tlambert | August 3, 2005Mark Steyn relates a story told by Johnelle Bryant:
Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.
The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then…
tlambert | August 2, 2005Under the title "Academics drag feet on giving out data" Lott quotes extensively from an article about the hockey stick by Steve Milloy. One part Lott doesn't quote is this:
Well, a scientist's refusal to provide colleagues with his data and methodology is suspicious.
Now, Milloy is being deceitful by implying that Mann, Bradley and Hughes hadn't published their data and methodology when they had already done so, but it is true that refusing to provide data and methodology is suspicious. As done by, to pick a name at random, John Lott. I guess that if Mann had claimed to have lost the data…
tlambert | August 1, 2005I wrote earlier about an extraordinarily biased survey conducted by Spiked where they asked scientists what they would teach the world about science if they could pick just one thing. I just noticed
this gem of an answer by Stanley Feldman:
I would also teach the world that energy used is proportional to mass times distance. Over a mile, a heavy train coach will use more energy than a light coach. A bus is not necessarily more efficient than a car, unless there is only one passenger in the car and the bus is full. A bicycle is less efficient than walking, as it increases the mass to be…
tlambert | July 28, 2005In response to my post showing that
DDT is not banned,
David Adesnik suggests that there is a de facto ban on DDT
There are two ways that this de facto ban is supposed to work: first, by aid agencies refusing to fund DDT use, and second by the EU banning imports from DDT-using countries.
However, the agencies do fund DDT use and the stories claiming that they don't have had to be corrected.
A correction of the story Adesnik cites was published on May 23 2004 in the New York Times:
An article on April 11 about DDT and its effectiveness in controlling malaria in developing countries misstated…
tlambert | July 27, 2005The Christian Science Monitor has published Fred Singer's acceptance speech after he won the 'Flat Earth Award'. This paragraph is interesting:
What matters are facts based on actual observations. And as long as weather satellites show that the atmosphere is not warming, I cannot put much faith into theoretical computer models that claim to represent the atmosphere but contradict what the atmosphere tells us. [Editor's note: Satellite measurements indicate the lower atmosphere is warming at a rate of 0.12 degrees F. per decade.] A computer model is only as good as the assumptions fed into it…
tlambert | July 26, 2005Keiran Healy observes that the U Chicago Federalist Society acted with integrity when Lott libeled Donohue. In the comments, Michael Maltz posts the letter that he sent with Dudley Duncan to the AEI about Lott and the reply they received:
October 21, 2003
Christopher DeMuth
President
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Dear Mr. DeMuth:
As you are doubtless aware, a number of commentators have recommended that AEI initiate an inquiry into allegations of unprofessional and unethical behavior by John R. Lott, Jr., an AEI Resident Scholar. They…
tlambert | July 25, 2005Lott has a response to my post about his libel of John Donohue. He writes:
2) Unfortunately, the second planned debate was also cancelled. The debate was rescheduled for April 13th this year, and I made sure to reconfirm it because of the previous cancelation. The student at Chicago who set up the debate said that even though he had confirmed the debate with me multiple times and even though we had taken a date that I was told that Donohue wanted, the claim is that the debate somehow hadn't been completely confirmed with Donohue.
Compare that with what the student told Lott:
If there is…
tlambert | July 23, 2005A beautiful sunny winter's day today so I took some pictures on a walk with my dog.
Here is Silas. He's a great dane bull mastiff cross.
Here he is looking dignified at Malabar Bay. Yes, that's walking distance from my house.
And looking undignified at Malabar Bay.
Can you spot the link to Crichton's State of Fear?
tlambert | July 21, 2005On his blog Lott has a sequence of postings telling a story of how
the University of Chicago Federalist Society tried to organize a
debate between himself and John Donohue, but Donohue kept backing out.
What really happened bears little relation to the story Lott tells. In
fact, Lott's account is so misleading that the Federalist Society
cancelled a talk by Lott because he refused to correct his postings.
His first
posting
was on 30 Nov 2004:
Disappointingly, John Donohue has at the last minute withdrawn from
our scheduled debate on Thursday (see note for 11/29 below). I will
still give a…
tlambert | July 20, 2005To celebrate 125 years of publication, The Bulletin is posting historical pictures of Australia from its archives. In the latest set, one from 1946 has my father in it. If I was a better writer I could probably tell you what he meant to me, but I can link to this appreciation written by John Burrows.
