Weird Links

The last quarter century has seen the explosion of a profession, financial engineering, that has provided innumerable lucrative opportunities for otherwise indigent mathematicians... Nevertheless the turbulence in the bond markets in the last couple of months, at a time when the world economy's prospects seemed set fair, have exposed a guilty secret of the financial engineering profession: its methods don't work.

When it comes to Iran's nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?

That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq...

..I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations.

The Firefox browser may not be as independent as previously thought. Mozilla essentially owns Firefox, and it proved so when it flexed its muscles last year in forcing Debian to rename its browser IceWeasel.

However, the open secret in the tech sector is that at the end of the day, Google calls the shots. As this blog post will explain, when a pro-user security feature in the browser threatens Google's business model, it is the feature that is made to compromise--not the search engine.

The sad, awful truth is that we fete these people, we fawn on them, we supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores. No, of course, there will be no visas for this reporter because Saudi Arabia is no democracy. Yet how many times have we been encouraged to think otherwise about a state that will not even allow its women to drive? Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, was telling us again yesterday that we should work more closely with the Saudis, because we "share values" with them. And what values precisely would they be, I might ask?

The demonization of Iran drags on relentlessly as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been officially branded a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its elite Quds Force a supporter of terrorism. The latter has for months been accused of supplying Shi'ite militias in Iraq with weapons that are killing US soldiers.

The move follows President George W Bush's comments last week that implied that Iran obtaining nuclear weapons could lead to "World War III", and Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on Sunday in which he said that "the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences" if Iran does not comply with demands.

At some point within the next twenty or thirty years China will face an energy crisis for which it will be almost certainly unprepared. The crisis may come sooner if, due to a combination of internal and external pressures, the Chinese are forced to limit the use of coal and similar fuels. At that point their economic growth would stall and they would face a massive recession.

For the US this means that in the future, say around 2025, the ability of private US or multinational firms to offer China a reliable supply of beamed electricity at a competitive price would allow China to continue its economic growth and emergence as part of a peaceful world power structure.

For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It's odd, then, that they're prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton to carry the party into the 2008 elections.

The problem with Hillary Clinton is two-fold: First, she's likely to be as bad or worse than Bush on all of those issues, and second, she's the one Democrat the Republicans still have a chance to beat.

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran...

Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.