Watts Up With That?

Now this was a surprise:

Out of the 2,854,671 blogs with 132,697 new posts today on www.wordpress.com. I was number 2, right behind the CNN Political Ticker. Details (while it lasts) at http://botd.wordpress.com/top-posts

Click for image

Surprise #2, I also made the WordPress main page as their top pick “hawt post”. Which you can see here (while it lasts) at http://wordpress.com/

Well looks like my 15 minutes of fame are up, I just got bumped to the #3 position.

A number of comments lately have found their way into the Akismet spam filter where before they were not. I have adjusted the SPAM filter settings several times, but this problem continues to happen. It happens especially when comments have full link URL’s in them, but not always. It also depends on the words used in the comments.

WordPress went through a software upgrade system wide last Friday afternoon, further compounding the problem, and begging the question: “who that wants to have a weekened does upgrades on Friday afternoons”?

If you’ve sent me a comment in the last week, and it disappeared, please accept my apology. Unless of course the comment was too far OT, a traffic troll, or a flame, in which case I may not have posted it.

For questions concerning what comments may get rejected, please see the policy page.

Current SOHO: The Sun is blank again

The outlook for solar activity continues to be pushed further back as cycle 23 spots continue, such as the group of 3 seen last week, but no cycle 24 spots are being seen. NASA’s convened panel of scientists obviously missed their mark of consensus in predicting cycle 24 would start in March 2008. There is growing concern over the delay in the start of cycle 24. Now a new prediction portends more delay. If we go to May or later before the solar min is reached, cycle 23 will be the longest cycle since the late 1800s. Now it is looking like cycle 24 may not get started until late 2008 or early 2009.

Here is a new forecast from  Jan Janssens SOLAEMON the SOLar Activity & Earth MONitor  web page:

In this statistical research, transits to cycles 12, 13 and 14 were considered, as well as transits to cycles 21, 22 and 23. The current transition towards SC24 was compared with foregoing evolutions.

The start of SC24 is not to be expected prior to July 2008, and in all likelihood might even take place only in the first half of 2009. This conclusion matches perfectly the results one can make from evolution of the number of spotless days. Nonetheless, SC23 would be one of the longest in over 100 years, possibly even in over 160 years.

See the entire article and methods used to determine these statements here:

http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Engwelcome.html

h/t Bob B