| Friday,
July 21, 2000 It was hot in Los Angeles. Indeed.
Over in mail, Bob Thompson
wonders if someone is trying to sabotage The
Burning City. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised. This is what happens
today, and there's not a lot to be done about it. As the sales people at
the old paper BYTE used to tell me, They charged premium rates for ads on
pages facing my column, because "a lot of readers like you and a lot
of them hate you, but they all read you," which was about all I could
expect. I am a bit surprised at sales, which are lower than we'd expected:
much of this genre gets its best sales in hard cover. But that partly
depends on what season it's published in, too.
Burning City isn't like any other book we've done. The next two books
in the series are more for fun (although being Niven and me we won't be
able to keep our views of the world to ourselves), but Burning City was
begun by Niven in white heat. He was going to do it alone and tried for
about 6 years before he asked me in on it. It took a couple more years to
do it right.
Books heavy with "commentary" run the risk of being boring as
hell. The trick is to keep the characters believing they are in an odd
kind of heroic fantasy, one without silly quests and a big foozle who has
to be killed to save the world, but still an heroic fantasy: that they're
important and not their thoughts and views, and certainly not those of the
authors. I think we accomplished that, and reading the poison pen reviews
makes me fairly certain of it.
Ah well. I have other work to do. Thinks to all those who did like the
book and said so. And
if you want to buy a copy, this might be a good time...
Meanwhile, out in the real world, there's a whole bunch of stuff going
on in physics that's just complex enough that I'm going to let the dust
settle; some new evidence that we know precisely what "g" is and
where it is located in the brain, which if true is going to spark a civil
war among social scientists; and Greg Cochrane is forging ahead with
evidence that a lot of what we thought was hereditary in in fact
infectious disease...
I'm angling for some brain and g papers from the principals.
And should Britain opt out of EU and join NAFTA, and would that be a
good idea for the US?
Have crowded brain cells, will be smarter
October 25, 1999
Remember those annoying people in school
(perhaps even you were one) who studied less, yet always scored higher?
Well, it turns out there's a scientific explanation for that phenomena.
Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, have found that
some people may have a built-in advantage when it comes to learning -
brain cell density.
The prefrontal cortex, located just behind
our forehead, is that area of the brain believed to have a major say in
how well we learn and remember. According to Sandra Witelson, the lead
researcher in the study, the more crowded the cells are in the prefrontal
cortex, the better adept we are at performing its functions.
Given that measuring intelligence and then
counting brain cells in the tissue is a logistical nightmare, Witelson's
sample size was small. She used the brains of four men and five women. She
had collected the brains from middle-aged terminal patients who were given
intelligence tests prior to their death.
Full text: http://www.exn.net/html/templates/htmlpage.cfm?ID=19991025-53&;Parent=Science
And then there is
A Measure of Intelligence Scientists Say
Brain Scans Show Locus For Basic Intelligence A team of researchers says
general intelligence may reside in one part of the brain. (Science
magazine)
By Willow Lawson
July 20 - Test preparation courses may be a
waste of money after all. A study published today in the journal Science
suggests there could be a biological basis for what scientists call
"general intelligence." The team of European researchers says it
has identified one brain region, rather than many, that may be at the core
of problem solving.
Which misses the point: heredity may set an upper
limit (one which can be compromised by fetal environment or diseases or a
while bunch of environmental factors) but developing the potential isn't
all that automatic. Every professor knows the difference between the two
kinds of "B" students: A smart but not working, and C smart but
working very hard indeed. And sometimes that slower student wins
through hard work.
There's a pointer
to a summary of materials on this in mail.
And more. If today's mail doesn't have enough for
you to think about, I give up.
If you haven't subscribed
or renewed in a year, this would be a good time...
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