1. Interactive website Musicovery creates free playlists for users based on a mixture of factors: mood (you can choose among “dark,” “energetic,” “positive,” and “calm”), era, tempo, genre. (HT: Very Short List)
2. A chart showing modern IQ ranges for various occupations (HT: Neatorama)
3. "A child's day from 0900 to 1530 is like a 20-hour day for an adult," says Steve Taylor, author of Making Time:
In developing what he calls the perceptual theory, first put forward by American psychologist William James in the 19th Century, Taylor says time is related to how much "information" someone is taking in from the world around them.
"Children are experiencing everything for the first time, all their experiences are new. They also have an amazingly intense vision of the world, an amazing fresh perception. Children are incredibly awake to the world around us, so time passes slowly for them."
Information - not from books or the internet, but through perceptions of the world - stretches time and as people get older they have fewer new experiences, he says.
4. Remember Statetris, the Tetris game played with the states of the USA I mentioned in TTT v. 23? Now there's a Statetris Europe and Statris Africa. (HT: Neatorama)
5. Parents Buy Stab-Proof Uniforms for Schoolkids: Paranoid parents in Britain are "outfitting their children with stab-proof school uniforms, lined with Kevlar, the same kind of material found in flak jackets worn by U.S. troops," CBS News says.
6. Anthony Bradley on social justice, environmentalism, and the local church:
Because evangelicals have too closely aligned themselves with political agendas, instead of the Scripture-derived social mission of the church, two camps have emerged over the past few decades. On the one hand, you have the "Christian-means-Republican" camp where many biblical imperatives are pursued through legislation and government force, and on other hand, you have the pathetic economics and theocratic biblical theology of prophetical left in the likes of guys like Bono, the One Campaign, and so on. Both camps pursue the same method, except that "the right" might start with the Pentateuch and Romans whereas "the left" might begin with the Prophets and the Sermon on the Mount. Both turn to government instead of the church to do the work of the Kingdom of God.
7. Cannibal tribe apologises for eating Methodists. But as David Darlington notes, "They're still unapologetic about eating Baptists though, who are delicious BBQ-style."
8. A defense of parapsychology research. (HT: BPS Research Digest Blog)
9. Movies dumbing down science: a list of egregious (and funny) offenses
The X-Men make a last food stand: rough estimate of the calories Magneto had to consume to fuel the magnetic fields that moved the Golden Gate Bridge? 4.8 million, the equivalent to burning of 1,350 pounds of fat. Dieters, take note.
10. Consumer Vertigo: Why too much choice can be a bad thing
“So much choice makes decision-making increasingly complex,” says David Shanks, a psychology professor and the co-author of Straight Choices, a new book that examines how to make the best decisions when faced with a perplexing array of options. We feel bad that every time we do make a choice, it seems we are missing out on other opportunities. This makes us feel inadequate and dissatisfied with what we have chosen.
11. 4 Utopian Communities That Bombed Miserably
12. Man Killed by Pet Spider, Eaten by Creepy Crawlies
Mark Voegel, 30, was found dead in his Dortmund, Germany apartment. His body was draped in spider webs and more than 200 spiders, several snakes, thousands of termites, and a gecko were feasting on his corpse….
A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa. Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth. There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles. Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”
(HT: Neatorama)
13. 100 Things you can make yourself (HT: The Presurfer)
14. The Advocate has some interesting results from a survey on gay men and lesbians:
[T]he median household income for gay men is $83,000 per year (gay singles $62,000; gay couples living together $130,000), almost 80% above the median U.S. household income of $46,326, according to US census data. 40% of gay men reported household incomes in excess of $100,000 per year. For lesbians, the median household income is $80,000 per year (lesbian singles $52,000; lesbian couples living together $96,000), and 36% of lesbians reported household incomes in excess of $100,000 per year.
Shouldn't they be voting for the GOP since the Republicans are the party of the rich?
15. Brain illnesses "may be the best-kept secret of AIDS in the world."
16. An exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises:
In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke's home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegetables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. "A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!" Mises noted disapprovingly. "Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness" was Röpke's rejoinder.
(Via: A Thinking Reed)
17. 10 eco-friendly things to do with lemons (HT: Lifehacker)
18. Eating Brazil: American consumerism in perspective
[T]he quantity of goods and services that Americans consumed last year in excess of what we produced was close to the entire annual output of Brazil. “Brazil is the tenth largest economy on the planet,” points out Laura Alfaro, an associate professor of business administration who teaches a class on the current account deficit at Harvard Business School (HBS). “That is what the U.S. is eating up every year—a Brazil or a Mexico.”
19. Is New Mexico a State? Some Americans Don't Know -- New Mexico Magazine has a monthly compilation of stories about Americans who don't know that New Mexico is a U.S. state. The editor talks with NPR about the bank tellers, cell phone providers and ticketing agents who tell New Mexicans that they reside in another country.
