tlambert | July 10, 2004 The cover story in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald is Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan's review of Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't opening in Australia until July 29, and Sheehan appears not to have seen it. So how does he write the review? Easy---he cuts and pastes from reviews by other people. Here is Sheehan: Perhaps the most egregious factual error is the bald and absurd claim that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked, killed or even threatened any American.
And here is Christopher Hitchen's review (he calls this an "…
tlambert | July 8, 2004 Mann, Bradley and Hughes have published some corrections to the supplementary information for the famous hockey stick graph showing the temperature record of the last 1000 years. They say that the errors do not affect their published results. This could explain why McKitrick and McIntyre could not reproduce their results, but McKitrick is continuing to insist that Mann's graph is wrong.
McKitrick has also published some errata. Unlike Mann's error McKitrick's error affects his results: Figure 3 in the Cooler Heads Briefing on TBS contains an error. Tim…
tlambert | July 3, 2004 After reviving my first ever online post. I've dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian:
Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the "non-violent peace loving" European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below such countries as Australia (90.82), West Germany (77.49), New Zealand (65.73), Netherlands (56.00), Scotland (44.69), Denmark (41.06), Sweden (40.52), Austria (30.42).
Gee, it must be the USA system of mandatory penis registration & control that accounts for our per capita rate of rape being…
tlambert | July 2, 2004 Tom Giovenetti, the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation has responded to my story on the Microsoft-funded think tanks attack on open source. It's rather an odd response---he's angry that I dared to suggest that they were funded by Microsoft, but he's not going to deny it. Anyway, here it is, with my comments:
* Your journalism is as lousy as your software.
My software works fine, thank you. First, you accuse IPI of taking money from Microsoft, but you have no facts or proof. True, you'd LIKE us to do your homework for you, but in…
tlambert | July 1, 2004 Sadly No gives Lott's latest op-ed the short shrift it deserves.
Update: Hunt Stilwell also writes about the stupidity of Lott's argument.
tlambert | July 1, 2004 Well, I now have 500 posts here, and only 399 are about Lott. The first post I made to this blog was on Jan 12, 2003, but to confuse things I just put up my first ever Usenet post to make it look as if my blog is older than the web.
tlambert | July 1, 2004
Lehrer and Lott have recycled their previous cherrypicking exercise into an article in the Investor's Business Daily falsely claiming that gun control in Britain, Canada and Australia have lead to "historic increases in crime". Mostly they repeat their previous claims, so I'll just comment on the new ones. They claim that "overall violent crime" in England increased by 118%. The graph above (from Chapter 5 of Crime in England and Wales 2002/2003) shows how utterly false their claim is. Since 1997, violent crime has declined significantly. Where did…
tlambert | June 29, 2004In response to criticism that Lott used cherry picked numbers to claim that homicides had increased following gun registration in Canada, "Maxim" posted on Usenet: The law started in December 1998. Guns did not have to be registered until 2001. Violent crime was falling until very shortly after the law started doing anything, and the crime rates start rising consistently after that, with the biggest increase in 2002. It is falling before the law and for one year after and then rising consistently afterward.
Hmm, it was posted under the name of Lott's son, but the writing style…
tlambert | June 29, 2004 Mike Adams has an article on John Lott and Michael Moore where he writes:
The thesis of "Bowling for Columbine" is sometimes difficult to ascertain because Moore frequently contradicts himself in the movie. Nonetheless, I think that he is trying, above all else, to assert the following:
The United States has more crime than other countries (like Canada). The United States has more guns than other countries (like Canada). Therefore, guns cause crime and, of course, more gun control is necessary.
What Moore actually says is that Canada has as many guns as the US and does not make the…
tlambert | June 27, 2004 On his blog, John Lott writes
The Public's Response to Michael Moore's Sources
David Letterman: How do we know what's in your film [Fahrenheit 9/11] is true? Michael Moore: Because I got most of my information from The New York Times. Audience: Wild laughter. Letterman: [Strains to repress laughing] Moore: What's so funny?
Late Show with David Letterman June 18, 2004
However, this transcript seems to be a fabrication. Nathan at BlueB has the correct version:
Letterman: And, and we can absolutely believe the sources you've used in assembling your documentary?
