08:43 – Barbara is off work today for MLK day, but will be spending most of the day running around doing errands. I’ll continue working on kit stuff. Kit sales have slowed down a lot in the last few days, which is fine with me. I was so busy building and shipping kits that I didn’t have time to do much else.
One of the comments yesterday said that MLK day isn’t treated as a real holiday, in his opinion because of “holdover race issues”. That may be part of it, but if so I think it’s a small part. The resentment is certainly widespread among whites, but I think the race of MLK has very little to do with that. I think it has more to do with timing and the insignificance of MLK.
Most businesses that give employees MLK day as paid time-off do so at the expense of Washington’s Birthday in late February or Good Friday/Easter Monday in late March or early April. Most employees now have two days off in January: New Year’s Day followed only two or three weeks later by MLK day. Their next paid day off is then Memorial Day, more than a third of a year later. That’s a long time without a holiday.
But most people would tolerate that if that second January holiday commemorated something or someone really worth commemorating. MLK isn’t. An individual has to be pretty damned special to deserve a national holiday. MLK doesn’t make the top 10,000 of people who deserve their own day. Probably not the top 100,000. I mean, Thomas Jefferson doesn’t have his own day, for heaven’s sake. National holidays should not be devoted to individuals. They should be reserved for things of enduring national importance or to commemorate things that are important to most citizens. Independence Day. Memorial Day. New Year’s Day. Veterans’ Day. Even Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, despite their religious basis. Devoting a national holiday to an individual, particularly one so insignificant as MLK, predictably generates a lot of resentment and needlessly contributes to racial polarization.
The truth is, I don’t think we should have any national holidays. If I had employees, I’d tell them to take whatever days off they wanted to take off. Just give me some warning so that I could schedule around their absence those days. If MLK’s birthday is significant to them, fine. Take it off. Otherwise, show up for work. If they’d prefer having Good Friday off, that’s their business. If they’d rather take time off for Hanukkah or the Winter Solstice than Christmas, or vice versa, fine. Why force people to commemorate things and people that aren’t important to them?
Jerry Coyne had something to say about MLK today, it seems to me that he makes the top 1000, or better. Yes, I know Jerry is a rabid liberal, but MLK seems to me to be highly significant to African Americans at least, and civil rights.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/the-speech/#comments
Yes, MLK is significant to many blacks and left-wing whites. But he not only doesn’t make the Top 1,000, he probably doesn’t make the Top 1,000 even among those who fought for civil rights for blacks. He was among the top leaders of the civil rights for blacks movement in the 50’s and 60’s. That’s it. There are many others who did immensely more for civil rights for blacks than King did. Many of those have names you’d probably recognized, but many, many more are just about forgotten. And many of those risked and often lost their lives in the struggle. King spoke powerfully, but that’s about it. The fact that someone assassinated him doesn’t mean that he was knowingly taking risks anywhere near the level that many of his predecessors took. Many of them were lynched, and more than a few were executed judicially. King just happened to have high visibility when the time had come. It would have come with or without him.
Bob,
When the wife and I worked at Zeneca, in addition to the regular legal holidays we had three ‘floating holidays’, which could be used with notice for such things as Good Friday, or simply as a mental health day. It worked out very well…
Cheers,
Rod
Excellent common sense on the national holidays here from our illustrious host; best summation of it that I have seen in many years. Hats off!
My days off in a given year: Washington’s birthday; St. Patrick’s Day; Memorial Day; Father’s Day; Independence Day; Leif Erikkson Day; Veterans Day; Thanksgiving; and Christmas. Nine holidays, and I’d take those as part of my six weeks vay-cay.
Bobby Kennedy and MLK were assassinated within two months of each other. Tough, tough times for our great nation. One was 42, the other 39. Both had extreme hands on experience shaping our nation. Yet neither was on the level of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. But they might have been, we will never know.
I feel pretty safe saying that neither would have ever reached the level of Washington or Jefferson; Jefferson himself might as well have been from another planet or from another dimension as far as his intelligence alone was concerned, and the actor playing him in the HBO series on John Adams captured this quite well, I thought.
