Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
December 5, 2005
After accidentally proving that he was using a sock on Wikipedia, Fumento is back for more. I think that putting a "(sic)" after misspellings is rather petty, but since Fumento does it when he quotes others, I've yielded to temptation and sicced all over his many spelling mistakes. Fumento begins…
December 2, 2005
Hello! And welcome to SMAI: Stupidest Man Alive Idol. Here's how it works: our contestants perform for you, the audience. And then you, the audience, judge them and you can be as unfair as you like in your comments. Our contestants today are Donald Luskin and Tim Blair. Luskin goes first, with…
December 2, 2005
Back in 2003, Ayres and Donohue found some coding errors in Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" data. They found that if you corrected his errors, Lott's results went away. Lott's reaction to this? Well, for four months he refused to admit to the existence of the errors. When he finally admitted to…
November 29, 2005
SayUncle blogged on Fumento's use of sock puppets:
Mike Fumento, who I've talked about before, poked fun at us insignificant blogs before starting his own. He also acted like a prick in an exchange between himself and Rich Hailey.
Now, he's using sockpuppets in comments at other blogs and to change…
November 25, 2005
In Tech Central Station (where else?) global warming skeptic Roy Spencer spreads the DDT hoax:
The whole DDT issue is a good example of stupid environmental policy. Insiders say the de facto ban on DDT was the result of politics, not of overriding human health and environmental concerns. Threats…
November 23, 2005
Bob Carroll learns from Chis Mooney about the relative risk scam. He writes
I owe an apology to readers of this newsletter. In April 2004, I wrote the first of several commentaries on Penn & Teller's claim in a Bullshit! episode that the EPA report was bogus that claims that 3,000 people a…
November 23, 2005
Little known fact: 22 is the smallest prime that can be formed from the product of smaller primes in four different ways (7x3, 3x7, and 7x1x3). Anyway, check out the 22nd skeptics circle.
November 22, 2005
The latest stunt from Africa Fighting Malaria is a petition advocating policies that would cripple the United States efforts against malaria. The petition asks that Congress and the President
Ensure that at least 2/3 (two-thirds) of annual Congressional appropriations for malaria control are…
November 21, 2005
Eli Rabett dissects Essex and McKitrick's incompetence with averages:
Unfortunately, either Essex or McKitrick or both do not understand zero and negative numbers. You know where my money is.
Read his post to see why.
Mind you, Steve McIntyre isn't convinced that there is anything wrong with…
November 20, 2005
Somebody with IP address 69.143.188.141 has been doing John Lott style edits to Michael Fumento's Wikipedia page. For instance, this person removed the link to my criticism of Fumento.
By a strange coincidence 69.143.188.141 just happens to be the IP address used by Tracy Spenser.
November 19, 2005
Iain Murray finally admits to the existence of anthropogenic global warming:
When I began working on global warming issues several years ago I was firmly of the belief that it was stuff and nonsense. As the scientific facts became clearer, however, my view has changed. It is quite apparent now that…
November 18, 2005
Monbiot's article on the Lancet study drew this letter from Gil Elliot:
On the strength of having calculated war deaths around the globe over the past century, I can inform George Monbiot (The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq, November 8) that the Lancet report on Iraqi deaths…
November 18, 2005
A couple of readers have gotten an error message like this when they try to access my blog:
Precondition Failed
We're sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server.
We have established rules for access to this server, and any person or robot that violates these rules will be…
November 18, 2005
Last month Tracy Spenser posted [this comment](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/10/crime-of-the-century.php#commen…) on my blog:
Looks like Fumento has made a fool of you again? When are you ever going to learn?
www.fumento.com/weblog/ar
www.townhall.com/blogs/c-
And when are you going to…
November 17, 2005
Congratulations to z, who posted the 10,000th comment here:
Says here, change in total (internal) energy U is defined in terms of temperature T, pressure P, volume V and entropy S as
dU=TdS-PdV
or T=(dU+PdV)/dS ...