Moore: Oh yeah, it's New…
tlambert | June 26, 2004 Site Meter says that I have now had 200,000 visits to this blog. The post that attracted the most visits was the one I made a few days ago on think tanks and Open Source, with about 35,000 visits, mainly because of a link from Slashdot. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
tlambert | June 23, 2004Think tanks vs Open Source
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks:
Date
Think Tank
Author/Title
Extracts
Sep 19, 2002
Competitive Enterprise Institute
James DeLongSoftware Wars: Open Source And The New York Times
Writing aps without incorporating some operating system code is difficult, and those who want to engraft proprietary aps onto Linux are taking a legal risk.
Jan 31, 2003
Washington Legal Foundation
David S. EvansOpen-Source Software Poses Challenges for Legal and Public…
tlambert | June 22, 2004 The National Post has printed a letter from Gary Mauser commenting on the Lott/Lehrer oped I discussed earlier. Here is the whole thing:
It should not surprise many people that Canada's gun laws have not worked (More Gun Control Isn't The Answer, John R. Lott Jr., June 15). Anyone living in a big Canadian city has witnessed the horrifying increase in violent crime over the past decade.
Canada's violent crime rate is now higher than in the United States. Our burglary and assault rates are particularly frightening, and illegal handguns are increasingly misused in our largest cities.…
tlambert | June 20, 2004 Lott has teamed up with Eli Lehrer for another cherry picking exercise. In an op-ed drafted in National Post they get straight to it with an outrageous cherry pick in just the second sentence:Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased.
On the left you can see a graph of Canadian homicide rates for the last ten years (data from Statistics Canada). Since 1998 the homicide rate has pretty obviously gone down. So how were Lott and Lehrer able to…
tlambert | June 18, 2004 The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux gets taken apart in Lee Gomes' Wall Street Journal article:
An institute study issued last month ups the ante in Linux criticism. It tries to prove that Linux's Linus Torvalds has always been contemptuous of intellectual-property laws, starting with the very birth of Linux. The implication: Since Linux is tainted, potential users may one day find themselves in court. ...
If Mr. Torvalds had the larcenous heart of a software pirate, it would be very simple to prove. Linux, you'll recall, is totally…
tlambert | June 17, 2004 Jason Soon has a series of posts on gun control in Australia here, here and here.
I felt that the laws here before 1996 were about right and I do not think that the 1996 laws were a good idea. The 1996 gun buyback involved replacing semi-automatic long guns with ones that weren't semi-autos. For almost all misuses of guns this makes no difference---you only need one shot to kill or wound someone. It does make a difference in the sort of incident that prompted the buyback---a mass public shooting, but these are really rare. You could save more lives if you spent the $500 million on…
tlambert | June 16, 2004 Lott has a new post on blog where he writes:
6/15/04 Two-thirds of Police Chiefs think Right-to-carry Laws Reduce Crime
A new survey by the National Association of Chiefs of Police asks members: "Do you agree that a national concealed handgun permit would reduce rates of violent crime as recent studies in some states have already reflected?" 65.7 percent of members say "Yes". There are other interesting questions in the survey. Two-thirds oppose one-gun-a-month rules. Over half think that the rules allowing pilots to carry concealed handguns are too restrictive.
It may be that two-…
tlambert | June 7, 2004 Ken Brown has a reply to the heavy criticism of his paper claiming that Linus Torvalds did not write Linux. ADTI introduce his reply like this:Experts from Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds agree: a. they are much smarter than AdTI's Kenneth Brown, b. IBM is good, Microsoft is evil, and c. Brown's theory of how Linux was probably written is dead wrong. (Dog bites man.) Brown says their accounts are hopelessly shifting and contradictory -- not only against the historical record, but in recent weeks. (Man bites back.)
Unfortunately, Brown's reply…
tlambert | June 2, 2004John Quiggin has a heuristic to help detect outfits like The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute.
ADTI claimed that Ken Brown's attack on Linux was based on "extensive interviews" with "Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew Tanenbaum". We already saw Tanenbaum's repudiation of Brown. Now Groklaw has Stallman's and Ritchie's. The one from Ritchie is particularly interesting because it lets us see the leading questions Brown was asking: In my opinion, Linus Torvalds did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he write? I talked to a Finnish programmer…
tlambert | June 2, 2004 At the The High Road there was some discussion of the cherry picked Lott article I discussed here. One poster, "agricola", criticized Lott, linking to my blog. Another poster, "fallingblock", responded:
I contacted John Lott a while back and asked him for the details of his discussions with Tim Lambert.
According to Lott, he has offered several times to provide data for Tim and Lambert does not reply.
Lott tried to make it look like I refused to look at the data and attacked him regardless. In fact, I have not received any email from Lott since 1999. All of…