| Monday
December 12, 2005 Relevant to
the study of diversity:
Removed by request
===============
On suicide bombers, from another conference:
Wow, it has taken the mainstream media only 4 years to
figure this out...
> Yassin and other religious scholars eventually gave
ground,
> [on female suicide bombers] but only after debating how
> long a woman on a suicide mission could be away without
> a chaperone-before she died.
These nutcases crack me up.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10315095/site/newsweek/page/5
==============
And this just in on intelligence and GDP:
Intelligence Article in Press, Corrected Proof
Richard E. Dickerson
Abstract: Plots of mean IQ and per capita real
Gross Domestic Product for groups of 81 and 185 nations, as collected by
Lynn and Vanhanen, are best fitted by an exponential function of the form:
GDP = a * 10b*(IQ), where a and b are empirical constants. Exponential
fitting yields markedly higher correlation coefficients than either linear
or quadratic. The implication of exponential fitting is that a given
increment in IQ, anywhere along the IQ scale, results in a given percentage
in GDP, rather than a given dollar increase as linear fitting would predict.
As a rough rule of thumb, an increase of 10 points in mean IQ results in a
doubling of the per capita GDP.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2005.09.006
See
discussion in mail
=================
As usual there was a great deal of
interesting mail over the weekend.
==============
Mozilla Firefox Problem:
I had a lot of windows open; the tabbed brower makes it very
easy to do so. I opened one more, then tried to close it. The window hanged.
I was able to run other stuff, and stl-alt-delete got me to task manager.
That showed TWO Firefox processes, one not responding. I closed the one not
responding and both closed only after the usual Windows notification about
applications not responding. The Microsoft report request popped up and I
sent the report. I got this link in return:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/response.aspx?SGD=ad80343c-5297-4ce9-a586-cfb0dbbc935f&SID=1778
While I am very fond of Firefox I wonder if it uses more
resources than Internet Explorer? I would not have thought so since Firefox
seems to respond faster than IE, but I have had more IE windows open than I
had when Firefox committed suicide.
===========
For subscribers: I have been informed that some of the links
in my Welcome Aboard letter do not work. I am slowly trying to fix that.
When I get it done you'll all get a letter. We are about to make all that
work, with thumbnails. Thanks to Greg Lincoln for telling me how. I recall
being told once, long ago, and I had forgotten. As Dr. Johnson tells us, we
may not need educating but we often need reminding. Try the links in the
welcome letter again. The result may surprise you. And if one doesn't work
today try tomorrow.
Greg says of the script,
It's a clever little script. It was written by
Kai Blankenhorn.
Here's the page for it if you want to mention it on
your site:
http://www.bitfolge.de/snif-en.html
Greg
and it should be useful to anyone doing a web page.
===========
I have a lot of mail on eugenics and intelligence, and I
will put all that together when I get a bit of time for commentary.
Meanwhile I find that the page I put together on ADD and drugs seems never
to have been linked. It was done a long time ago, and needs updating, but it
also needs a way for people to find it. Here
is a link, and I'll see about setting up others. It is found in
altmail because, at one time, I tried
to restrict this site mostly to comments about the impact of technology on
society, and to avoid political, religious, and philosophical discussions;
that not only didn't work, but turned out to be highly undesirable, so I
abandoned the whole notion of an alternate mail page, saving everyone the
trouble of looking at View, Mail, and Alt.Mail daily. There is a summary of
what's available at the alt.mail home
page, but most of it was of temporary interest only. With the exception
of the ADD and drugs discussion, which is still current.
==========
The ADD and Drugs page is
WAY out of date, and I'll collect other stories if anyone thinks there are
some worth telling. I think the page did the job I wanted it to, which was
to call attention to the fact that we are using drugs when that may not be
the right way to go. It may be the ONLY way with some children, but
boys must learn self-discipline, and they do not learn it by being kept
"calm" with drugs. This seems self-evident to me. And of course there are
incentives for the drug companies to push profitable drugs, and for teachers
already faced with discipline problems to turn to recommending drugs as a
way out of the hard work that teaching self-control to unruly boys, and
particularly to bright unruly boys always is. If drugs had been available
when I was a teen I do not believe the Christian Brothers who were
responsible for my high school education would have turned to them; but I
know that the principal of Capleville Consolidated where I went to grade and
middle school after we left Memphis and St. Anne's, would have greeted a way
to drug me to calmness with shrieks of joy. Fortunately that alternative
wasn't available to her, and a willow switch and then a wooden paddle were
the instruments she had the legal authority to apply. Those worked: I
learned to control myself in order to avoid pain. It is an ancient learning
mechanism designed by Nature (Intelligent or not) and perfected over tens of
thousands of years. Of course we all know better now.
Monday TOP
Current Mail |
to
mark items worth calling attention to, and once in a while my gremlin
because I like him.
and
even the dueling computers.
. or
the exploder
