So you’re a tech journalist who’s mostly respected in the tech world. People know your name and look forward to your opinion. For part of a new show you’re doing on your underwatched and barely heard of video project that a company sank a ton of money into, you visit the studios of Ansel Adams who is one of the greatest photographers ever to have walked the face of the earth.

So what do you do when you see his equipment?

Do you stand back in awe?

Are you struck by the power of the equipment you’re seeing?

Do you show it the respect and dignity you would think such a man has earned?

Not if you’re Robert Scoble…

Now here’s the thing… Do you think Robert would dare walk into Seagate’s clean rooms and start handling platters for hard drives or chips without a bunny suit?

Hell’s no.

But he has no problem shoving his shoes and fat ass into a developing tub while laughing along with the dopes he’s in there with.

Really classy, Robert.

Okay, can we make up our minds on what we’re going to be killed by? Is it cooling or warming?

No wonder the environmentalists stopped using “global warming” and started with the more generic “climate change.”

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Face it, the most we can do is take care of the planet and hope for the best. We don’t know what’s going on, we don’t understand it, and we probably never will. One thing’s for sure, though. Seeing as man hasn’t done much to change its ways, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our impact isn’t quite as large as we were lead to initially believe.

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Oh Jesus, will these people just go away?

I did this video last Friday but it still applies…

I was once told by a guy who’s relatively smart that I shouldn’t be so outraged by what the media chooses to report and what they choose to ignore, and I shouldn’t be sitting around wondering where the outrage was when a story doesn’t have people rioting in the streets.  I was told that it was simply a partisan device, and I’ve been chastised for it more times than I care to count.

You would think that, knowing this, the person in question wouldn’t fall into that same trap after chucking me into the wood chipper, but it doesn’t work that way.

In Australia, a cockeyed judge made an idiotic ruling that a ten-year-old girl agreed to have sex with a group of people that were later charged with raping her, resulting in suspended sentences for the group.

Of course, the "she’s not white" card was played pretty much instaneously, along with the "woe is me, there’s no outrage, boo fucking hoo" card.

Sure she did you racist sack of shit your honour, all 10 year old girls have the capacity to make such a decision.

I’m not gonna bother asking if the judge would have arrived at the same conclusion if it had been a little white girl who was gang raped but somehow I can imagine it would be somewhat different than a bunch of suspended sentences

Now, I’m not arguing the validity of his gripe.  The idea that a ten-year-old can consent to sex in the first place is laughable, but is it racism or stupidity?

There’s something about the left that loves racism and it usually follows this mould.  Lately, we’ve seen it a lot with the "pretty white girl" crimes or the case where a white family had a bunch of kids and got a lot of attention while a black family that had the same number of kids got no attention.  It was, after all, because they were white.  And Natalie Holloway, of course, is only a story because she’s white.

It’s silly victimhood, and it’s annoying.  This judge, as Stageleft says, should be flogged in the public square for this idiotic opinion and the suspended sentencing of people who raped a little girl, but playing the race card is old, boring, and tiring.  Contrary to the left’s assertions, not everything in the world is the product of a racist biased culture.  Some things are better chalked up to good old fashioned stupidity.

Watch the first few minutes of this video. You’ll get the point really quickly…

The scene at the beginning of the post is endemic of a huge problem with “adults” in the year 2007. Every single person who has a kid finds the need to constantly update the world on every time the kid eats, sleeps, or takes a crap.

I have a lot of friends who have kids, and I consider it a burden. Why? Because every time you go out with them you have to hear about how Cody, Shyler, Coral, or some other stupid-assed name they picked because it looked good in a Lord of the Rings book had their first piss, fingerpainting lesson, bike ride, etc. Don’t even attempt to ask these experts on child-rearing to have a conversation that doesn’t involve telling you how unbelievably awesome their child is because the conversation will, as it did in the video above, inevitably changes to “Speaking of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, did I tell you that my Drew shaved the cat yesterday?”

I’m all for kids. I don’t blame them for their parents’ obsession with them. What I do blame their parents for, however, is their utter ability to have an adult conversation that doesn’t involve how to get the stains out that their little angel left on their shirt after breastfeeding from mom’s already overworked nipples.

Sorry, not interested folks.

Here’s a note to parents. Don’t tell us you want an adult conversation if your idea of an adult conversation involves talking about the effects of young Cassidy on your sex life. That’s not adult conversation in my book.

Take a read of this bit from an article I always keep handy because it pretty much sums up my feelings on the way parents have started acting in the last fifteen years (it could be longer; I’m just talking about the time since I started noticing these sorts of things)…

Today’s generation of children is the most closely observed, monitored, cherished and scheduled in our history. They are also the most praised. Families are smaller, and there are fewer children upon whom parents can beam their attention.

Today there are moms and dads who aren’t just parents — they believe in “parenting.” They read volumes and volumes about how to be good parents and view parenting as both an art and a science that must be studied and updated and practiced self-consciously. Letting children run around the neighborhood and be bored some of the time is anathema to them.

Many parents these days don’t expect their children to contribute much around the house, although they do expect them to achieve outside the house. They have strong beliefs about what makes children successful and happy-ever-after, and underpinning those beliefs is the concept that they — the parents — are all-important in this quest. Such parents believe that self-esteem is the key to lifetime success, and to this end they compliment their children a lot.

They are egalitarian, and they believe families should be democracies. Needless to say, they don’t give orders. They believe that children will do things when they are ready to. They ask their child politely if he or she will do something and are surprised and dismayed when the response is “no.”

It’s as if parents have rewritten the Fourth Commandment to read, “Honor thy children.”

As much as you may love your kids, please don’t constantly bore me with stories about them. One or two is okay, but frankly if your whole life involves what your oddly-named child did at school that day, and your first instinct is to introduce yourself as “Brecken’s Mommy” then you probably have an identity crisis you need to deal with before you can hang out with real-world adults.

Do yourself a favor… Iron those out, and then call me so we can talk about more than the difference between the Wiggles and Dora the Explorer.

One of my good friend Jeff’s biggest pet peeves in living color…

First the title of the article:

iPod helps you to gear up for the SAT Test

Uh oh…

My parents always blame me for being an iPod-addict and are always on my case to surrender my dearest companion. But now I can give it back to them as its not only all-play-and no-work on iPod these days. More than just playing the videos and music, the 5th generation iPod is equipped to help high school students practice for their college entrance exams - SAT test.

What?

You don’t see the problem?

Maybe I should go to the ATM machine, put in my pin number, take out a few bucks and see if that’ll entice you to pay closer attention. And if you still don’t get it, I’ll go watch the Mets, my favorite MLB Baseball team.