IQ tests are updated periodically, to replace out-of-date questions (“typewriters” have given way to “computers”; dated words like “delectable” have been jettisoned for modern jargon like “operational”).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.
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.
]]>]]>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.
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.
]]>]]>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.
]]>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.”
]]>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
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.)
]]>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.
]]>Read of the sham indecent trade, the clown who hates his job, the sewer hunters, the ratcatcher to the Queen. and more.
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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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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