As I implicitly promised here, we went to see Al Gore’s new doc­u­men­tary on global climate change, An In­con­ve­nient Truth, when it opened in Seattle last night. We brought some friends too.

Gore lays out a compelling case that global climate change is real, that it’s been happening for decades, and that it’s spiralling out of control. He backs it up with plenty of statistics and graphs.

• The ten hottest years on record have all been since 1990.
• The glaciers are in full retreat everywhere. The "snows of Kil­i­man­jaro" are almost gone.
• At current rates, the Arctic ocean could be ice-free by 2050.
• If either the ice covering Greenland or the ice on the western side of Antarctica …continue.

Nearly two years ago, I said that I was back at Microsoft, as a contractor. A year later, I said that I was moving on, because my 12 months were up. In both cases, I said that I was doing some really in­ter­est­ing work and that I hoped to be able to talk about it some day.

Now the truth can be told: I was working on FlexGo, Microsoft’s new prepaid/sub­scrip­tion versions of Windows. FlexGo was announced last Monday and unveiled the next day at WinHEC (transcript of BillG’s speech; FlexGo is at the end). The …continue.

Jamison Foser writes on the defining issue of our time:

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or un­will­ing­ness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it im­mi­gra­tion, out­sourc­ing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruth­less­ness or the tactical and strategic su­pe­ri­or­i­ty of the …continue.

Raven emailed me a link to this story in the Onion: Heroic Computer Dies to Save World From Master’s Thesis:

"This fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of ex­as­per­at­ed head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who had already read through three drafts of Samoske­vich’s sprawling, 38,000-word dis­ser­ta­tion, titled A Hermeneu­ti­cal Ex­plo­ration Of Ono­matopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. "It was an incredible act of bravery. This laptop sacrificed itself in order to put an end to Jill’s senseless rambling."

Nothing like …continue.

Here’s a selection of the lies propagated by the Right in the last few years:

• Iraq sent its WMDs to Syria.
• Democrats don’t want to wiretap terrorists.
• Mexicans are taking our jobs.
• Scooter Libby has a faulty memory.
• Tom DeLay is like Jesus Christ.
• No one could have an­tic­i­pat­ed that the levees would be breached.
• We do not torture.
• There is no global warming.
• There is global warming, but humans didn’t cause it.
• John F. Kerry is a flip-flopper.
• George W. Bush is a decider.
• Nobody at the White House knows Jack Abramoff.
• Evolution isn’t supported by the facts.
• Diebold voting machines are secure.
• Fox News is fair and balanced.
• Mission ac­com­plished.
• No one could have an­tic­i­pat­ed the Iraqi insurgency.
• The budget deficit will be cut in half in four years.
• Anyone who thinks Dubai shouldn’t control our …continue.

Amer­i­ca­Blog links to a CNN segment on the quacks who claim they can "cure" ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty.

Very creepy. Very bogus. And typical of so-called reparative therapy.

I believe that those "ex-gays" who do manage to make a go of it are bisexual rather than gay. In other words, they’re no more than-5 on the Kinsey scale.

And I’m not the only one.

I’ve been sporting a goatee for the last two months, instead of my usual full beard. This has ne­ces­si­tat­ed shaving, and I’ve been using those disposable Bic razors. I haven’t been very happy with them. They left my face feeling like I had been making out with a cheese grater.

I bought one of those new five-bladed Fusion razors yesterday and shaved with it this morning. Oh my! Very smooth!

I’m convinced that five blades is marketing hokum and that five blades is probably not really better than four blades. Or three blades. But five blades is certainly better than one.

I have two blogs, my personal blog and my technical blog. The technical blog is a small subset of the personal blog containing posts that are more likely to be of interest to the techie audience at weblogs.asp.net.

Lately, the comments in one post at weblogs.asp.net have been repeatedly spammed with sad little gems like the following:

• "not much on my mind right now"
• "I just don’t have anything to say , but shrug"
• "I’ve just been letting everything happen without me"
• "Basically nothing noteworthy happening right now, but eh"
• "My mind is like a void"

If you click the links above, you’ll find that I’m not the only one who’s getting this treatment. The spams are clearly generated by a …continue.

I just listened to This American Life on the radio. I am con­tin­u­al­ly amazed at just how good this show is. They find so many compelling stories.

This week, Ira Glass in­ter­viewed Gene Cheek, who wrote a memoir, The Color of Love: A Mother’s Choice in the Jim Crow South.

In the early 1960s, Cheek’s divorced mother fell in love with Tuck, a black man. They lived in a small town in North Carolina, and the mis­ce­gena­tion laws were still on the books. They dated clan­des­tine­ly, but eventually their re­la­tion­ship become known. The police would stop by regularly to harass them. After she had a baby by Tuck, her own …continue.

A front group for Big Oil is putting out ads denying the reality of global warming, in a pre-emptive bid to undermine Al Gore’s new doc­u­men­tary, An In­con­ve­nient Truth.

The first ad portrays global warming science as a vicious smear campaign against carbon dioxide. The ad, which despite ap­pear­ances is not an SNL parody, helpfully reminds us that carbon dioxide is “essential to life” because “we breath[e] it out.”

"An In­con­ve­nient Truth" opens in Seattle on June 2nd, 2006.