Washington wasn’t the greatest general in world history but he was in the right place at the right time and managed to elude the Brits, whose hearts weren’t really in it, anyway, long enough to involve our pals the French. I seriously doubt RFK could have pulled that off; basically Saint JFK’s hatchet man and consigliere.
Saint MLK had feet of clay, like almost all of us, but I will lay off him today anyway, as he had plenty of sand back in the day standing up to the violent persecution directed against him and his people.
You can mostly thank government unions for the holidays. MLK is the January day off. New Years Day is really a part of the winter holiday. Feb is Presidents day. Easter, oh wait spring break is March or April. Memorial day is May. June, mmmmm. July Fourth. August, well most take a summer vacation. Sept is Labor Day. October some get Columbus day either to celebrate or hate him. November Thanksgiving and December lots of days for winter solstice. Pretty much a holiday a month club. The gift that keeps on giving.
Hey, for June we have Flag Day and D-Day.
August is pretty much a dead month, the dog days of summuh and all that; state governments here in the Northeast pretty much take the whole summer off; try and get anything done or find someone. Oh wait, for August we have Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the Apostle who was martyred by being skinned alive and then crucified upside-down. It was in August of 1572 that the massacres in France took place.
My former employer observed New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, plus 4 floating holidays. The exceptions were for some contracts at government installations, where they were obligated to observe the holiday. We used the days of the unobserved holidays as a day to houseclean and reorganize the lab at JSC, where I worked for a number of years.
Oh and the glorious state of California (Upper Baja) has Cesar Chavez day on March 31. Strong push by some, especially those courting the Hispanic vote, to get a national day.
Floating holidays make too much sense to ever become universal. But again, it’s all about polarization, isn’t it?
From the earliest times I can remember, people worked together to cover what needed to be covered. I remember when I was in elementary school my parents explaining to me that many Jews volunteered to work Christmas so that Christian colleagues could have the day off, and that many Christians did the same to cover for Jews on their holy days. Hell, when I was single, I’ve covered Christmas shifts myself to give co-workers the day off.
But nowadays, it’s not about cooperation any more. It’s about confrontation and polarization. If everyone gets Christmas off, everyone should also get the days off that are important to other religions. Hell, if a day really matters to you, talk to your co-workers about covering for you. If you can’t get coverage, suck it up and work that day. Nobody’s trying to insult your personal beliefs.
Agreed. Back in ye halcyon days of yesteryear, when I was a dumbass street cop (OK, I’m still a dumbass), the tiny handful of Jewish cops covered for us on Xmas and we covered for them on Hanukkah and Yom Kippur. There were then no hadjis or Buddhists or Wiccans on the force (that we know of) and in one large department there was a KKK chapter but they did not demand their own holiday. That’s right, folks, a KKK chapter in Maffachufetts and another one not too fah away in Connecticut.
But the country has become steadily Balkanized and polarized, to the point now where it is not difficult to imagine another civil war at all.
But the country has become steadily Balkanized and polarized, to the point now where it is not difficult to imagine another civil war at all.
I blame the Democrats and to a far lesser extent, the social conservatives.
I also blame the people who let all so many immigrants into this country that the melting pot overflowed two decades ago. When we got radio in Spanish and then tv in Spanish, that was a bad sign. Now we have communities of people that are isolated from the rest of us. Not good for the long term. We are in the process of creating MANY little Quebec’s in the USA.
I can fix this!:
1. USA balanced budget constitutional amendment
2. USA English is the only official language constitutional amendment
I blame our mis-educational publik skool system; the continued validation and worship of Mssrs. Dewey, Freud and Marx; the various “revolutions” of the Glorious Sixties; virtually unlimited mass immigration, both legal and illegal; and both halves, the Stupid and the Evil halves, of our War/Money Party.
A balanced budget amendment and making English the official language, which it is anyway, like it or not, and the Master Language of the Universe, are the wistful and dreamily hopeful applications of bargain-basement band-aids to open, artery-gushing wounds.
