It’s never a good idea to hotlink someone’s  image by putting an embedded image in your own blog or website.  That’s especially true these days with so many free hosting sites and hosting so cheap to begin with.   Still someone got lazy and apparently found an image I had up.   It was only a tiny image that was actually downscaled from an Associated Press story.

There’s another issue with hotlinking images.  When someone else runs the server, they can find out when there’s traffic coming from an image like that.  They can also change the image if they want, since it’s their hosting account.

Here, an assclown decided to use the little image I had in a post while posting some anti-science propaganda against modern agriculture.

It looked something like this:

(more…)

I know this might sound like a shock, but I will soon be leaving the blogging world and no longer keep this site online.   I feel that this is necessary for personal reasons.  It’s not because of spelling errors or because of the cost of hosting, but because I have other things to focus on in my life.   I need the time and space to make my transition

Recently, I made the difficult decision to begin the process of becoming a woman.  I’ve always felt like a woman trapped inside the body of a man, trapped inside the body of a horse, trapped inside the body of a woman, trapped inside the body of a man.   While there’s nothing I can do to completely untrap myself from all the layers of entrapment, I can at least remove one layer.   As such, I will be having a sex change operation.   Before I can do this, I need to move somewhere that such surgery can be had at bargain basement prices.  Thus, I shall soon be bidding my beloved country goodbye and moving to Guatemala to begin the gender reassignment process.

I have struggled with this decision for many years, but last night, as I lay in bed, Jesus came to me in a dream and told me he would still love me no matter what or where I was.   Thank you, Jesus.  I now know what I must do.

After my transition is complete, I’m not sure what I will do, but tentatively my plans are to return to the United States, to live in the shallow water channels of Florida, where I will become a member of the peaceful community of manatees.  Did I mention that somewhere in those layers of entrapment is a manatee?   I might have forgotten that.   Manatees are also extremely accepting and very peaceful creatures.   Best of all, manatees don’t have nuclear arms.   You can’t hug your children with nuclear arms!   Of course, they also don’t have regular arms either, but they do have flipper-like things that are a bit like arms.

Finally, I just want to wish everyone a blessed April Fools Day.

In the past couple of weeks there has been an enormous increase in the amount of spam/advertising/bogus comments showing up on this site.   It might be because this site has gotten onto some list of sites for spamming or it might be just a general increase in spam across the net or it could be because there has been quite a bit of traffic recently.

Whatever the case, these comments and link-backs really get in the way of having a meaningful discussion and are a huge annoyance.   It’s important to catch them as much as possible, because many spammers are able to detect if the comment has been successfully posted and, if it was, they will continue to post to the site.  If it’s not, the spambot may know enough not to bother with the site anymore.

For this reason I’ve had to increase the level of filtering.   This includes filtering messages from certain IP ranges, domains and email addresses, as well as messages which contain certain key words and phrases.   Some of the filtering methods also include filtering messages which fit a profile derived from public spambot lists.   Sites that receive spam report it to various databases and the patterns are used to reconize when the spambot comes to another site.

Unfortunately, as the filtration standards are made tighter, more legitimate messages are likely to get moderated as suspicious.   They are not deleted!  They end up in a spam folder which I regularly review and approve messages that are not spam and don’t belong in there.   However, this might take a day or so, because I do have a life aside from this site.

So if your comment does not show up, that is probably why.   Please don’t keep trying to post the same message 20 times in a row and then start posting messages about how you’re being censored.   That’s not what’s happening.   It’s just an issue of the spam filters not being perfect.

Starting a blog can be pretty frustrating.  For the first few weeks (or more) there are few visitors and even fewer comments, which really makes it feel like you’re posting to a vacuum.   So when someone starts a blog that advocates things like nuclear energy, better enviornmental policy, human health and those kind of things, it’s always a good idea to support it and help it get going.

So why not do that for our friend Robert Steinhaus who has a brand-spankin-new blog called “Yottawatts From Thorium.” It’s worth a read anyway and although it only has a few posts up thus far, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more insightful and top-notch posts in the near future.

The Depleted Cranium 2009  year in review

The Hypocrisy of Greenpeace Illustrated - Most visited post of the year and the most discussed, with a total of 144 comments

Get your damn symbols right! – Surprisingly, this one was the second place for the most visited post of the year, although not nearly as discussed, with only 36 comments.

How Homeopathy (Supposedly) Works Illustrated - Not quite at the top in terms of most visits (although it was posted relatively late in the year)  However, this post stands out as having the most link-backs of any post in DC history and has an astounding 77 Facebook links and 47 tweets and re-tweets

The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn – Not as popular in 2009 as it was when it was first published, nearly two years ago, but this post continues to rank in the top ten and is the all time most visited and most commented post.

Depleted Uranium for Dinner – The most popular and commented post of a youtube video.   However, this was followed closely by Apollo 11 First Steps, High Quality 16mm DAC.