20. 10 Surprising Uses For Aspirin
#3 First aid for pimples: Crush an aspirin tablet and add a little water to make a paste. Cover the pimple with this paste and after a few minutes rinse it off. The pimple will be less red and reduced in size. Aspirin is an astringent.
(HT: The Presurfer)
21. Top 15 Great Science Fiction Book (HT: The Presurfer)
22. U.S. life span shorter: Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries. For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.
23. The Writers' Resources is a treasure chest of tools just for writing.
24. I always had my suspicions about those two: The Vegas big cat act of Siegfried and Roy have finally announced they are gay.
25. Men and Women are Different (Part I):
A poll of 1,536 Canadian adults, by Leger Marketing for Aero, asked what they would be least willing to give up -- sex, chocolate or alcohol.
Sex was almost five times more important to men than chocolate, and four times more important than alcohol, while women found chocolate and sex equally important at 40 percent each. One in five women wouldn't like to give up alcohol.
26. Men and Women are Different (Part II):
Forty-nine percent of the men said they think they are born multitaskers, but 68 percent of women disagree that men can do several things at once. Eighty-five percent of the women thought they were born multitaskers and 61 percent of the men agreed.
(HT: The View from Her)
27. First, there was Oscar, the death-predicting cat who roamed a nursing home. Now, Scamp, the dog of death, is able to sniff out which nursing home patients will be the next to go. (HT: Neatorama)
28. Harry Potter is "dreadful and vulgar", says educational theorist Paul Spears, "and that is not a bad thing."
29. An interview with the author of Embryo Culture has a telling bit about wanting religious leaders to justify the evils that we want to do:
When I started looking at the IVF issue, I started with my old rabbi, who is very conservative. He pulled out some books that definitely predated 1978 and pointed to this rabbi and that rabbi who had so clearly spoken about these issues -- and I thought, "What are you talking about? IVF wasn't even around then!" He said, "Well, don't underestimate what people envision." And I just thought, Well, that's it for me. If this is the person I'm going to have to talk to when I'm faced with having to reduce a quadruplet pregnancy, he's not my guy.
Yes, indeed. A rabbi who has a problem with IVF probably would have a problem with intentionally creating a human life only to kill it later.
30. Harrison Scott Key has an interesting "conspiracy theory" :
It sometimes seems that the Republican party of the last ten years has really been masking as the Christian party. To so many on the left, the Right is just another way of saying Evangelicals and a Few Other People Too. But I suspect there are a whole slew of fellows who consider themselves Republicans and think most Christians are about as retarded as most of New England thinks we are. These are the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren (and so on) of the cavaliers and grandees and adventure-seeking businessmen of Europe, no more intent on evangelizing the New World than the Puritans were on making money off of the slave trade. These children of cavaliers are the elite, the wealthy, of mainline churches, the kinds of people Alex P. Keaton wanted to grow up to be, and for the last ten years, they have been cavorting with low-brow Christians (like Baptists and other people who take faith seriously, even if they're uncultured, according to some). And what's even more interesting, a lot of these low-brow Christians have begun to think they are the elite, the wealthy, the powerful. This might be the undiscovered rift in the Republican party - the alignment of Evangelicals with the Elite Mercantile Class of Gentry - and it's a rift that's quickly becoming discovered.
31. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, two in three Americans (67%) say they consider the United States to be a Christian nation. This is down just slightly from 71% in March 2006 but up significantly from the percentage who said so a decade ago.
32. Loneliness is bad for your health: A new study in Current Directions in Psychological Science finds that as we get older, loneliness plays a devestating role in our physical decline.
33. And you thought your local pool was crowded?
http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/mt/mt-trackback.cgi/3843
1
Number 24: Wow. Who'd of thought a couple of flamboyant, show-biz guys, living together with a bunch of exotic cats could be gay. I mean, what are the odds?
posted on 08.20.2007 8:53 AM2
#12
I thought that the Weekly World News had gone out of business.
Oh, the story was originally published in The Sun. That explains it.
The story screams B.S. from top to bottom. Lethal black widow? Geckoes ripping off hunks of rotting corpse? Tarantulas feasting on chunks of meat? Exploding terrarrium heaters?
posted on 08.20.2007 9:31 AM3
That chart listing "IQ's for various occupations" is totally, simply, absurd.
The idea, say, that they can claim there's an IQ range for, say, "up to 128" for EE's and it's 133 or so for "college professors" (what about college professors of EE?) presumes an accuracy of measurement that is nonsense.
