Here are some excerpts from an email I sent to Stephen Fry on 30th January 2010:

Dear Stephen

I'm just watching The Virtual Revolution on BBC 2 … I thought your first comment, on Wikipedia, very well judged. The needs of the ordinary citizen, well exactly. Your point about Tim Berners-Lee is even more important in my view. As ever, thank you.

Why would my opinion matter? Well, in 1999 I was the person who first showed Tim (over the telephone) the Wiki idea. That was before Jimmy Wales had heard of it of course. But it was easy to tell Tim was grabbed by the idea. Have you ever met Ward Cunningham, the genius behind the original idea. He has a number of other important ones I think.

… from what Tim BL said to me at MIT in 97, he didn't actually set out not to make any money from the Web. But that's a small detail. His generosity was the key.

One thing I'd like to talk to you about if we meet is the need for full openness - open data, open source and the earliest publishing of all papers a la http://arxiv.org - for climate science, given how much depends on these guys getting it absolutely right for the world's politicians.

This was Stephen's reply, via his sister and PA, two days later:

Dear Richard,

So pleased to hear from you — thanks so much for being in touch.

I missed the programme sadly as I’m away in America until May, writing away… It would be charming to meet some time when I get back. To pick up your mini and write again and I look forward to getting a chance to salute you for what you’ve done and believe in. I’ve met Jimbo Wales, but not the great Ward Cunningham…

All the best

We didn't in fact meet but I remain grateful for the kind words from the celebrated polymath.

This thread is about pretended history. If it turned out Richard Drake didn't write that email and receive that reply then my credibility on Bishop Hill would, quite rightly, be shot to pieces. If I had never in fact met Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, likewise. Not least because this

from what Tim BL said to me at MIT in 97, he didn't actually set out not to make any money from the Web

would become worthless testimony - or, worse, deceptive. (Note that even if I was a fantasist who made up such personal history I could still be right that Tim set out, as a small businessman, to make money from the Web and related technologies. But my credibility would be ruined more broadly.)

Name-dropping is a habit about which both RKS and TBYJ have expressed dislike when attacking me. One problem I have with that is that I have so many more to drop! And, in a few cases, at least, such as meeting 30-year-old South African software billionaire Mark Shuttleworth by chance in Oxford in 2003, and having almost two hours travelling back together to London, there were valuable lessons to learn, that stand to this day. Likewise, I think the idea I mooted on the back of my history with Tim and Jean-Marie Hullot in May 2013 among the most important I've contributed on Bishop Hill. But I do accept name-dropping can be annoying. Despite the introduction, this thread isn't about that. It's about the much narrower issue of pretended history. If I had completely made this stuff up that would be really serious. I want to look at another possible example of that kind of thing.

Here's the problem in a nutshell. On 8th June 2014 RKS wrote this about Nullius in Verba

Who exactly is this NiV character that his own personal opinions are assumed to be infallible. I've got nothing against him posting his opinions but he is, after all, just another anonymous poster - like me - with his own ideas. He claims the Venus example is wrong but why should his views be of greater importance than those of other qualified physicist, Huffman being only one of those putting forward the argument. He doesn't even try to address the coincidence that the temperature of eight atmospheric bodies are shown to be the result of pressure and insolation, but simply obfuscates by making ad hom attacks on Huffman - who does indeed come across as a rather tetchey person - but a more skillful dissection of his scientific viewpoint would have been more honest.

On 17th November 2012 RKS wrote this about Richard Drake:

Finally it is hard to quote specifics from your multitude of posts, but my personal opinions of your political aspirations were built over an extended period of reading what you have to say on various subjects. Merely an observation on my part..

The question is how RKS could have spotted and read a 'multitude of posts' from Richard Drake by November 2012 and not even noticed Nullius in Verba by June 2014. Bear in mind that this is someone who said of me six days ago:

You, with your science free thread hogging posts are perhaps the most prolific thread bomber on the BH blog

And something very similar on 3rd May 2012:

Any more ad-homs while your at it or would you like to give us some REAL science for a change!

The nym concerned may be totally right about me. But it's fair to assume I think, from these comments, that he's more interested in science than other matters, on this blog and others. Yet we're meant to believe he's never spotted NiV. RKS also said this to Martin A on 7th May 2012:

Not too sure about the objectivity of Scienceofdoom though, WUWT regard them as a pro AGW site.

