The Flynn Effect refers to the increase in average IQ over time.
IQ tests are updated periodically, to replace out-of-date questions (“typewriters” have given way to “computers”; dated words like “delectable” have been jettisoned for modern jargon like “operational”). Whenever a test was updated, a single group of people would take both versions—the obsolete and the replacement—to check that each ranked people in a similar order.
As a matter of completeness, the groups’ average scores on both versions would be published in the test manuals. And, pretty much always, the group would score higher on the old test. An IQ score shows how a candidate does in comparison with a large “standardisation sample” of people who took the test when it was first introduced. Flynn’s discovery indicated that the people who were used to calibrate the earlier tests were consistently easier for test-takers to beat.
Now Flynn found himself with a much bolder hypothesis. Rather than just one disadvantaged group—black Americans—having made cognitive gains, could the average person be getting smarter? He looked up every study in which a single group had been given two tests, one calibrated before the other. By 1984 he had compiled results from more than 7,000 subjects, and about a dozen combinations of tests. And they pointed to a startling conclusion: that white Americans had been steadily gaining around three-tenths of an IQ point a year for almost half a century.
And scientists have made a video game, playing which predictably raises the player’s IQ.
Jaeggi’s volunteers were trained daily for about 20 minutes for either 8, 12, 17 or 19 days (with weekends off). They were given IQ tests both before and after the training. The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls – and that the more training people got, the higher the score.
Today’s value of dumbest thing ever.
Germany’s celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors. […] There is speculation that hand-reared Knut killed the carp just for fun.
Controversy. Apparently, there are people shocked, shocked to learn that the solution to the equation polar bear + fish = dead fish.
Before writing the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming was pitching espionage plots to British Naval Intelligence.
Fleming […] devised Operation Ruthless. This was a plan to obtain a German codebook by crashing a captured aeroplane into the Channel, where the crew would be rescued by a German minesweeper. The ‘survivors’ would then kill the German crew and hijack the ship.
I’d seen mention of roasting your own coffee with a hot air popcorn popper.
At the beginning of March, Pocahontas and I visited Hawaii’s Big Island. While we were there, we toured a coffee farm, and drank a lot of Kona coffee. It really is better than most coffee I’ve had, but the price is prohibitive in the continental U.S. One of the things the tour guide said was that green coffee beans keep for a couple of years — it’s roasting that gives coffee a short shelf life.
Which is one of the reasons that green beans are cheaper. So much cheaper as to make Kona feasible.
So we found one and a half popcorn poppers at a yard sale for $3 — the half popper was missing its hood, which is fine for coffee roasting. We kept the whole one for actual popcorn popping (we’d both forgotten how much better and easier hot air popping is than old-fashioned popping in oil.) We found a green bean seller in Oakland, and bought a sampler of 8 half-pounds of different varieties. I modded our popper per directions for the model, and we began roasting our own coffee.
The various warnings on the web lead one to expect plumes of stinky black smoke, even cautioning one to wear old clothes you don’t mind stinking of coffee. Doing a tiny batch outside, there wasn’t much in the way of smoke or stink. We just guessed as to how long, watching the beans for color. After somewhere in the neighborhood of five minutes for 1/3 of a cup (raw — they increase in volume as they roast) we were done.
The advice on the web was to wait at least 12 hours before making coffee with them, so we waited till the next morning to try it.
It was fantastic. With a yard sale popcorn popper, a regular coffee grinder, my aeropress, green coffee beans, and time, I’m drinking the best coffee I’ve ever had, for less money than we’d been paying for roasted beans from Peet’s.
We still haven’t tried roasting our own Kona. It gets hard to imagine our coffee getting any better.
And we totally got this Final Jeopardy clue.
William Gilbert, the dude who first figured out that the Earth had magnetic poles, thought that quartz was sort of like ice-9.
Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal [quartz], which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines.
A Cultural Briefing for the Warriors.
Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England.
The warriors, who are leaving their remote Tanzanian village to run in the London Marathon, have been given a detailed four-page guide on how to contend with the most curmudgeonly species they may ever encounter: the English office worker.
“You may be surprised by the number of people that there are and they all seem to be rushing around everywhere,” the guide says.
“Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should.”
How was Lester Dent, the creator of Doc Savage, so prolific? He had a formula.
The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.
Here’s how it starts:
1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE
2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING
3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE
4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO
Paperbackswap is a great way to turn a pile of books you don’t want into a pile of books you do.
The idea’s simple: all books of acceptable condition or better are assumed equal. You list your books; if someone wants one, you mail it at your expense. When the recipient says it’s received, you get a credit, and can ask someone else for a book, and you get it without further expense.
