffic as yours does in an entire month.
Again, I remind you that you took time out of your own busy day to start this discussion on the issue of blog traffic.
Tom,
You're falling into Martin's trap - it was just a clever ruse to increase traffic on his blog!
Doh!
Cheers,
Just commenting to raise your comment count. Also because, as one prone to idiocy, I would probably not be welcome on Tom's blog. He seems to have an issue with dumbness, or not-smartness, as we idiots would say.
By the way, I like your sketch but her field notes are more descriptive.
I think that one can acknowledge the possibility of ulterior motives on the part of some American critics and still find problems with the evidence. The failure to document the species in subsequent years - despite many observer-hours in the field - renders further argument over the Luneau video largely irrelevant, in my opinion. If an ivory-billed woodpecker was present in 2004, it is pretty clearly not present in Arkansas now.
Post a Comment