So he was aware of both those blogs over two years ago. By this month he's also comparing Tallbloke's moderation policies favourably with BH. So how has this person missed Nullius in Verba in all these travels, when Richard Drake has not only been read, very often, but detested for it? It could I suppose be a strange accident, which is the way I framed it six days ago:

You appear to be surprised to learn of NiV's existence. Did you never come across him on the Climate Audit threads he mentioned, way back? Or on Judith Curry's in November 2010? Such blindspots make me realise how different our paths through climate blogs can be.

RKS didn't see fit to answer. My link to NiV's long post on Climate Etc. in 2010 was because, apart from Richard Lindzen, that was the single most helpful explanation of how the greenhouse effect really functions I felt I'd ever read. I have held NiV in the highest esteem, as a result, ever since. And for many other contributions. To see him attacked by someone I have less respect for was one thing. But since that moment I've dug into my own archives and asked some more questions. This thread doesn't claim to have presented conclusive evidence for pretence from RKS but it seemed worth putting down. Because if Richard Drake's credibility would be shot to pieces if I put forward pretended history then we should at least be aware of how much easier it is for an unknown poster, with malice, to get away with the same thing, in order to advance an agenda. The data presented here is inconclusive but it asks the question.

Is that really the best you can do? There's no claim to have invented anything. To be effective sarcasm requires some basis in reality. The first part illustrates the drastic implications once one is dealing with pretended history. You're now pretending I said things I didn't, advancing the argument not at all. Do please try again. There are fruitful areas to question in the second part.

How could it upset me diog when the reason you give for the meaninglessness of my personal history and posts on Bishop Hill apply equally to every contributor here, including yourself. But I don't buy the meaninglessness. On Derrida and friends I go with Roger Scruton:

If we examine the gurus of the new university establishment, those whose works are most often cited in the endless stream of articles devoted to debunking Western culture, we discover that they are all opponents of objective truth. Nietzsche is a favorite, since he made the point explicitly: "There are no truths," he wrote, "only interpretations." Now, either what Nietzsche said is true—in which case it is not true, since there are no truths—or it is false. Enough said, you might imagine. But no: the point can be stated less brusquely, and the paradox concealed. This explains the appeal of those later thinkers—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty—who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments (of which they have precious few) but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value, and meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion.

It is vain to argue against these gurus. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive will to believe that endears them to their normal readers. After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they put in question—namely, the possibility of rational argument. At least one of them—Michel Foucault—has been the subject of a hagiography, Saint Foucault by David Halperin, on account of the liberating message contained in his assault on structured thinking. But each of them owes his reputation to a new species of religious faith: faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one.

Or as CS Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man: "If your mind is open [on the existence of objective truth and values], let your mouth at least be shut."

More pretended history. I don't want acclaim for anything, I'd like to know if RKS made stuff up for effect. One related question is whether logicophilosophicus was entitled to ask him this in May 2012:

What kind of engineer are you anyway?

Answer came there none, though RKS responded aggressively on other things (next page). Compare this with Nullius in Verba's response to me a week ago explaining his attitude to those asking questions on that thread (including RKS, I think - at least until he traduced NiV):

I'm also perhaps more patient because when I first started with the lapse rate argument, I often got treated the same way. Even though I was getting the theory straight from the mainstream literature, many who had absorbed the back radiation argument just saw it as some other sort of Skydragon argument and dismissed it without thinking. I remember when it seemed to be just me and Leonard Weinstein saying it, and I can certainly understand the frustration. (While at the same time being annoyed at the Skydragons for having put me in that position.) But I was generally careful only to bring it up if somebody else did first - especially a blog host - and to try to listen to and respond to the counter-arguments and misunderstandings. These have over the years given me much better insight into the physics, and some much improved analogies and examples. I'm grateful for that. I can't tell you how pleased I am to see it now gaining a little wider acceptance.

We don't know everything about NiV as a result but we have a lot to chew on. The reserve of RKS, combined with the mystery of how he had managed to read so much Drake without ever having heard of NiV, creates the conundrum. If it's pretended history, for malicious effect, that's bad. But something tells me you don't want to talk about that.

Come on, diog, fewer nonsense questions please. Scruton I cited in response to your mention of Derrida. I rate the Englishman - and you're free not to - but please don't play the climate scientists' trick of appeal to a 97% of 'real experts' who think Scruton, like Lindzen, is off-piste. The questions here are about RKS and how he managed not to have heard of NiV when he'd made such a furious study of Drake, all in the name of better blog science. Looking at the record back to May 2012 it doesn't seem to compute. But this thread exists to investigate the matter so please feel free.

"… I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."

Holman Hunt's painting of that verse is in St Paul's. An astounding idea.