I used to have a bunch of books listed on Half.com. Occasionally, one would move; mostly, they languished there month after month. A couple of weeks ago, I finally registered with Paperbackswap. For listing ten books, I received two book credits (in this respect, it’s sort of like a Ponzi scheme that works.) I requested Alternate Oscars, which I received promptly, and there wasn’t any other activity.
Last week, I passed on to Pocahontas a book I’d started and lost interest in. She quickly lost interest, too. “I know,” I thought. “I’ll post it to Paperbackswap.” While I was at it, I posted three recent mass-market science fiction paperbacks, too.
And, boom. Members can have wish lists, and as soon as a book on your wish list is posted, you’re informed and can confirm you really want it (or, alternatively, you can set it to automatically order a given wish list item without confirmation.) Three of the four new books had been others’ wish list items. Then I cleared nearly everything I’d had on Half.com and listed them and more on Paperbackswap.
I ended up mailing 4 packages on Friday, and have 8 more ready to mail today, which include things that had just sat on Half.com. The cumulative postage for all of these will set me back around $25, but, for that, I’ll have my pick of a dozen books shipped to my home.
(I vacillated on mentioning this, as I don’t like any appearance of shilling, but if, when you register, you list zedlopez as having referred you, I get a book credit. But I recommend it whether or not I get any referrer credits.)
As a lad, I was a big fan of the People’s Almanac series. I recently discovered that there was a relatively recent addition to the series, The People’s Almanac Presents the 20th Century. Not long after taking it out of the library and beginning it, I ordered my own copy. Did you know that the superintendent of the NJ State police that investigated the Lindbergh kidnapping was Norman Schwarzkopf,. father of the Gulf War general?
A lot of content from the series is on-line at Trivia-Library.com, like this year-by-year events in U.S. history.
Here’s a proposed wiki successor that doesn’t appear to have any content yet.
The whole text of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, a detailed account of the poor of Victorian London is available on-line.
Read of the sham indecent trade, the clown who hates his job, the sewer hunters, the ratcatcher to the Queen. and more.
Ooh Girl! is an R&B spoof reminiscent of Business Time.
Pirates of Penzance/Baby Got Back mashup
The Beatnix play a wonderful cover of Stairway to Heaven.
Here Comes Another Bubble from Bay Area local a capella group the Richter Scales. Check out “I’ve Got Mail” and “Stockholm Syndrome” on their website.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for some 3800 years, until the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln, England was rebuilt between 1307 and 1311.
Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas died in the same London flat that Keith Moon of the Who died in four years later.
At the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia was the deadline: anyone crossing it was shot dead. The OED’s earliest citation for the modern usage of deadline is 1920: “Corinne Griffith..is working on ‘Deadline at Eleven’, the newspaper play.” It seems that newspapers adopted the term because the deadline was the (temporal) point which, if crossed, would get your story killed.
Pocahontas told me a story of a college friend who’d stayed up until three the night before a final, so he set two alarms, one of them across the room, to be sure he got there in time.
He woke up three hours late with the alarm clock from across the room in his hand.
Maybe one of these top ten most annoying alarm clocks would have made the difference. I’ve admired several of these before, like the one that launches a helicopter you have to catch, or the one that rolls of your night table and hides, but the one that launches puzzle pieces into the air that you have to re-insert for it to silence was a new one to me.
This is an incredible video of wind-driven machines.
“Dachshund” comes from the German, “dachs” for badger and “hund” for dog. But a dachshund doesn’t look it all like a badger, you might say. It’s a small, sweet, lap dog.
But its name owes to dachshunds having been bred to hunt frikkin’ badgers, animals known to fight off wolves, bears, and coyotes.
Bartleby offers a large number of references online, many of them public domain and available elsewhere, like Project Gutenberg, many of them not.
Some highlights are:
There are tons more.
Elsewhere you can find the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. And For convenient downloading (and sharing), Project Gutenberg offers large numbers of books packaged as CDs and DVDs. Get them with BitTorrent to ease their server load.
This professor had an interesting technique to keep his students’ attention.
“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.
This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious - immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase “Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on … “
Read the rest. It gets better.
A man is claiming he taught high school for 17 years while illiterate.
For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher’s assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.
“What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn’t the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher’s assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin,” said Corcoran.
I find this story hard to swallow, though it would also be an odd thing to lie about. (Then again, he’s made his current career out of being the formerly illiterate teacher who promotes literacy.)
The Unburdened Mind Ever think one of your co-workers was a psychopath? Odds aren’t bad — about 1% of everyone is.
Wonderland: re-creating children’s drawings as photos.
Embodied cognition — humans don’t think by brain alone.
An sf story I read a while back included people being teleported by representing their bodies as data, transmitting the data, and creating a physical body based on it at the destination. Conventionally, the data was compressed by using templates for various body parts, instead of representing every nuance of the real parts. In the story, one such transmission was taking a long time due to the transportees having insisted on foregoing compression. “There’s something awfully precious about making sure you have your very own small intestine,” the narrator said.