My thanks to everyone who has commented. Your comments keep me on my toes and…
November 16, 2005
Rolling Stone has published a major feature on global warming. Steve Milloy was mentioned as one the chief anti-science guys in the debate, so he has a column in Fox news trotting out all the usual tired old discredited arguments:
"the sort of crystal ball climate modeling that the IPCC report…
November 16, 2005
This editorial from Africa Fighting Malaria contains the usual misleading statements about what happened in South Africa and the usual false claim about the EU threatening to ban imports from Uganda. But it adds this attack on Bayer:
The obstacles to good malaria control unfortunately do not end…
November 15, 2005
Kent R. Hill, assistant administrator, Bureau of Global Health, USAID, corrects yet another ignorant claim that USAID won't fund DDT spraying:
Paul Driessen's opinion article titled "USAID Could Stop This Epidemic" (Nov. 2) misrepresents the U.S. Agency for International Development's support for…
November 15, 2005
Andrew Chang writes a lettter to the Vancouver Sun which published a Lott editorial full of his usual cooked numbers.
Chang also links to an old Usenet thread where he, Mary Rosh and I were involved. Oddly enough, Lott and I have been continuing the argument in comments at the Volokh Conspiracy.
November 14, 2005
The Australian government's conclusion that the climate change debate is over has prompted a column from Andrew Bolt, who insists that there is to a big debate still going on. Bolt writes:
Just look at the big Greenhouse 2005 conference [environment minister Ian Campbell] department is sponsoring…
November 14, 2005
The edit war on the Wikipedia article on John Lott has continued. Lott has now tried changing the page to his preferred version almost 50 times. The trouble he has encountered is that since his changes are so unreasonable at least half a dozen people have been undoing them. So, if you were Lott…
November 12, 2005
Currently comments to posts are shown in descending order (most recent comment first). Do you like this, or do you prefer that they appear in the conventional ascending order?
And while I'm asking, is there anything else about the presentation of this blog that could be improved?
Update: Ascending…
November 10, 2005
Eli Rabett continues to try to puzzle out the weird statements about temperature in Taken by Storm:
Reading the several versions of Essex and McKitrick anyone familiar with thermodynamics (heat engines, blackbodies, chemical reactions, etc.) will start to scratch their heads. One peculiar statement…
November 10, 2005
Little known fact: 21 is the smallest prime that can be formed from the product of smaller primes in four different ways (7x3, 3x7, and 7x1x3). Anyway, the 21st skeptics circle is here. Check it out.
November 9, 2005
T-SAW, who emailed Tim Blair:
I saw your post about the proposed celebration at the Bellevue on Friday and your attendance along with that of some other wingnuts. Well I thought in the interests of community spirit that I'd pass along the details to some mates who used to be, amongst other things…
November 9, 2005
George Monbiot blasts the pathetic media for their lazy and incompetent reporting of deaths in Iraq
Hitchens Watch catches Christopher Hitchens citing the Lancet study of deaths in Darfur as a "reliable estimate" after calling the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq a "crazed fabrication".
November 7, 2005
Lenin points to some complete innumeracy at the BBC as they make excuses for not using the Lancet estimate. They write:
We do not usually use the Lancet's figure in standard news stories
because it is so far out of line with other studies on the same issue.
There are also some questions over the…
November 6, 2005
Todd Zywicki links to Lott's take on Alito. Lott cites a study by Choi and Gulati but gets taken to task in comments by Frank Cross who writes:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this review by John Lott is quite misleading. Under Choi & Gulati's citation-based measure of judicial quality, Alito comes…
November 2, 2005
A couple of my students have created a cool web page that lets you create beautiful lace patterns with a few clicks of a mouse. Well, pictures of lace patterns, but you can print out instructions for crocheting them.
It also lets you create really ugly laces, but if you keep rating the patterns…
November 1, 2005
This American Life has a fascinating show on the Lancet study and why the news coverage of it was so pathetic. Worth listening to.
In it, another Lancet critic, Marc Garlasco recants:
I'm not a statistician---I know absolutely nothing about it. When I then went and spoke to statisticians they…