The country is too far gone; we are looking at continued Balkanization and eventual breakup, and much of it is not likely to be peaceful and quiet and orderly. It’s just too damn big and complex and expensive and cannot be sustained, no matter how much wonderful natural resources we have or how many super-genius Mr. Fixits are straining at their leashes to fix all that is wrong and invent spanking new shit.
My employer doesn’t recognize MLK Day as a holiday worth giving paid time off for. I can’t say I’ve thought twice about it. Ho-hum I guess. They do, however, provide a floating Birthday holiday that allows you to take a day off without using Paid Time Off.
Skools and state and Fed offices all closed up here; I assume banks are, too, but haven’t had reason to check.
Speaking of banks, ours is downtown, about three miles from our house, and is the site of the St. Albans Confederate raid and bank robbery, which is gonna get re-enacted in full next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Albans_Raid
http://www.vermontcivilwar150.com/Events2014.html
Vermont had the highest, IIRC, per capital KIA of Union troops in that war. Farms were mostly good for harvesting rocks and mostly failing by that time, so wot’s a young lad to do but go off to end slavery and save the Union for Father Abraham?
There would not have been such mass illegal immigration if there weren’t jobs. Business owners wanted cheap labor. The affluent, both Republican and Democrats wanted cheap nannies.
I am not as pessimistic as many about the effects of the melting pot. In the early part of the twentieth century, there was mass immigration from different parts of Europe. The Italians, Polish, Jews and other groups each had their own neighborhoods where little English was spoken.
I spent nine days in L.A. over Christmas. We stayed in Echo Park, which as a large Hispanic population. Many people in the stores and restaurants were bilingual. There was a nice bakery just down the street from where we stayed. It was owned by El Salvadoreans. The employees spoke excellent English, but quickly switched to Spanish, when needed. As long as the immigrants keep starting businesses, all is not lost.
Our educational idiocy makes the melting pot harder, but not impossible. My great aunt taught school in Chicago for decades starting in the 1920’s. She had a lot of students who didn’t speak English when they started, but learned quickly because they had no choice. Kids learn languages quickly. The immigrant kids want to learn English so they can understand what Jerry Pournelle calls “cultural weapons of mass destruction.” I haven’t run into too may young people who can’t speak English (or a facsimile thereof).
We are going to need young people to help support us old farts as we age. The U.S. is one of the only “developed” countries whose population is not rapidly aging because of immigration.
Rick in Portland
1. We have a balanced budget mandate in the CA state constitution and it doesn’t mean squat. Congential liars suffer from a mental illness, none of the mental illnesses are curable.
2. We have neither a MLK Blvd, nor a CC Blvd locally. But I expect the CC manifestation more likely in the future.
3. The 1st and 3rd Mondays are when we have municipal street sweeping in my neighborhood. Only the 1st this month; my tax dollars NOT at work. I do not expect a refund.
71 F here in the Land of Sugar. More of the same all week. I do not know what of this winter that you guys are talking about.
They try to propagate the lie that illegal aliens pay taxes. Total nonsense! They average 4 children per family, most born here and all those on food stamps. The cost of education is about $100,000 per until the dropout in high school (extremely high rate). All medical taxpayer provided. The illegal wage earners never earn above the minimum over which income taxes are levied. Sales tax? Absolute minimum, no clothes or appliances or cars bought from a store. Real estate via rent? 6 in a 400 ft2 slum apartment.
George Washington was not great because he was a great General, which he was. George Washington was great because he refused to be King. Instead, he became our first elected President and thereby set the tradition of elected officials running this wonderful country.
Can you imagine what would happened if George Washington had become King? It would have been chaos at his death because he had no natural born children. Martha Washington was a widow with children when he married her and they did not have any children together. Civil wars have been started with less reasons.
The cost of education is about $100,000 per until the dropout in high school (extremely high rate).
We probably need to move to a system where you need to test well to go to high school. Just about all other countries in the world use this system. If you do not test well then you go to technical school or beauty school. If you show up.
I was totally shocked in high school when only 635 of our 1365 seniors graduated. I was magna cum laude until graduation day. Then I was cum laude all of a sudden. Very few of the blacks and hispanics graduated. It was an almost all white graduation ceremony even though whites were only 40% of the student population.