It’s a good line, but I’m not sure that it’s a precious concern after all.
I attended an engineering school. I’ve participated in programming contests. I’ve attended science fiction conventions, comic book conventions, gaming conventions, a furry convention, programming language user group meetings, Linux expos, technical conferences. I know geeky. I’ve worked with geeky. Geeky is a friend of mine.
And Friday night’s Jonathan Coulton concert may have been the geekiest event I’ve ever attended.
The opening act was Paul and Storm, half of what used to be Da Vinci’s Notebook. I saw Da Vinci’s Notebook in Berkeley a while back, in their last tour before breaking up. Between songs, Paul said “We have a theory about our demographic. Raise your hand if you’ve ever owned a d20.” At least half the hands in the audience went up. “Now keep your hand up if you still have it,” he said. Most of those hands stayed up. And one audience member threw a d20 onto the stage. Yes, he’d had it on him.
So that tells you something about the geekiness level of the opening act. While I was disappointed when I heard Da Vinci’s Notebook had broken up when I only got to see them once, Paul and Storm’s act has consoled me — they’re funny as hell and I’d pay money to see them headline anytime.
Then came Jonathan Coulton. I’d heard references to him in the blogosphere, but was first really aware of him when I followed a link to the Code Monkey remix contest. and listened to Code Monkey.
Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting with boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not functional or elegant
What do Code Monkey think
Code Monkey think maybe manager wanna write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy just proud
I was singing it so much that Pocahontas adapted it to
Code Monkey drive his wife crazy
Singing Code Monkey song
So he sang his set about code monkeys, zombies, mad scientists, Mandelbrot sets (you’re one badass fucking fractal.) He took out a Zendrum to play Mr. Fancy Pants, explaining that he needed to get one for the song “and because it’s frikkin’ awesome!”, obviously beside himself over how cool a toy it is. He played his theme song to Portal, one of the huge video games of 2007, and then later reprised it by bringing up prominent bloggers to play the Rock Band version.
And he owned the audience, who had variously dressed as zombies, brought homemade monkey-pony hybrid stuffed animals to wave during Skullcrusher Mountain, sang along. It was like it was the most important holiday of the year.
Come to think of it, I don’t think that’s far off.
Tor Books has a current promotion: sign up on a mailing list, and each week, you’re mailed links to download free e-book novels of theirs. Coming up next is 2006 Hugo Winner Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, a fine novel.
Then again, I’ve never managed to read a novel-length e-book, despite having taken a couple of stabs at 2007 Hugo nominee Blindsight. I look forward to the day e-paper readers get cheap.
The Prince of Seborga is addressed as Sua Tremendità — Your Tremendousness.
(Via The Volokh Conspiracy)
Warren Buffett describes why he had become so bearish on the dollar that in 2002, for the first time ever, he invested in foreign currencies.
To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that’s how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.
Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading outlet, Squanderville.
The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there’s a quid pro quo — but to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).
Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off — or simply service — the debt they’re piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of Squanderville.
At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat — they have nothing left to trade — but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest.
Weak Dollar Fuels China’s Buying Spree Of U.S. Firms.
In 2007, acquisitions in the United States by foreign ventures hit $407 billion, up 93 percent from the previous year, according to Thomson Financial. The top countries investing were Canada, Britain and Germany; the Middle East and Asia — especially China — are quickly catching up.
The biggest deals in recent months have involved Wall Street firms hit by losses from exposure to mortgage-related investment vehicles. […]
“The U.S. dollar is getting weaker and weaker, and many medium to small U.S. companies are in economic crisis. So they need investments from China. It is very good timing,” said Yu Dan, a representative for the state of Pennsylvania in China.
Yu, who is one of about 30 people in China who represent American cities and states, said at least six Chinese companies are in the process of closing deals in Pennsylvania. One will make some purchases in the food industry. Another will invest in the wood industry, because as Yu put it, “Pennsylvania has very good hardwood resources, and the aboriginal people in the north Pennsylvania woods are good workers.”
Aboriginal people? The Amish, Yu clarified.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, 1796:
I view [a proposition respecting post roads] as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest.
This is simultaneously the most creepy and heartwarming thing you’ll read all day.
(Via The Pawn Shops of Isher)
Bibliodyssey provides beautiful pages scanned from various odd books.
Strange Maps does the same for maps.
This Flickr photoset has scans of dozens of sf pulp paperbacks.
I can’t believe I’d never heard of this.
In the space of about 27 years, everything turned upside down. Out of all of the major bronze age cities [in and around the Middle East] we know of, all but two were attacked and burned viciously to the ground by unknown invaders or rebels. The first city burned around 1225 BCE. The last sighting of the city burners was when they were defeated at great cost by Ramses II in the Second Battle of the Sea Peoples in 1198 BCE.
