Time Immortal

I’ll still be following various current events, although I probably won’t be posting on as wide a range of topics in the coming days. Also, I won’t be posting as many entries. I’ve been going over my notes, and I’ve decided that I should take care of a few other bits and pieces of content that I’ve been neglecting for the last little while.

For example, there’s the ongoing series I’ve been working on concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, which I need to finish up. Also, there’s the Answers from a Catholic series, which I need to add some installments to. I’ve also got a few other articles planned concerning creationism and evolution, as well as the book review of Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux’s Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution.

So for the next little while, Catholicism is going to be the principal topic here at Time Immortal, and (as noted) the number of posts per day can be expected to diminish (but the length of posts can be expected to increase, on average). So don’t get discouraged if for some reason the RSS feed isn’t as active as it has been in the past, good Reader.

Apparently, the temperature decrease over the last twelve months has basically undone the previously observed rises in same (rises which were said, by Al Gore and others, to be “permanent”).

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.

…

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever 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 [CO2] is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Others have demonstrated just how inconsequential CO2 is in the grand scheme of global average temperature. This new development merely serves as one more argument in favour of the suggestion that humanity really doesn’t have much at all to do with changes in that average temperature, especially not when compared to the big glowing ball in the sky.

Which seems reasonable to suggest, given that the Sun is…well…our star (and thus responsible for basically all the energy that the atmosphere traps, thus making this chunk of rock we call Earth a habitable place), and given that other planets in the Solar System also show warming and cooling trends that match the changes in how energetic the Sun is.

Of course, now we’re likely to be told that humanity is causing the globe to head for a new ice age, and that we need to ratify the Kyoto Protocols immediately in order to stave off the impending “big chill.”

You may have noticed that I’ve been something of an absentee over the past week and change. There are two reasons for that. The first (and not nearly as good) reason is that I’ve been busy with other stuff, most notably school. And indeed, that thing called “life” has in general kept me on my toes for much of the week. If you’re at all curious about what I’ve been up to, you can check out some of the recent activity at these other sites I run:

• Lost Sosaria, where I’ve been busily adding new “stuff” to the Neverwinter Nights module I’ve been building for the past couple years now.
• My CMPUT 299 project, the Neverwinter Nights module that I have to build for my game design class
• The CHRTC 451 forum, which I built for another of my classes, this one a theology lecture on modern creationisms.

The other reason I’ve been kind of absent, besides being busy with those things above and with other things besides, is that I’ve been preparing a new website for launch!. That’s the site you’re looking at now, the product of a few months of design, testing, and CSS refinement. But I think, at last, that I’ve got it where I want it, and so here it is, brand new and ready to rock.

So anyhow, you might be wondering why I went to the new site. There are a few reasons, not the least of which is that I thought it was time for a change. However, there were a few other considerations, some worth mention:

• The move to the new site let me switch away from Mambo 4.5.0 and upgrade to Mambo 4.5.1. I realize that may not seem like a large version number increase, but believe me — it is. Mambo 4.5.1 offers me a larger degree of control over the site’s content and its display than 4.5.0 did, and it features more dynamic templates as well. Plus that, there are a few site components for 4.5.1 that weren’t available for 4.5.0. Chief among these are the Tip Jar and the Verse of the Day visible on the right sidebar.

  Please feel free to make use of the Tip Jar, especially! I can always use the help!

• The opportunity to use a fixed-width, visually dazzling template was too good to pass up.
• The Chesterton Quote Machine was something I was able to re-adapt as an actual site module instead of simply inserting the extra PHP code into the sidebar in the actual page layout. That means I can move it around the site if I feel like it…and given that some of the random quotes are quite LONG, that may eventually happen.
• The main domain page, www.timeimmortal.net, has sat empty for too long now, or rather has been un-used for too long. I’ve developed it out somewhat in the past, but in practice it’s only ever been an RSS aggregator for other Time Immortal sites that I post to. And I’m going to re-implement that feature shortly, because that’s sort of an end goal of what the site is for as well — it will be my blog, and also where you can come for news snippets from other projects I work on.

  But for the moment, it was just important that I get the main site back in use.

And so the old site is officially “closed”, and will be maintained only for posterity. In the next week or so, I’ll be sending out emails to all the folks who link to me asking them to update their links (as it were), but in the meantime welcome to the new site, and I hope you enjoy it!