2. USA English is the only official language constitutional amendment.
Seems to me SI Hayakawa tried that in Mexifornia a couple decades ago and the result was not sí.
Immigration is one of our major problems but not the only one, and not the most important one; the genie is outta the bottle and neither come-one-come-all nor draconian measures will fix this.
Our most important problem is an out-of-control Leviathan and a national and world economy that is about to tank within the next five to ten years, tops. Concomitant with that, a probable series of mass civil disturbances that some might characterize as another civil war, we are that polarized.
“Wanted: ‘Adventurous woman’ to give birth to Neanderthal man – Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby”:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265402/Adventurous-human-woman-wanted-birth-Neanderthal-man-Harvard-professor.html
This will not go well.
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
If they are, in fact, more intelligent than us, which is not a stretch by any means, can we replace our current Congress, SCOTUS and WH forthwith?
Well, H. sapiens neanderthalensis’s cranial capacity was higher than H. sapiens sapiens, and cranial capacity correlates very strongly with intelligence, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Neanderthals were brighter than modern man.
I take it that you guys don’t approve of cloning a Neanderthal. I do, with some reservations. As the only one of its species, the new Neanderthal is going to be lonely, and its uniqueness ensures it’ll be a public spectacle. I think rather than one, they should clone a bunch–hundreds to thousands, depending on how many discrete Neanderthal genomes they have available. It certainly shouldn’t be a problem to find host mothers.
Hi OFD, don’t know if you are much of a reader but this sf (speculative fiction) might be right down your alley: “After America” by Mark Steyn:
http://www.amazon.com/After-America-Get-Ready-Armageddon/dp/1596983272/
Well, H. sapiens neanderthalensis’s cranial capacity was higher than H. sapiens sapiens, and cranial capacity correlates very strongly with intelligence, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Neanderthals were brighter than modern man.
It certainly shouldn’t be a problem to find host mothers.
I guess that all the births will be caesarian sections as few of the birth mothers will try to pass a basketball through their cervix.
California did pass prop 63 in 1986
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#Languages
it’s just ignored by the officials that should enforce it. I wonder why.
I take it that you guys don’t approve of cloning a Neanderthal.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I sure would like to have a new heart cloned for me out of my present heart tissue with my missing right coronary fixed. So, I am at least for partial cloning. Full cloning has not gone well in most sf stories especially with the potential for brain transfer. I do agree with Crichton that we just do not know the consequences of full human cloning. Up with chaos theory!
“…I think rather than one, they should clone a bunch–hundreds to thousands, depending on how many discrete Neanderthal genomes they have available. It certainly shouldn’t be a problem to find host mothers.”
No, I do not approve, but if we’re gonna do it, let’s just start with 546. Maybe take the host mothers from among volunteers in the ranks of tens of millions who’ve had abortions and bitterly regretted them.
“…Hi OFD, don’t know if you are much of a reader…”
I am a sick and twisted bibliomaniac of many long decades standing; my parents taught me to read at age four and I was doing book reports at five. My usual method is that I am reading ten or twelve books at once, continuously, throughout life, so however many that is since age five or so, fifty-five years. Rough guess: 9,000 or so, not counting thousands of magazines, pamphlets, backs of cereal boxes, newspapers, etc.
I am familiar with Mr. Steyn; he is an optimist from O Kanada. I think it’s too late and we are headed for more or less terminal decline until we reach the middle- and working-class standard of living we had in circa 1900, if we are lucky. I hope, of course, that our host and Lynn are correct, and that we will somehow muddle through without too much damage.
Thank you, dkreck. I’d forgotten the proposition had passed. Nice to know you can get your ballot in Tagalog, isn’t it?
Lynn wrote:
“George Washington was not great because he was a great General, which he was. George Washington was great because he refused to be King. ”
All Hail Cincinnatus!
bibliomaniac
Oh my goodness, a new word! I like this word and it could be applied to me. Maybe. I would rather read than do just about anything else. Sleep, work, tv, etc. You can see the books that I read at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2P5WAAF0R125O/
All Hail Cincinnatus!
Nice!
Nice to know you can get your ballot in Tagalog, isn’t it?