Update: As soon as I post this, they replace the pictures with next week's set. Here is the picture:
tlambert | July 19, 2005In 1996 we were discussing Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" paper on the firearmsreg mailing list. I've posted my comments on my blog as entries for August 1996.
tlambert | July 18, 2005Last year an anonymous person from the American Enterprise Institute
repeatedly tried and failed to remove all
criticism of Lott from his
wikipedia page. He
eventually admitted to being
Lott and claimed
that the "posting contains a huge number of inaccuracies and outright
lies".
Over the past few weeks a sequence of more subtle changes were made to
the Lott article from several different IPs. For example, this change
was made by Mr 38.118.73.78:
Before
After
Lott's actions were discovered when weblogger Julian Sanchez noticed that the IP address Lott used to reply to an email was the…
tlambert | July 17, 2005RealClimate has some responses from scientists to Barton's letters, including the replies from the three scientists that Barton sent his letters to, Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Of note is that the fact that Mann has released the source code for his multiproxy reconstruction. I imagine that the hacky team will insist that he hasn't released all of his code or that it won't compile or that satellite balloon data doesn't show warming, etc etc.
tlambert | July 16, 2005Brian Schmidt tries to track down a source for the quote "People Are Pollution" that John Ray claims was the slogan of Zero Population Growth. Ray was unable to give a source for his quote, which would seem to be bogus. Schmidt concludes:
I don't think Ray is intentionally dishonest (unlike Benny Peiser) but I suspect the quality of his work on this slogan, given how often he repeats it, indicates how much one should trust anything from him that does not come with independent documentation.
A while ago I exchanged several emails with Ray trying to get him to correct his false claim that:…
tlambert | July 16, 2005On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying:
Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth's surface warmed by
approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth
century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) projected that the average global surface
temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4
centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990
levels, by 2100.
The scientific understanding of climate change is now
sufficiently clear to justify nations taking…
tlambert | July 15, 2005John A, one of the bloggers at Climate Audit writes:
You should know that Lambert's scientific knowledge is *ahem* "challenged". Ask him if he's discovered what entropy is and how it applies to closed thermodynamic systems.
What a guy.
Following the link, we find an anonymous person defending McKitrick's false claim that average temperature has no physical meaning. I had explained that the physical meaning of the average temperature of two bodies was the equilibrium temperature you obtain when you let heat flow from the hotter body to the cooler one and that this was just the weighted…
tlambert | July 12, 2005It's now a quarter of a decade since I started this blog.
Originally it was just a web page for my comments on John Lott's Mysterious Survey. I figured that the survey issue would be resolved in a few weeks and I could shut it down then, but that doesn't seem to have happened.
Thanks to the Internet Archive you can see what my blog looked like when it was three weeks old.
tlambert | July 11, 2005Last year blogger Xrlq
href="http://xrlq.com/2004/03/17/hat-of-the-day-stim-lamberts-xrlq/"
rel="nofollow">dismissed my criticism of
Lott as "paranoid rantings" and
"gratuitous attacks on Lott personally", calling me "Dim", "Timwit",
"Timbecile", "a jerk" and "Dim Lambert".
This year I noted that
Lott had signed his name to a review of Freakonomics
using the same Amazon account that he used for a five-star review his
own book. Over the years the account name had changed from JL to washingtonian2 to
economist123. Xrlq
href="http://xrlq.com/2005/05/11/lottsa-personalities/"
rel="nofollow…
tlambert | July 10, 2005After three posts on a spelling mistake Chris Sheil made, and another one on a Sheil typo, it seems that Tim Blair couldn't find any more Sheil errors. Undaunted, he has a new post linking Sheil to spelling mistakes made by someone else:
In other spelling news, Chris Sheil is selling his trailer.
In obedience to the Iron Law of Spelling Flames, his link is broken. Corrected link.
Update: Make that four posts on the spelling mistake. Get help, Tim B.
More Update: Five.
Even More Update: Six and seven and eight and
nine and
ten and
eleven and
twelve.
tlambert | July 8, 2005By popular request, I've installed a comment preview plugin. I'd tried a live preview, but it didn't display Markdown. Now with a preview and a spell check you can avoid making a mistake in a comment and having Tim Blair write a whole series of posts about your mistake.
I also highly recommend the Bad Behavior plugin to any WordPress users. It blocks 99% of spam without any intervention on your part. Spam Karma 2 then blocks any spam that gets past Bad Behavior.