— Conservapedia

In an attempt to undermine Wikipedia, which it regards as “anti American, and anti-Christian“, there is now a conservative version, called (you guessed it) Conservapedia. (I won’t give you the link; believe me, you don’t want to visit).

Maxine, over at Petrona, has a wonderful sample of the kind of nonsense you can expect to find there.

And there is also this, from Conservapedia’s page on abortion:

The majority of scientific studies have shown that abortion causes an increase in breast cancer, including 16 out of 17 statistically significant studies. However, like the tobacco industry in the 1950s, the abortion industry has so far kept this important information away from much of the public. This may be due to the profitability of selling fetal parts for Chinese medicine.

And towards the end of the Copernicus entry, there is a really nice surprise:

“To this day, most Protestant countries reject the Copernican theory.”

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— Cars and Computers

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”
In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release [...]

— Intoxicated

The paperback of John Barlow’s novel, Intoxicated, is published today. He’s put together a forty-five second video to help his publisher’s marketing department. The novel, set in Yorkshire, is about cocaine, madness and soft drinks in the late 19th century.
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— Apple fights consumer rights

Apple’s digital rights management lock on its iPod device and iTunes software is illegal, the Consumer Ombudsman in Norway has ruled. The blow follows the news that consumer groups in Germany and France are joining Norway’s action against Apple. Similar actions in Sweden and Denmark are expected to follow.
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— Reading eBooks

There is a short article on the Dear Author site about some of the eBook Readers we can expect to see in the coming months. The post also has a range of responses from users.
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— Presque vu XIV

I’ve installed Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition Plugin on this site to make it easier for people with mobile devices to read and comment. This is an impressive program which automatically recognises that you are using a device with a small screen. It cuts out pictures and organises the text so that it is possible [...]

— Presque vu XIII

An American survey by Spier’s of New York found that 18% of readers have been to a publisher’s Web site, but 23% of readers have visited an author’s site.
The Spier’s survey was only small but found that half of those asked said they had purchased a book as a gift within the past year.
According to [...]

— Presque vu X

The Australian novelist, Patrick White, left behind a box full of papers which have been stored in the Australian National Library.
Out of the boxes came extraordinary treasures: photographs of the young swell at Cambridge in the 1930s; precious letters saved from the thousands he’d received in a long lifetime; the old man’s beret and [...]

— The New Look

Is really a new wordpress theme. All seems to be working as it should, at least in the browsers that I’ve checked. If you find anything on the site that doesn’t work, please let me know.
I still have some tinkering to do with it, but overall I’m quite pleased with the look.
This is brought about [...]

— Getting Started - a recipe

Take a good selection - two to three million - phonetic symbols. You may not need them all but if you run short make sure you have more to hand.
A few thousand of your favourite punctuation marks, mainly stops and commas. A rather more meagre batch of secondary punctuation marks, question marks, colons, hyphens, [...]