tlambert | December 18, 2005I wrote earlier about a particularly dumb argument against global warming--the argument that an unusually cold day shows that global warming just isn't happening. Well, there doesn't seem to be an argument dumb enough that someone can't make it dumber. Take it away, Tim Blair:
Comical protest news from Montreal:
Thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures to lead a worldwide day of protest against global warming.
Was it unusually cold that day in Montreal? Well, no. December 3 was slightly warmer than the average December day in Montreal.
Wait, there's more!
Global warming protests…
tlambert | December 17, 2005Stephen Dubner reports that Freakonomics is the 7th best-selling book for 2005. According to Nielsen BookScan, it is has sold 584,000 copies so far this year.
Freakonomics discusses the survey that Lott claims to have conducted in 1997, but that he appears to have fabricated. Lott says that eight Chicago university students made the phone calls for him. So why hasn't one of these students read Freakonomics and come forward to prove that Lott conducted a survey? You would think that students (or former students) from Chicago would be particularly likely to have read the book since Levitt is…
tlambert | December 16, 2005It is frequently claimed that the World Health Organization opposes the use of DDT against malaria. Even if we just confine ourselves to articles at Tech Central Station, the claim has been made by
Paul Driessen,
Nick Schulz,
Roger Bate,
Tim Worstall,
Duane Freese,
James Glassman,
Richard Tren and
John Luik.
Of course, given TCS's track record, you'd be well advised to check to see what the World Health Organization actually says about DDT. Here is the full text of the RBM Partnership Consensus Statement on Insecticide Treated Netting:
The RBM Partnership has received questions enquiring…
tlambert | December 15, 2005Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts about his survey. Roberts comments on Bush answering a question about Iraqi deaths:
I guess, politically, he has to downplay this issue, but for him to say a number, that of the eight estimates out there is probably the lowest one, really is not a strategic thing to do in terms of winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Secondly, I'm even more struck that here a year after our study came out, the first time the President has been asked about this was not by a reporter, but by someone from the public when he took a question.
Regular readers will be…
tlambert | December 14, 2005Peter Baker in the Washington Post writes:
The Iraqi death toll has been the subject of considerable debate. A group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count estimates civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892, not counting Iraqi troops or insurgents, by tabulating incidents reported in media and human rights reports. Iraqi authorities have said that roughly 800 people die a month in violence there, a rate that if typical over the course of the conflict would come to 25,600.
An epidemiological study published in the British journal the Lancet last year estimated…
tlambert | December 13, 2005The Sydney Morning Herald reports
Asked about the Iraqi death toll, Bush said about 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It was the first time Bush has publicly offered such an estimate. His aides quickly pointed out the president was not offering an official estimate.
"There is not an official US government estimate," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. He said the 30,000 figure was based on "public estimates cited by media reports."
Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich demanded the Bush administration release all information it has…
tlambert | December 12, 2005Fumento has now made three posts on his blog and a whole pile of comments on other blogs in response to my revealing his use of a sock puppet. He has called me a liar, claimed that I am insane and falsely accused me of using sock puppets myself. What he hasn't done is deny that Tracy Spenser was his sock puppet. I wonder why not?
This comment from Fumento is pretty funny:
Meanwhile, since I made my first post on Lambert's Vendetta.com my site has been swamped with vile fake trackbacks for non-existent pornographic URLs. None before that posting; about 40 a day now. Coincidence? I find it…
tlambert | December 10, 2005Steve Levitt has a post with a detailed response to Foote and Goetz's paper. They construct a new, better, measure of abortions under which more abortions are associated with less crime. They conclude:
The results we show in this new table are consistent with the impact of abortion on crime that we find in our three other types of analyses we presented in the original paper using different sources of variation. These results are consistent with the unwantedness hypothesis.
In comments to Levitt's post Steve Sailer raises objections that do not impress me in the slightest but Daniel Davies…
tlambert | December 7, 2005We last saw Fumento blundering around in a field of rakes. Now read on. John Fleck commented on the situation:
The thing is, Fumento is, at times, a quite talented journalist. But then, over and over again, he shows himself to be a complete tool.
My first encounter with his work was a solid take-down in Reason of Gary Taubes' New York Times Magazine piece on the wonders of the Atkins diet. I probably liked the piece because it fit my biases, but whatever. It was a solid piece of work.
And true to form Fumento managed to make a complete fool of himself with an evidence-free claim that…
tlambert | December 5, 2005After 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:
There are lots of reasons people blog. One may be that nobody else would ever publish their material. Some of these people nevertheless fill a valuable nitch (sic) that just doesn't appeal to outside publications; others are simply inept. The latter describes Tim Lambert and his Deltoid blogsite.…
tlambert | December 2, 2005Hello! 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 Brad DeLong providing the commentry:
A correspondent asks me if it isn't time to surf on over again to Donald Luskin's "Poor and Stupid" website, find some egregious offense against intelligent thought, and lay down another marker saying that Luskin is indeed the Stupidest Man Alive™, just in case…
tlambert | December 2, 2005Back 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 the errors, he changed his model to bring back his results, making a clumsy effort to try to hide the changes he made.
Fast forward to 2005. Now Foote and Goetz have found a coding error in a paper by Donohue and Levitt. The Economist reports:
But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors'…
tlambert | November 29, 2005SayUncle 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 his Wikipedia entry.
Fumento left this comment:
And the reason we know the IP addresses match is . . . because we have Tim Lambert's word on it! And never mind that Lambert has long been on a vendetta against me, nor that he uses his friend over at urinestain.com, er, inkstain.com, to do HIS…
tlambert | November 25, 2005In 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 of trade bans on countries that dare to use DDT, one of the safest and most effective insecticides available, have contributed to over one million malaria-related deaths each year in Africa. Literally hundreds of millions of people contract the disease each year. While the knee-jerk hostility to DDT…
tlambert | November 23, 2005Bob 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 year die from lung cancer because of secondhand smoke. My initial research into the subject was inadequate and I agreed with P & T. I was wrong to do so. My position was laid out in Newsletters 41, 42, 44, 49, and 50. For the full retraction, see Newsletter 41, though I've posted corrections in…
tlambert | November 23, 2005Little 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.
tlambert | November 22, 2005The 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 earmarked for insecticidal and medicinal commodities - with up to half of such monies targeted to the treatment and cure of infected patients.
Specifically direct such funds to the actual purchase and deployment of: (1) DDT, or any other proven, more cost-effective insecticide/repellent, for Indoor…
tlambert | November 21, 2005Eli 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 their argument because "Chris Essex is an accomplished thermodynamicist" and
my impression was that your counter-argument was mostly just belligerence. While it's possible that they made a mistake. I very much doubt whether Essex made a trivial mistake and your argument seemed to be assuming that it was…
tlambert | November 20, 2005Somebody 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.