You can get your ballot in 15 languages in Fort Bend County, Texas. Yes, Tagalog also. Most divisive thing that I have ever seen in my life. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong. All ballots should be in English, period.
Not sure what the solution to holidays is, but the bottom line is that holidays in Europe were a restful respite from the daily grind—more-or-less enforced because of the blue laws requiring businesses to close (exception was anything attached to the shopping parts of a train station, which were growing exponentially into mini-malls when I left), whereas holidays are essentially meaningless in the US. I much prefer the European dedication to holidays, although I do not really know what they should be based on, as neither people nor religious events seem a good foundation to me. I have lived long enough to see streets named after some ‘deserving’ person stripped of that person’s name and something else substituted—sometimes not even a different person’s name. I mean really, did Adlai Stevenson deserve an expressway in Chicago named after him? What about Major General Alexander E. Anderson, whose name—until 1963—officially graced the Queens airport now known as JFK? Even Columbus Day is taking a beating, solely because progressives have come to hate him for having discovered America.
When I worked in commercial TV, we got double-time for only 5 holidays (provided they did not fall on Sunday, and back then, they were not Monday holidays): Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Xmas. There was no M.L. King Day back then. In public TV, we did not work on any federal days off, and the big boss in each place did not want anybody working weekends or holidays, so there was no heat or air-conditioning on those days, except in the Air-Ops area where programs were actually played back or connected from satellite to the transmitter. Only 4 people were on duty at any one time in that unit, and in public TV, they only got all day OT, not double-time. We did not observe M.L. King Day in Chicago when it was instituted, but that was quickly remedied after the newspapers got wind of that and made a big deal about it. You do not get away with stuff like that in Chicago, and the powers that be should have known better. They were warned by the plentiful number of blacks we had on staff, but those warnings were discounted because top management thought they were biased. Everyone but management saw that one coming.
Like I say, I don’t know what the solution to naming the holidays should be, although Memorial Day and Labor Day seem generic enough not cause problems like Columbus Day does. I loved the April Patriot’s Day holiday observed in some New England states. It was wonderful to get a day off at the beginning of spring.
In the smaller TV stations, Jewish people never got their religious holidays off, so many just called in sick and nobody complained. In the big markets I worked in, like Chicago, Boston, and occasionally LA, they got their days off, but there really was no trade-off in covering for Christmas, because everyone got that off anyway, except the poor Air-Ops people. Same with school systems. My kids got all the Jewish holidays off in the big cities, but places like Indianapolis and Tiny Town have never accommodated Jewish holidays in the school schedule.
If we’re gonna insist on ballots and signs and other such stuff being in other languages than modern English, then I want my choices approved, too:
Old English
Middle English
Old Saxon (mutually intelligible with Old English, ha, ha)
Old Norse (mutually intelligible with modern Icelandic, ha, ha)
Old Welsh
Gaelic
Mi’k’mac
Passamaquoddy
Mohawk
Algonqian
Huron
Old French
and Pict
“2. USA English is the only official language constitutional amendment”
I was listening to Rand Paul being interviewed. The question came up about posting bills 2 days before voting. The Tax Crap Sandwich just passed observed 3 minutes advance posting. He said he wanted to initiate a bill to enforce the standard, but Congress just gets together and does what it wants, so he was frustrated. Next Obummer will just issue edicts “for the way it will be”. See ya in Armageddon.
I wonder how viable the NeandraOFD DNA is. I hope they aren’t just going to shoot craps with it.
“We probably need to move to a system where you need to test well to go to high school. Just about all other countries in the world use this system. If you do not test well then you go to technical school or beauty school. If you show up.”
This is already the law in CA, for both grammar school and high school graduation. However, the school districts absolutley refuse to enforce. It would only exacerbate the very high dropout rates. No matter, as they are emptying our prisons of violent felons, they will not replace them with school district scofflaws.
Yup, as has been mentioned several times on this board recently, we have laws for this and that but they don’t get enforced, and deliberately so. However this sometimes works *for* us as much as it does against us.
