tlambert | February 12, 2005You would think that after all this time, all possible erroneous arguments against the Lancet study would have been made, but folks keep coming up with new ones. R.J. Rummel has come up with some new ones. Unlike many of the critics, Rummel has read the study; but unfortunately he has badly misunderstood it. Rummel writes:
The pre-invasion statistics were compiled by Saddam's Ministry of Health. There are questions one must ask of such a source that the Lancet researchers do inadequately. Did the ministry include murders or massacres by the Iraqi regime, such as in prison…
tlambert | February 11, 2005 John Brignell has an odd response (scroll down to "Hit Parade") to some of my criticism. He doesn't link, or dare to even mention my name, so it's probably rather mystifying to his readers what he is responding to. Brignell goes on the Michael Fumento road, boasting about how the 2,488 hits he got on Monday vastly exceeds the 10 hits he got from me. Trouble is, he got those hits from a link in a comment in a two-day old post, so it's hardly a meaningful comparison. For what it's worth, his web counter shows 230k visits in five years, which is less than what I have…
tlambert | February 10, 2005 In a recent post I observed that the Junk Central Station crew were ignorantly advocating the use of DDT in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, apparently unaware that mosquitoes in Sri Lanka were resistant to DDT. The World Health Organization's plan for malaria prevention in the wake of the tsunami advised against using DDT because:
Sri Lanka
Endemic sporadic malaria close to the affected areas transmitted by An.culicifacies, which has been considered DDT-resistant for many years, but is still sensitive to organophosphates, such as malathion, and pyrethroids.
Conclusive,…
tlambert | February 9, 2005Andrew Bolt, writing in the Melbourne Herald Sun offers this conclusive disproof of important evidence against global warming:
Melbourne last week had its coldest February day on record, and its wettest day, which should surprise those still naive enough to believe our green gurus.
Oh, plus he calls it a "booga-booga theory". I think even Tech Central Station would find this too lame to draft. Nice one Herald Sun!
Update: Silly me, of course TCS wouldn't find this too lame to draft. TCS editor, Nick Schulz made the same dumb argument. Oh, and Tim Blair…
tlambert | February 4, 2005 Embarrassing Correction: I screwed up. Somehow I pasted the wrong IP into a query. I thought I was checking Brignell's IP, but it was actually Per's. Per and "James Brown" are the same person, but his real name is David Bell, not John Brignell. I apologize to John Brignell and to Per/David Bell.
After I criticized John Brignell for an innumerate criticism of the Lancet study in this post, a commenter named Per showed up to defend Brignell and attack me. Those of you familiar with the Mary Rosh story can guess the rest---it seems that "Per" is a sock puppet…
tlambert | February 2, 2005 I wrote earlier about the pernicious and dishonest campaign by the London Daily Telegraph to scare people into thinking that self-defence against burglars was unlawful. To correct this misinformation the Crown Prosecution Service has issued a statement detailing what the law really says:
Does the law protect me? What is "reasonable force"? Anyone can use reasonable force to protect themselves or others, or to carry out an arrest or to prevent crime. You are not expected to make fine judgements over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what…
tlambert | February 1, 2005 Sagenz has joined the very small and select group of critics of the Lancet study with the honesty to recant and withdraw their criticism.
Chris Young has written a letter to Slate's Fred Kaplan, suggesting that Kaplan correct his flawed critique of the Lancetstudy.
David Adesnik has posted his thoughts on the study. Unlike most of the war supporters who have written about the study he has the intellectual honesty to accept the unanimous verdict of the experts in sampling---that the methodology was sound. Nonetheless, he thinks it is most likely that the result…
tlambert | February 1, 2005 Via David Tiley we have an interview with one the scumbags who comment spam blogs. One of them just finally left my blog alone after trying to leave about a hundred trackback spams. I deleted the first few that arrived, and found that it was posting new ones as fast as I deleted them. I renamed my trackback flavour so that it wasn't called "trackback" anymore and that stopped the spams from getting through.
tlambert | January 29, 2005 What Max Sawicky says.
Update: Reynold's response? He doesn't link or rebut or even give his readers a clue that he is responding to a particular post, no he just likens Sawicky to a monkey. Real mature.
Update 2: John Holbo has a longer response.
tlambert | January 28, 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article on the Lancet study and the way it was ignored in the American news media.
Daniel Davies notes that the blogs have just as bad:
Other than that, the response in the world of weblogs has been exactly the same as the rest of the media; in the immediate aftermath of the report, half-assed attempts to rubbish the survey, or links to same. Then, when this didn't work, just pretend that it's all been dealt with and move on. Maybe say "I'll get back to you on that" and never do. After a few months of…
tlambert | 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, a 14% drop in car thefts and a 9% drop in violent crime.
Police recorded crime figures show a 6% drop in crime, a 2% drop in murder, a 23% drop in burglaries, a 17% drop in car thefts and a 7% increase in violent crime. The increase in recorded violent crime is likely due to…
tlambert | 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 of evidence shows gun control doesn't work," commentary, Jan. 8] contained significant errors. The NRC is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. In composing the committee, the NRC ensured that all areas of relevant scientific expertise for the…
tlambert | 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 lines (these are the models in our example) fitted to two different data sets. While the line is roughly the same distance from the data points in both cases, the one on the left is bad fit, while the one on the right is a good fit. The points on the left lie on a curve and not a straight line…
tlambert | 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 unfounded accusations in a 1962 book, Silent Spring. ... DDT should be sprayed on water pools, tents, and on people themselves---as indeed was once common in Sri Lanka and throughout most of the world.
And Tech Central Station:
Imagine that every year the world suffered from six or…
tlambert | 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 comment spammers get no benefit. Of course, this won't solve the problem immediately, since spammers won't bother checking that you use the attribute, but as more and more people update their software, there will be less and less incentive to leave comment spam. Well…
tlambert | 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 character. Oh, and it had footnotes. I don't know if you were supposed to imagine Crichton's character speaking the footnotes or what. I didn't buy the speech or the book.
John Quiggin also has a book review. His is of Lomberg's new book.
Over at RealClimate Michael…
tlambert | January 20, 2005The 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 though since the vast majority were civilian deaths, this isn't that big a deal. Blair, however, calls FitzSimon's "stupid" and links to Andrew Bolt's train-wreck of a critique. I suppose that Bolt's isn't the worst of the critiques out there, but with Fumento around the competition is very very stiff…
tlambert | 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 over the same time span. The BBC program raises the alarming prospect that burning fossil fuels is making aerosols that produce the dimming and global cooling that is partially masking the warming produced by increased greenhouse gasses. That suggests that the greenhouse gasses…
tlambert | 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 to www.alexa.com and ranked your site. Not even in the top million! I don't even have a blog and I'm under 300,000. You have GOT to start training some monkeys to click on your site all day long. That or simply reconcile yourself to reality and save yourself some IP fees by simply writing in a paper…