And we don’t know who did it.
Wikipedia’s article on the Bronze Age Collapse.
Here’s a provocative story. 67% hotel maids reported that they didn’t exercise, over a third of that 67% saying they didn’t get any exercise at all, despite having an obviously physical job. A researcher educated one group of maids in just how many calories their jobs burned, and tracked them and a control group of maids whom they didn’t tell anything.
One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.
One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids’ behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset.
The article makes no mention of the researchers recording even self-reporting on the groups’ food consumption. I’m inclined to suspect that the one group may have changed their habits, some of them possibly without thinking about it.
It remains an interesting suggestion of the mind’s power over the body, though.
A MetaFilter user has collected all of the Ask MetaFilter book recommendation threads on the MetaFilter wiki.
One thread I’ve meant to post for a while is what single book is the best introduction to your field? nominated as the most expensive thread in the history of Ask Metafilter.
For some counter-recommendations, here’s a Making Light thread on books citing which will make you look like an idiot to people knowledgeable in the relevant field.
Fraktur is a Gothic typeface that was popular in Germany in the early 20th century. Then Martin Bormann issued a decree condemning it as Jewish.
It is false to regard or describe the so-called Gothic typeface as a German typeface. In reality the so-called Gothic typeface consists of Schwabacher-Jewish letters. Just as they later came to own the newspapers, the Jews living in Germany also owned the printing presses when the printing of books was introduced and thus came about the strong influx into Germany of Schwabacher-Jewish letters.
The German Shepherd was the product of Captain von Stephanitz’s efforts to breed a working shepherd dog. He defined the breed standard for German Shepherds; the original dog recognized as a German Shepherd was dark-coated, but his grandsire was a white dog, and he sired both white dogs and dark-coated dogs that bore the recessive white coat gene. But then the Nazis decided that white German Shepherds were racially inferior.
The Nazis, including Hitler, saw the white coat as an undesirable trait, and further assumed that the white coated dogs’ genes paled the darker coated dogs’ colors. With little knowledge of science, they blamed the whites for many diseases as well. Germany soon barred white German Shepherds from the conformation ring and the breeding pool.
I imagine one could dedicate a daily blog to wacky Nazi beliefs and have material for years.
Hmm. I relish the cadences of the English language…
- Convivial: Habitually drunk.
- Did not suffer fools gladly: Monstrously foul-tempered.
- Gave colorful accounts of his exploits: A liar.
- A man of simple tastes: A complete vulgarian.
- A powerful negotiator: A bully.
- Relished the cadences of the English language: An incorrigible windbag.
- Relished physical contact: A sadist.
- An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man: A flasher.
Goebbels is quoted as saying:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Someone is even selling that quote all over various Cafepress merchandise.
But it seems to be yet another apocryphal quote.
Rather than championing the use of the big lie as a propaganda technique, both Goebbels and Hitler criticized its perceived use by others, Hitler in Mein Kampf attributing its use to Jews:
In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick-a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.
and Gobbels to the English:
One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
At age 61, Cliff Young entered an 875 km ultra-endurance foot race in Australia competing against world-class athletes. The usual strategy was to run 18 hours a day and sleep 6 hours a day. Young had a different strategy.
Cliff did not stop after the first day. Although he was still far behind the world-class athletes, he kept on running. He even had the time to wave to spectators who watched the event by the highways. When he got to a town called Albury he was asked about his tactics for the rest of the race. He said he would run through to the finish, and he did. He kept running. Every night he got just a little bit closer to the leading pack. By the last night, he passed all of the world-class athletes. By the last day, he was way in front of them. Not only did he run the Melbourne to Sydney race at age 61, without dying; he won first place, breaking the race record by 9 hours and became a national hero!
And then he gave away the award money.
When Cliff was awarded the first prize of $10,000, he said he did not know there was a prize and insisted that he had not entered for the money. He said, “There’re five other runners still out there doing it tougher than me,” and he gave them $2,000 each. He did not keep a single cent for himself.
A story sixty years in the making — a man interviews his father about a puzzling cartoon face his father had been drawing on cards and birthday cakes for years.
I hope you’re not putting this on your site.
Why?!
This is not for publication.
Are you crazy? This is ABSOLUTELY for publication. The only reason the internet exists is for this conversation to be on it!
He may be right.
(via Boing Boing)
I’m a happy geek.
A while ago, I bought a used Xbox advertised on Craigslist. Then I bought a modchip1, and hired a teenager (also found on Craigslist) to install it. (As a solderer, I make a good programmer.) I put a larger hard drive in it, and a better fan, and installed Linux, and spent some
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