zotz

Did you see Doris Lessing being interviewed on BBC2 last night? She sat there with a glass of wine in her hand being funny, intelligent and articulate.

Interviewer (brightly): So you have a new book coming out soon, which of course will now say, 'Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature' on the cover!
Lessing: Will it be a better or a worse book for that? I don't think so!

I didn't see it, no - I was out seeing Attila.

Andrew Wilson met Lessing some years ago at an SF con - it sounds like she's utterly charming in the flesh too.

I can imagine. The new book sounds interesting - it's about the effects of war on ordinary people's lives.

The Stockbroker? Did he do 'Commandante Joe'? I downloaded it from Emusic the other day. Very good.

That's him, yes. He did that last night.

I've also just found out that one of the other acts used to be in Shelley's Children, which is odd as they just came up in another context for the first time in godknows.

So... is the judge also a climate scientist? If not I don't see how he is qualified to comment on the accuracy of Gore's claims. very strange.

And that New Party. On a quick glance they don't look too unreasonable. They put human rights at the bottom of their list of philosophical points, which is not where it belongs. But they seem more hinged than I expected, somehow.

Though on looking at their committees, there seem to be a lot of people involved in trucking and the haulage industry. Is it a spin-off from the fuel protests, I wonder?

So... is the judge also a climate scientist? If not I don't see how he is qualified to comment on the accuracy of Gore's claims. very strange.

I think his position is that it's a polemic rather than an investigation, which is true. OTOH, it just seems to need some explanatory notes packaged with it, so it's not as bad as it might seem.

On a quick glance they don't look too unreasonable.

Business-oriented Libertarians, as far as I can tell. Flat tax and everything. Odd that they should bill themselves progressive.

Is it a spin-off from the fuel protests, I wonder?

I certainly get the impression that that's a part of it. The only place I've seen any real-world publicity of theirs was on the back of a truck.

But if they were going to assess his work's scientific merit, other than being entirely bollocks or not, they would have put him in for physics, not peace.

I meant the judge in the court case, not the Nobel judges. According to the article zotz linked to, he commented to the effect that polar icecap melting and the associated rise in sea level will happen over millennia, if at all. I don't think the judge is qualified to make that assertion. Gore is probably no more qualified to make the opposite assertion, but I think his film was based on current, reasonably well-founded understanding.

Disclaimer: I haven' seen the film, and I'm neither a lawyer nor a climate scientist.

OHHHH. Now I am on the same planet as you. Right.

Yes, in that case I think I agree with you.

ITYM "in schools"

Also, ITYM rules in favour of Al Gore's film being shown in schools. Dimmock was told by the judge that he had "substantially won", but the outcome is that the film will be distributed to all schools...

Yes, but the details are in the story, and it's a restriction being imposed.

Yes, I thought was strange. "You've mostly won, but you don't actually get what you wanted (except some of your costs back)." Might be that the judge was sympathetic to the plaintiff, but realised that there wasn't much he could do about it in law. Which means he behaved correctly, at least.