bored of education

Ask and ye shall receive

I found the perfect Blog for info showing whether mankind causes Global Warming. It is www.realclimate.org. It is written by a climate scientist, Professor Michael Mann, and eight other scientists. They answer questions raised by the media, skeptics, or the concerned curious (such as myself).

The good thing is that the answers are written by the scientists and are unfiltered by the Media. Nor did I see any references to the not-yet-convinced (such as myself) as irrational idiots.

Thank you Professor Mann. I look forward to reading your entire site...

Global Warming News

I found an excellent site which posts up to date news about Global Warming. It is called Howling at the Moon.

The article I read only had one quote which offended my skeptical mind. Dr. Tim Barnett was quoted as saying "The debate about whether or not there is a global warming signal here and now is over at least for rational people." Just because I'm curious and would like to know more facts does not mean I'm irrational...

I found another site which holds the opposite view (about Global Warming...not about whether I'm rational.) It is EnviroSpin Watch. In the most recent post Professor Emeritus Philip Stott compares the media's constant worry about the environment with hypochondriacs. It is a very funny article but left me unconvinced about his position...

Anyway, I'm still unsure about the global warming issue...I'll have to dig a little deeper.

Global Warming

I've become increasingly interested in the controversy over global warming. The politically correct view is that mankind causes (or at least contributes to) the current warming trend. However, many scientists believe natural forces are warming our planet and that humans have very little to do with it. I want to find out which view has the most support from science.

Unfortunately, most arguments sound something like:

"The media is biased and is not reporting the more important details..." (That's probably true, but it doesn't prove your point. What details should they be reporting?)

Or,

"Every rational scientist believes global warming is due to mankind's influence therefore it must be true." (I'm only convinced by their reasons, not their credentials.)

I'm not interested in the rhetoric, I'm interested in the data and the conclusions that can be made from the data. And so I begin my search.

As I find items of interest I will post them here.

Technorati Tag Test

For those who don't know, the website technorati watches over 7 million weblogs and tracks over 863 million links.

They offer a service called tags. The idea is that when I update my weblog, a link is added under the appropriate tag. People who are browsing through the technorati tags might see the link to my blog and visit.

It is a great way to promote a site with interesting content. (I don't pretend, yet, to have interesting content. I'm still just figuring out the technology.)

I want to see if it works by placing this entry in the blogging tag.

So if you came to my site via technorati, post a comment whether it worked or not.

Who Let the Blogs Out?

I still haven't figured out how to do the normal associate links to amazon.com. But I think I figured out how to link to a specific book.

I decided to link to Who let the Blogs Out? by Biz Stone since it is the book that inspired me to start blogging.

When the link creation site at Amazon didn't work I went looking elsewhere for help and I found this site which had this entry explaining some of URL language used at amazon.

Anyway, now that I have a link to Who let the Blogs Out? one of my two readers should go and buy it. (Mostly to see if the associates thing works...Although I could use the 50 cents.)

Amazon Associates Test

I just signed up to be an Amazon Associate. The signup part was easy. (Although I was a little nervous about giving them my Social Security number.) The difficult part has been posting a link on my sidebar.

Until I figure out how to do that I'm going to try and post a link here...

Update: Link failed and I have deleted it.

Better than Blogrolls

On my other blog. I had set up a blogroll using blogrolling.com. It was fairly easy to do... The difficult part was to get the format of the blogroll to match the format of the other sidebar items. (In fact I never did get it to match. I'm more interested in spending my time developing worthwhile content than I am in making it beautiful. Sorry...)

Typepad makes blogrolling easy. (Only they don't call them blogrolls. They're called lists...which seems unnatural!) I just setup a list of websites that have lesson plans which teach math as problem solving. I'll talk more about them later. (I'm on vacation and don't want to think about math.)

First Post, Second Blog

I started my first blog in January. It turns out that blogger doesn't quite meet my needs. My math department needs to have a multiple author blog that is password protected and blogger doesn't allow password protection. So...I decided to setup multiple blogs with typepad. It does cost 15 dollars a month but that seems reasonable for the number of blogs I have in mind.

Right now I'm at school and I'm waiting for four students to leave so that I can. However, they are not getting the hint....