” NeandraOFD DNA”
Hmmmm….at some point we’re thinking of sending our DNA in someplace to be analyzed; wot do you scientist types think of that? Are those tests viable? Accurate? They seem to run about a hundred bucks, maybe a little more.
OFD wrote:
“If we’re gonna insist on ballots and signs and other such stuff being in other languages than modern English, then I want my choices approved”
No Latin or ancient Greek?
“…cranial capacity correlates very strongly with intelligence, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Neanderthals were brighter than modern man.”
Okay, how come *some* women with very small heads are smarter than some guys with very large ones? I realise you said correlated, but a 50-100% difference is pretty significant.
Why do you want your DNA analyzed? Your wife may want to see if she has any of the breast cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. My wife has these and the other two minor genes, she got breast cancer at age 45. But there is not a direct correlation between those genes and cancer.
I’m not sure how unique DNA is. For instance, can it be used to uniquely identify you and do law enforcement types have access to that data?
BTW, since I am a licensed professional engineer in the Great State of Texas, apparently this year I get to provide my fingerprints to the state for checking against some criminal database. I suspect that I will get loaded into the national database of all people at that time also. I am not happy about this. Of course, I had to give my thumb print several years ago to keep my drivers license. Do it for Big Brother!
Hmm, my elder nephew’s wife has one or more of the breast cancer genes too. Her mother and one or two of her mother’s sisters died young of breast cancer, so she had the test, which came back positive. She’s had about a year of counseling and is scheduled to have a double mastectomy in the next few months.
I simply assume/d that classical, medieval, botanical and ecclesiastical Latin would be included as a matter of course, along with classical Greek.
As for DNA, last I knew, yes, it could be used to uniquely identify us, and has been used for ID purposes for a while, including, supposedly, that of the late not-so-much-lamented Osama bin Laden. And if any data is ‘out there,’ I would also assume that “law enforcement,” or, the State, has access to it. They have me already via mil-spec and cop service long ago.
Why do we wanna do it? It’s not an obsession or anything; just curiosity. Maybe for possible medical insights, but mainly for ancestry.
No need for ecclesiastical Latin, they can’t even pronounce it right.
Eh? The difference is nowhere near that large. Here’s a pretty good overview:
http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Rushton1992.pdf
Oh, okay. I thought that men had very much larger/heavier brains, however measured, than women. The difference actually seems to be around 100g. But if, as you’ve said, men and women both have mean IQ of 100, why hasn’t the extra brain mass in men made a difference?
I cannot find the article I read now (that’s the problem with our modern-day access to so much information; how do you collate and save it for the unknown likelihood you might want to retrieve it in the future?), but it involved Einstein’s brain. Apparently, against his wishes, somebody he worked with, had his brain preserved after his death in case posterity could find out something useful.
What the article said they did find out, is Einstein (like most Germans) had a smaller than standard American head, but there was significantly more concentration of cells (or whatever makes the brains work—I cannot recall) than normal in the base of his brain as it approached the spine. They speculated that it is therefore not the size of the brain, but the density of those elements that make the difference, and accounted for his superior intellect.
Well in the Great White North we have but ten holidays a year: New Year, Family Day/Heritage Day, Good Friday, Queen’s Birthday (Victoria Day), Canada Day (Dominion Day), Civic Holiday (Simcoe Day in Ontario), Labour Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Boxing Day. Family Day and Civic Holiday are not statutory holidays but the rest are. Family Day is recent, the third Monday in February and is a welcome midwinter break.
Had my least favourite exam this morning; TRUS + biopsy. For those less than 50, that’s Trans Rectal UltraSound of the prostate. A singularly uncomfortable procedure. But at my age (68) and family history it’s something to keep and eye (and a finger on.) One of the things they asked of me, was permission to use the biopsy samples for genetic testing. Apparently the genes that are suspected to cause ovarian cancer in women may be responsible for prostate cancer in men. I gave my consent, more research is always a good idea.
DNA is unique, but most forensic tests only look and a few markers which are far from unique. I think the current tests can conclusively eliminate someone but I would want more than just DNA to conclusively identify someone. It’s true that everybody’s DNA (identical twins or clones excluded) is unique but nobody exams the entire genome.