Here's why: a 10 point difference in IQ is presumably equal to a standard deviation from the mean of the population. Between, say, 125 and 130 IQ, that difference in population would be 0.0004. To measure reliably random events (say, the IQ of a statistical sample of an occupation) with say, a 75% level of confidence (sounds reasonable, right?) would require at least about 10 million "random trials" and, for engineers, or, I'd submit, college professors, or the like there aren't that many of 'em in the country.
posted on 08.20.2007 11:05 AM4
Oh, great. I really needed to hear about the spider thing, thanks. Now I believe I'll go throw up.
posted on 08.20.2007 11:09 AM5
Mumon, you might want to thumb through your stats textbook again. Your calculations are a bit off.
First, the standard deviation of an adult IQ test is likely 15, not 10, though that doesn't really affect your argument.
Second, while there is error associated with any score in a probability distribution, the IQ test is calibrated so that you can get a reasonably accurate score within about 3 standard deviations in either direction. IQ scores are often reported with an error range (confidence intervals, e.g.), but differences in means of 5 points in a suitably large population will be reliable.
Third, you're calculating the probabilities wrong. With a standard deviation of 10, the difference between 125 and 130 (with a mean of 100), probability-wise, would be about .005, which is small, but you're off by one power of ten, which is a pretty big error. The reason is that the probability between scores of a certain difference (in absolute scores or z/T-scores) is not uniform across the distribution.
Fourth, you're using the wrong variance to determine the effect size. The question the data raises is whether the different groups (EE's, professors, whatever) comprise different "populations." Think of them as sub-populations of the population that determines the overall IQ distribution (the one with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15). Each of those sub-populations will have a different mean and variance, and the question then is the extent to which they overlap. To measure that, you have to use their specific means and variances, not the general population's mean and variance. Again, given what we know about IQ scores, a difference of 5 points with a relatively large sample size (in these sorts of measures, a sample size of 30 is large), that difference is almost certainly reliable assuming equal and relatively small variances (the variances for sub-populations will be smaller than the variance for the general population, in case that's not obvious).
Third,
posted on 08.20.2007 12:05 PM6
I have to say, this is not one of the better complilations you've done. About half these entries are just dumb or wrong.
The IQ thing is interesting but no more valuable than any discussion of IQ, which is to say hardly at all. And the numbers, offhand, look awfully low. The average IQ of college students is about 115 - one standard deviation above the population mean - and higher for higher levels of education, but this chart gives the mean IQ of college professors lower than that, and of MDs barely higher. The IQs in the skilled trades are suspciciously low as well, again assuming IQ predicts anything other than school achievement. The chart looks to me like a measurement of somebody's class prejudices, not actual test results.
I don't know if Bono espouses "theocratic biblical theology", but is there any other kind? And how is that an insult, from a Christian perspective?
The US isn't "eating up a Brazil" every year - we're eating up many times that amount. We're just importing a Brazil to supply that part of what we eat up that we can't make for ourselves. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on where your values lie.
The US lifespan is not getting shorter. It has continually lengthened for all population groups, and is still doing so. As your own text notes, it's just not as long as that of many other countries, largely due to their lower infant mortality rates and better healthcare.
Of the four Utopian communities that "bombed miserably", two were not Utopian and most were not miserable failures. Brook Farm lasted six years and disbanded over ideological differences; that's not a terrible record. Pullman City was a lousy place to live but it didn't fail by its own lights - it forced huge amounts of wages out of Pullman's workers for Pullman's own profit, while remaining financially viable for 20 years; and it wasn't a Utopia, it was an ordinary company town run for the company's benefit at the workers' expense. The Shakers were not a single community and were also not Utopian, other than by having a common organizing ideology (religion); given that they made the deliberate choice not to seek further growth, and lasted for over 200 years, they can hardly be called a failure.
"You always suspected . . ."? A poker hand containing "two Queens" has been known as "Siegfried and Roy" for years. There's a reason.
I see no difference between rejecting a rabbi who's anti-choice and rejecting a priest or nun who's pro-choice - except that the former limits your autonomy and the latter support it.
That the Republican party is divided into the upper-crust Eisenhower/Rockefeller camp and the religious right, and they don't have much in common beside a grasping desire for money and prestige, is hardly a brilliant insight, or a new one.
Given that half of people who define themselves as "secular" also said that the US is a "Christian nation", the question was clearly interpreted descriptively, not prescriptively. And, the results also mean that the overall percentage of the population who say the US is a Christian nation is considerably smaller than the percentage that is actually Christian.
posted on 08.20.2007 1:36 PM7
On #25: I think the survey result on sex says more about the sexuality differences between men and women than about a congenital propensity of either to prefer it more or less. It seems to be easier for men to achieve a certain level of satisfaction, know what I mean? (In other words, if women were having better sex, I suspect they might prefer it more...)
posted on 08.22.2007 10:54 AM