http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347850,00.html

A 26-year-old British woman whose weight reportedly dropped to about 27 pounds after she walked up to 12 hours a day is finally gaining weight, according to London’s Daily Mail.

Lauren Baily obsessively walked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in an effort to lose more weight. By 2006, Baily’s weight was that of an average five-year-old, the Daily Mail reported.

Turns out her weight was given as 3 stone which is 42 lbs but still an amazing number.

Is that, then, the threshhold one must meet as a journalist? Not to accurately convey information – not to present honest depictions of the facts so that we might decide what those facts mean to us – but to advocate intellectually dishonest partisan positions using supporting statements that are only “literally true”?

I note that “literally true” is a phrase that’s only used when the shorter, simpler “true” won’t quite suffice. Perhaps if you’re a jouro who’s satisfied with having “the appearance of honor” instead of actual “honor”, it’s enough. To me, though, it makes you a hack.

> Furthermore, why does Coyote believe the relationship between height and pressure should be linear?

Maybe because for relatively small increments, it is. How do you think a bathroom scale works?

First, how do you know the earth’s crust behaves according to Hooke’s Law under the pressures in question? Second, suggest why you think that extrapolating out to a 100% of the ice mass is a “relatively small increment”? Remember here that it is Coyote who is doing the extrapolation, so it is up to him to justify it, not me.

Nonsense. By your “logic,” the author may just as well have said “…by a million kajillion feet per year,” even though he knew the rise was only a few inches(just to pick a number). The statement would be factually correct, but utterly misleading.

Uh, no. Only if there actually was one year where there was a million kajillion feet rise would the statement be factually correct. The understanding here is that “up to” means “maximum”. You are interpreting “up to” to mean _any_ upper bound. Suppose a store offered discounts of “up to 30%”. You would expect that there were some items at that discount. Like I said, call the writing bad (or even misleading if you want). But Coyote is claiming that it is evidence of mathematical illiteracy.

Come on people, get a grip. There’s plenty of real examples of journalistic mathematical illiteracy without resorting to grasping at straws. You are nit-picking at one minor sentence in one minor MSM article by one minor journalist about one minor academic paper. Attack AGW all you want, but please do a better job of it.

My guess would be it was supposed to be 25mm not 25m.

Even that’s pretty quick in geologic time.

AGW is supposed to produce a sea-level rise of several feet, but if is also going to raise the ground by several feet as well, then we will all be alright, wouldn’t we?

/comic hat off

Seriously, how stupid do they think we are!? Global Warming is starting to turn into a circus.

Is this perhaps a major seismic event that they are referring to? – how often did the land in any region of the ice cap rise by this amount in a single year?

I fear global cooling.

But most of all I fear politicians fookin with our economy.