I’ve never said that men and women both have a mean IQ of 100. The mean IQ of men is a bit higher than that of women. Comparisons of different data sets typically yield results in the range of 101:99 to 102:98. But that difference pales compared to the large difference in SD. That larger SD among men means that by the time you get to high genius range, men outnumber women by 1000:1 or more. That explains why, with the possible exception of Hypatia, all universal geniuses through history have been men.
Chuck’s memory is a bit off. It wasn’t that Einstein’s brain was smaller and denser. What they did find was a higher glia:neuron ratio in Einstein’s brain, although that finding was compromised because Einstein died at 74 and his brain was compared to a relatively small number of “normal” brains that averaged, IIRC, a decade younger. Glia continue to divide with age, so that finding may be insignificant.
From that article, it’s also interesting that estimates of cranial capacity made from external measurements turn out to be more accurate than those made by actual measurement (pouring sand into the skull or whatever).
Oh, I was sure you’ve said more than once that men and women both have a mean IQ of 100 and that men have much higher SD: so that real dopes and real geniuses tend to be male. But given that there is a quite significant difference in cranial capacity shouldn’t men have a mean IQ much more than 1-2 above that of women? I mean, 100g is a fair bit.
No, all I’ve said is that the mean IQs of men and women are close enough that the difference is relatively insignificant.
If you assume that the mean brain size is 1400 cc and that men average 100 cc more, that means men’s brains average 1450 cc versus 1350 cc for women, or about 7% larger. Taking into account that men’s body sizes and masses are significantly larger than womens and that overall body size/mass affects brain size, it’s not surprising that men are only slightly smarter on average than women.
Trans Rectal UltraSound of the prostate. A singularly uncomfortable procedure
No shit. I looked it up on the web and saw a video of the procedure. Yikes. I was interested because my PSA levels were elevated. I had to visit a urologist who gave me the option of a biopsy or a different blood test. I opted for the blood with followup in a few months and monitoring of the situation.
Fortunately cancer does not run in my family with the exception of one grandfather who died of lung cancer and smoked short, none filter Camel cigarettes for his entire life. My family just suffers from brain rot.
I assume that men have larger brains on average than women and that average body sizes are partially a factor in this, but if a man has a larger brain – for whatever reason – surely that dictates that he has a chance to be smarter just for that reason?
Well, whales and elephants have pretty large brains.
Rolf wrote: “Well in the Great White North we have but ten holidays a year: New Year, Family Day/Heritage Day, Good Friday, Queen’s Birthday (Victoria Day), Canada Day (Dominion Day), Civic Holiday (Simcoe Day in Ontario), Labour Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Boxing Day. ”
Boxing Day is only a paid holiday in Ontario. The rest of us suffer with only nine!
Moochelle Obama being the counter-example.
She’s kinda cute. For a politician’s wife.
Wow, the sun must really be bearing down in Oz. Brains are being fried. The Mooch is disgustingly fugly, like her predecessor, the Heroine of Tripoli and Benghazi. The Dems simply cannot provide a decent looking woman to save themselves. Laura Bush was the cutest First Lady we’ve had in a long time and the classiest. Still is.
RBT said “Why force people to commemorate things and people that aren’t important to them?”
Well, as a straightforward counter-example, I’d say that your constitution isn’t important to a heck of a lot of your citizens. Nevertheless I’d say that having people know about it is pretty important, despite their ignorant opinions.
There’s also always the old argument that those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. That seems to be becoming more and more relevant every day. It’s happening particularly in the USA, but it isn’t limited to you there by any means. Par exemple, treating muslim immigrants and even muslim native-born citizens as if they are civilised citizens is something that’s all too common worldwide, and the end of that is self-evident.
It’s seemingly unimportant to those who just wish to go on their blinkered lives without paying any attention to the world around them. It’s inconvenient for those who want to control others; this group is more than half of the population. The US Constitution is important specifically as a counter to the tyranny of the majority. And of course that’s why statists of all colors work to undermine it.
There was work being done to undermine it from the very beginning, and one result, thankfully, was our Bill of Rights, which is also just birdcage liner to these bastards.