Climate-change denier and quack weatherman Piers Corbyn writes to the paper: The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate. Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects. Their theory has no power to predict. It is faith, not science. I challenge them to…
Read More Science!Guess what our old pal Jim Gamble is up to? The man who gave us Operation Ore is about to solve the Madeleine McCann case. Can we guess how he’s going to do it? Yes, that’s right. With a big database and a stunning ignorance of the rules of statistics. Senior police officers within Ceop…
Read More I can see for miles and miles and miles..oh yeahThe Sindy has been getting a lot of blogosphere points for this article, which alleges that a mysterious ailment of bees is caused by “radiation” from mobile phone networks. Nowhere is it mentioned that an identical, and unexplained, condition has been documented as early as 1896, before the invention of radio and a hell of…
Read More The Rays from Outer Space Strike Canary WharfOK, so there’s a memetracker web service called Visibility Index that claims to monitor “positive” and “negative” Internet activity about your company. Seems either Caterpillar, Inc. or someone with an interest in them is using it. On Sunday, I used a metaphor and described Thomas Barnett as being like a Republican caterpillar beginning to stretch…
Read More When Memetrackers AttackDoes the idea of “embodied energy” convey any useful information whatsoever in the vast majority of its applications? I ask because I recently read about the difficulties faced in calculating this metric. For the uninitiated, it means the energy consumed in creating one unit of product X. People concerned about climate change and the supply…
Read More Useless metric of the decadeWhatever Sir Ian Blair says, the opposite is probably true. It’s a basic working assumption that has at least one major advantage – that even when it’s wrong, it won’t lead you into anything too terrible. Rather like the Malatesta estimator. To estimate a value people disagree about accurately, take the most and least exaggerated…
Read More Sir Ian Blair: IgnorantThere’s been plenty of debunking aimed at the Weekly Standard‘s claim that more US troops in Iraq always means less violence, but I haven’t seen this point. Stuntz argues that 18,000 more troops were deployed between November, 2004 and February, 2005, and the butcher’s bill fell. Well, it would. November, 2004 was the peak of…
Read More GoalpostsThe thinnest attempt to discredit the Lancet study yet: apparently if you don’t live on a main street you can’t be blown up by a carbomb, murdered by fake policemen or shot by coalition convoy guards. Worse, it is alleged the back streets weren’t sampled although the methodology explicitly states they were. And one of…
Read More Vicarious embarrassmentFor a start, which second world war army are you? You scored as Finland. Your army is the army of Finland. You prefer to defeat your enemy by your wit rather than superior weapons. Enemy will have a hard time against your small but effective force. Finland 88% Poland 88% British and the Commonwealth 69%…
Read More Stupid web things of the dayBack in the 1990s, before foreign fighters and eye-catching initiatives, one of the catchcries of the Labour Party as it arrived in government was “evidence-based policy”. This meant, as far as anyone knew, that the government’s activity would be subject to review on the basis of results, and that choices would be made according to…
Read More Evidence-based stupidity