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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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.