Beating Elijah

Posted by on

I finally beat Elijah.

I noticed recently, looking at Bugzilla emails in my inbox, the remarkable speed with which Elijah Newren has been triaging incoming bugs, and I made a little game out of trying to get to one before he did. A couple of times I came close, only to hit the “submit” button some small bit of time after Elijah, because we’d been literally looking at the same bug at the same time.

This morning I finally did it. The trick seems to be to be up early in the morning while Elijah, I assume, is still sleeping.

The Golden Rake

Posted by on

Tim Lambert awards the inestimable Michael Fumento the Golden Rake.

It is named in honor of Sideshow Bob, who in the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons, steps on a rake whacking himself in the face. Then he does it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

Fumento, remarkably, has posted yet another witty riposte on his I Am Not A Blogger Web Site for what must be close to the ninth time, umm, erring in his description of last year’s study in the Lancet on deaths in Iraq.

Here are the latest words from Michael “I Know So Much about the Study, I Don’t Have to Read It” Fumento:

Moreover, the authors of the Lancet article CLAIMED to have re-calculated the number of deaths after excluding those in Fallujah, except that strangely enough they never bothered to say what those numbers were.

Thwack!
Just a reminder (and herein lies the rake – this language has been pointed out to Fumento too many times to count) here is what the study’s authors actually said:

We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included. (emphasis added)

Things that really suck

Posted by on

In 1862 and ’63, Peruvian slave merchants kidnapped some 1,500 people from Easter Island – half the people left after their society collapsed. They were sold into Peru’s guano mines. Most died.

There was an international outcry, and the Peruvians were shamed into returning the small number of surviving Easter Islanders to their home. They brought smallpox back with them.

The Insurance Industry and Climate Change

Posted by on

In the past, I’ve taken the insurance industry’s recognition of the economic threat of greenhouse climate change as a sort of free market signal. My reasoning was that people who actually have an economic stake view the threat as real.

But in a couple of posts recently, Roger Pielke Jr. has argued that the insurance industry essentially has an economic motive to inflate the perception of risk:

It seems like pointing out the obvious that the reinsurance industry has a powerful vested interest in charging the highest rates that the market will bear for its products. And the prospect of more disasters means a basis for charging higher rates. Thus, for the moment setting aside whether or not recent disasters are caused by climate change, it seems pretty clear that when the reinsurance industry say that disasters will get worse in the future, they have a clear conflict in interest.

On Writing

Posted by on

Luis links to Joel Spolsky’s college advice, which includes a nugget likely of value for those beyond the confines of the computer science world Spolsky means to address. In short – if you can write well, which is really just to say communicate well, you’ll end up big cheese:

Would Linux have succeeded if Linus Torvalds hadn’t evangelized it? As brilliant a hacker as he is, it was Linus’s ability to convey his ideas in written English via email and mailing lists that made Linux attract a worldwide brigade of volunteers.

Pielke and Sarewitz on Disaster’s Toll and Implications

Posted by on

Roger Pielke Jr. and Daniel Sarewitz argue in TNR that the way to reduce the damage from things like climate change and tsunamis is to, in essence, help people be less poor:

Disparities in disaster vulnerability between rich and poor will continue to grow. About 97 percent of population growth is occurring in the developing world. This growth, in turn, drives urbanization and coastal migration. The result is that, in the next two decades, the population of urban areas in the developing world will likely increase by two billion people. And this population is being added to cities that are mostly located on coastal or flood plains–or in earthquake zones–and are unable to provide the quality of housing, services, infrastructure, and environmental protection that can help reduce vulnerability.