Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
January 26, 2005
The latest crime figures in the UK are out and show that crime has continued to fall, reaching a record low:
The risk of being a victim of crime, at 25 per cent, is the lowest recorded by the BCS since it began in 1981.
The BCS recorded an 11% drop in overall crime, a 10% drop in burglaries…
January 26, 2005
The NAS has responded to Lott's attack on their panel on firearms research. I'm posting their whole letter:
A Lott of misinformation
The recent column by John Lott about the National Research Council's project and report on improving scientific information and data on firearms ["Mountain…
January 25, 2005
One of the disagreements between Lott and the NAS panel is on the question of whether the models fit the data. Joel Horowitz explains the problem in Appendix D of the report. For people who don't like equations, I'll try to explain the issue with some pictures. The graphs below show straight…
January 24, 2005
Following the tsunami, the folks at Junk Tech Fumento Central Science Station (JTFCSS) have been calling for DDT spraying. Here's Michael Fumento:
The best answer would be spraying with DDT. Unfortunately, environmentalists have demonized DDT based essentially on…
January 22, 2005
Google has come up with a solution for comment spam. From now on, if a link contains the "nofollow" attribute (rel="nofollow"), Google will not count it for page rank. All you have to do is configure your blog so that this attribute gets added to links in comments left on your blog and…
January 21, 2005
Chris Mooney has a well-written review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I picked up a copy at the book store and read a couple of pages from the middle. It was like a Tech Central Station column, except that it was a speech by one of the characters, with occasional lame objections by another…
January 20, 2005
The target of one of Tim Blair's five-minute hates on Wednesday was fellow journalist Peter FitzSimons. FitzSimons' crime? He said there had been an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Now you could quibble that the Lancet study measured all excess deaths rather than just civilian ones…
January 19, 2005
David Tiley has an has an interesting summary of a BBC program on Global Dimming. It seems that, over the past 40 years, while the amount of sunlight reaching the top of the atmosphere has not changed, the amount of sunlight reaching the surface has declined. Despite this, the earth has warmed…
January 17, 2005
After Fumento promised me:
Now I am going to do the worst possible thing you can do to somebody who measures his life by "hits." I'm not going to write to you again,
what do I find in my inbox from Michael Fumento?
Goodness! Even on the Web you're a pitiful pissant!
I just went…
January 16, 2005
Not only are arguments not allowed in the comments on Tim Blair's blog, it is one of the most uncivil places in Australian blogspace. The rest of this post is below the fold because it contains quotes from his comment section. Please do not read if you are offended by obscenities.…
January 15, 2005
Today is a day of mourning in Australia for tsunami victims and John Quiggin is donating $1 to Australian Red Cross tsunami appeal for each comment left at this post on his blog. I know we have some redoubtable commenters here---go and do your stuff!
January 14, 2005
Lott has some more comments on the NAS panel report on firearms research. (Also posted at the Volokh Conspiracy.)
Lott adds to his earlier claims that the panel was biased with this:
In fact, the panel apparently originated with the desire from some to respond to the debate on that issue…
January 12, 2005
It's now two years since I started this web log. Here is my first post. Originally it was just a page for me to join the discussion about Lott's fabricated survey, but the focus seems to have expanded beyond that.
To get an idea how much blog traffic has increaased, my first post got linked by…
January 9, 2005
According to my logs, about half of the visitors here are using Internet Explorer. There is a critical security hole in Internet Explorer that allows a web site you visit to take over your computer. Secunia has the details and a test to see if you are vulnerable. If you…
January 8, 2005
Welcome to the 2004 Deltoid awards. Today we are giving out the Golden Rake Award, named in honour of Sideshow Bob and the rakes in the Simpsons Cape Feare episode:
How many other series would waste valuable prime-time real estate by showing a man whacking himself in the face…
January 7, 2005
I've been nominated for a Koufax award best single issue blog over at Wampum. They have me listed under the issue "Australian politics", which isn't close to being correct. I want to correct them, but how would you describe the issue that this blog is mainly about? "Junk science" would…
January 6, 2005
William Connolley at RealClimate provides a useful summary of the scientific consensus on global warming. He notes
That the increase in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic is so obvious that few people question it
Of course, Louis Hissink is one of those few people, insisting that the…
January 5, 2005
Now I thought that Australians were being extremely generous with $110 million in private donations (that's over $5 per capita) and $1 billion from the Australian government but over at Tech Central Station Jackson Kuhl and Nick Schulz have come up with a measure that they call…
January 4, 2005
John Lott and Michael Bellesiles are both mentioned in a new book, Historians in Trouble by Jon Wiener. Wiener argues that the reason why Lott still has his job but Bellesiles doesn't is power:
The answer briefly is power---especially power wielded by groups outside the history…
January 2, 2005
Tim Blair posted this accusation that the UN was lying about the tsunami relief effort:
Via Diplomad, some comments from the UN's Jan Egeland:
In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with…
January 1, 2005
Lott has published an op-ed in the New York Post on the NAS panel. Lott once again claims that the panel was stacked:
The panel was set up during the Clinton administration, and all but one of its members (whose views on guns were publicly known before their appointments) favored gun control.
In…
December 31, 2004
Via Jim Henley comes a test to see how nerdy you are. Like my previous quiz pages, you can post your score here and a link to your blog here.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/nerd.html)
December 29, 2004
The Sydney Morning Herald has an informative page with news and links for donations. I donated to The Australian Red Cross, who have already raised $3 million. You have to look hard to find any good aspect to such a terrible catastrophe but the generosity of my fellow human beings…
December 28, 2004
Jim Lindgren thinks the panel was too generous to Lott:
From the portions that I have read, I found the report sober, impressive, and fair, though there are substantial parts of this literature that I am unfamiliar with. As to Lott's work, I actually thought that the Council's report was too…
December 25, 2004
Here are my kids at the beach on Christmas day. Best wishes to all my readers.
Of course, to get to the beach we went through a long dark scary tunnel. Our only light source was the camera's flash.
Also on the way we walked along the top of a high cliff.
Justin…
December 23, 2004
Boffo blog tells the story of a Lott presentation at a workshop about a decade ago:
I was not prepared for how truly awful the paper was. His argument concerned how expensive elections have become in this country. ... His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth…
December 22, 2004
Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever:
Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.
And…
December 19, 2004
As I predicted, Lott claims that the panel was stacked:
My piece in the LA Times is still accurate today. While I will write up a more substantive discussion, James Q. Wilson's very unusual dissent in the first appendix says a lot. Wilson concluded that all the research provided…
December 18, 2004
Not content with printing op-eds by John Lott, the LA Times has published a piece of disinformation by Nick Schultz. The LA Times fails to disclose that Schultz works for a public relations company that has ExxonMobil as a client. The central message of Schultz's piece is that science will…