Visitor loyalty was above average for a blog.   More than 10% of visitors were considered “regular,” having visited several pages over the course of months.    Visitor retention was also above average, with most staying for two minutes or more.

The most prolific commenter was DV82XL.

Traffic:

The largest refereeing sites to Depleted Cranium for 2009, not including search engines are (in order of visitors):

stumbleupon.com
randi.org
thoriumenergy.blogspot.com

About 40% of visitors came from a refering site, about 30% came from search engines and about 30% came directly to Depleted Cranium in 2009.

The most common word entered into a search engine to find this site was “Organic.”   Over six thousand visitors to this site got her by searching for the word “organic” or a phrase containing it.

(more…)

Best Wishes that for a very very high energy holiday season and a bountiful new year.

This holiday season, may you and all your friends and family enjoy relief from the bitter cold through artificial heating and may your nights be happy, secure and brought by the glow of incandescence, fluorescence or whatever lighting you may have.   Of course, for those who are in Australia or South America, may your days be cooled by air conditioning.   Here’s hoping all your travels are safe, comfortable and rapid, and may all your pantries overflow with a surplus of safe and pathogen-free food.   And may your health be maintained by the best medicine that science can produce.

However you may celebrate your holidays and whether it is Christmas, the Yuletide, Solstice, Chaunaka or otherwise, here’s hoping that the power of many many kilowatts will serve for your comfort and protection.  Terajoules of comfort and joy, for all of mankind.

I have to admit that at the moment, I am what you might call “under employed.”   The current market has made it difficult to get steady work, but I’m optomistic, as I am working on putting together a portfolio of stuff I have done.  This includes 3D models, programing, site design and so on.

Anyways, I thought I would share part of the portfolio that I finished the other day.   Here’s my sample of work I’ve done in the area of video and motion picture cleanup and restoration.  Anyone need some work done?

Well, I felt like sharing anyway.

Note:  I am using the theme from “Back to the Future” and I was hoping I could get away with that, as it is not a mass-media use and it’s not intended to directly generate money.   Perhaps it could even qualify as “fair use,” although I doubt it.   In any case, Youtube was fast to detect the use of copyrighted background music and informed me that Universal Pictures did not require me to take it down – apparently they are okay with this or at least do not object to the use of their theme music in Youtube videos to the extent that they would want it withdrawn.   However, Universal Pictures International of Germany is not cool with it and thus the video will not be avaliable to German users.

It just seemed like good music for the sequence and I couldn’t find anything better in the public domain.

I didn’t mention this before because it was extremely last-minute, but I’m currently in London for TAM London. I won’t be back until Tuesday at the earliest. While I do have a laptop and internet access, there’s so much to do I doubt I’ll be spending much time blogging. If you happen to live in the London area and would like to get a pint, then leave a comment and I’ll try to check them fairly regularly. My phone does not work here, unfortunately.

There’s so much to do and so many people to meet plus there is so much to see here as well, that I’d rather spend my time experiencing it than on the internet, especially given that I will be headed back on Monday night.

Also, a big thanks to everyone involved, including, but not limited to: Ben Goldacre of badscience.net, Phil Plait of badastronomy.com, Adam Savage of Mythbusters, George Hrab and of course my good friend Tracy King, who organized the event.

It only exists for the purposes of verifying a pingback

n5×62urweh

It’s been almost a week since TAM-7, which I may add, was pretty awesome, and it therefore might seem a bit strange that I haven’t posted anything about the trip or for that matter, posted anything new at all.

Unfortunately, despite being a complete blast, TAM was also a bit of a burn-out weekend.  Way too much time awake and not enough asleep, a bit too much drinking and way too much time crammed into coach class seats on aircraft really does not lend itself to optimal health.   Coming back from the event I was jet-lagged, overtired, dehydrated and just not in the best condition in general.    It’s been my experience that when I allow myself to reach the point of total burnout, I often will find that I have contracted an illness due to my immune system operating at bellow its  normal capacity.

That seems to have happened on this occasion as well.   Upon arriving home I found myself with a mild fever, achy joints, fatigue and some very swollen glands.  My doctor tells me it’s probably a viral infection (which one he does not know, because there are dozens that can cause these symptoms).   He also told me that there is little medicine can do for me, and I just have to wait this one out.    Perhaps I should have gone to a homeopath, because I’m sure they’d tell me they could cure me – whether or not they actually could, but since real doctors are forced to tell the truth, they have to admit sometimes that they don’t have much to offer for a given condition.

That being said, I feel better today than I did yesterday and I felt better yesterday than I did the day before.   Assuming this trend continues at its current rate, I should be back to 100% capacity either tomorrow or the day after.    (hopefully)

I could certainly post more today.  I’m not so deadly ill that I can’t manage to crank out a few pages of text, but I’d rather just rest and drink fluids, because that’s generally the best way to get over this kind of thing.

If this post has any spelling or grammatical errors in it, then just deal with it.   I still have the tail end of a low grade fever and I’d rather just get some rest tonight than worry about that kind of thing.