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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 292 December 12 - 18, 2005

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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

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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

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As usual there was a great deal of interesting mail over the weekend.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

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Tuesday, December 13, 2005   

  I am accumulating materials on energy and eugenics, and we'll have a pretty good spread of views shortly. Today is taken up with other matters, so there will not be much. I have to get the bills paid and some other matters settled.

 

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WednesdayDecember 14, 2005

Holidays and other matters. Cleaning up. I will try to catch up on the Talin debates, global warming, and eugenics today.

Outside my squirrel and my blue jay -- they are of course wild creatures, and do not belong to me; indeed I think they believe I belong to them -- are making noises on my balcony because the feeders are empty. Those animals hate each other but they will cooperate in annoying me until I feed them. They have me conditioned.

I do have Harry Erwin's Letter from England posted.

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There is a discussion of national IQ and GDP in Mail.

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Feed Service Improved.

Thanks to Mr. Hastings, the feed service algorithm has been improved to pick up items like this one which are not indexed in the "Highlights This Week" at the top of the weekly page.

(It's still in testing, so you will not necessarily see anything different until it's implemented for all users.)

I don't know what it does to random illustrations dropped to the page. I haven't done so many of those as I used to. In one case, this one

I am just as happy not to have to include it, since it usually means I was dead wrong about something, and I am eating crow, or the crow is eating my words, as you choose to interpret it. I don't have an illustration of a man eating a dish of steamed crow, but then I rather like crows so I am not sure I want one. When I was a lad in rural Tennessee I didn't like crows at all. They are very smart, and if you plant corn, they will wait for the sprout, then pull up the green shoot with the corn attached; and they are also smart enough to pay no attention to a boy without a gun, but take a shotgun with you to the field and the crows call to each other and avoid you. Very smart birds. In Studio City they serve to keep the rattlesnake population down by eating hatchling snakes, and I wish them well at it.

Aha. The crow appears just fine. The tests are working well, and I suppose they'll implement this for all Real Soon Now.

For a full explanation of what is happening here on the feed situation, see mail.

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 Thanks and apologies:

We've got in a great many new subscriptions recently, and my thanks; apologies for not getting them all registered. I am a couple of weeks behind. You will not be ignored, and I date the subscription from when I register it, not when it is paid. I'll have a mailing to all subscribers sometime before Christmas, and I will have the subscriber list up to date before I send it.

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Support for Professor Nyborg continues to pour in.

I want to thank all those who have taken the trouble to send letters with copies to me. There are many of them and it would serve no great purpose to print copies of them here. But my thanks to all. I do not understand Denmark now. First the Danish authorities tried to persecute the author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, now this. My ancestors left what was then Denmark (it is now part of Sweden, but that is a very recent acquisition) to follow Rollo to Normandy, and I have always thought of the Danes as my kin. I cannot imagine what is happening there to produce these horrors.

===========

Tools in England 700,000 years ago.

Subject: 700K BC.

700K BC.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10466325/

-- Roland Dobbins

Which sure makes our The Burning City and its sequel Burning Tower more plausible... As well as damned good reads, if I do say so.

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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Subject: connector problems

Jerry,

Some years ago in your Chaos Manor column you highly recommended a liquid product that when put on wires and connectors, greatly facilitated the connection. You may have mentioned this product again in subsequent years, but I must confess to not keeping up with your column once I cancelled my Byte subscription due to lack of content. Can you tell me what this product was and if it is still available. I have a manufacturing customer that I would like to recommend this product to. And now that I have found your website, I can start to enjoy your columns again. It got to the point with Byte where I was buying the magazine only because of your writings.

Thanks for your help.

Herb Clann

Thanks. The product is called Stabilant 22, and you can find it with Google. I got a lifetime supply of it, and use it often, and thanks for the reminder because it belongs in the year-end column. It is seriously good stuff.

Do understand that CMP pays me for exclusive use of my columns, which still appear monthly but are now about twice as long as they were in the old paper BYTE (but they also contain at least one book review and some other matter that went into Chaos Manor Mail in the old days; today the mail is here). You can subscribe to BYTE at http://www.byte.com and the subscription, which isn't terribly expensive, gives you entry to a number of other CMP publications on line, and I think it's a good deal.

================

Support for Professor Nyborg grows.

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Thursday   TOP  Current Mail

 

 
 

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Friday, December 16, 2005

Family matters and domestic business for most of today. I'll try to catch up with mail, but there is no keeping up with it. I wish I had a solution to the dilemma: if I allow unrestricted posting the quality falls apart very fast. If I do as I do which is select mail for quality and try to comment on it, what goes up is very limited. Genie used to pay someone to help keep the mail in order, but that doesn't quite work in this situation.

I also have two major essays to write.

I do think the IQ and GDP discussion went very well indeed. There is a bit more in mail.

And let me recommend

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/opinion/15theroux.html

to those who ponder African affairs and wonder what might be done.

==================

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley'garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Duck us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, Woof, Woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, Goof, Goof!
 

(The traditions must be observed.)

 

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Saturday, December 17, 2005

I am now so far behind that I may never catch up. We'll see.

The experimental Atom Feed is having a few glitches, particularly in trying to catch "orphan" entries, which is to say, those without an index bookmark. This is all being done by Mr. Hastings who has earned my eternal gratitude. He is trying to adapt his script to my habits, rather than cause me to learn new ones. It should not be long before it is all perfected. Meanwhile, if you want to try it, you should be able to find the link to the script here. I think that will work if you paste it into your Atom Feed reader.

 

 

Saturday   TOP  Current Mail

 
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Sunday, December 18. 2005

The Atom Feed Script is now working fine. Yesterday I gave an incorrect link to the script, but I have fixed that above, and the correct link is

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/atom.xml

 

This will probably be the last revision for a while. My thanks to Mr. Hastings and Greg and Brian at Rocket/Mazin, and to Roland who kept bugging me about getting a feed in place.

========

The feed now picks up "orphan" items as well as those indexed. This should be one of the "orphans". It also should include pictures including gif files:

although I don't use those as much as I used to. Still, I do include flags and such, and my little atom    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

But you won't see those too often.

Today was Fourth Advent with one of my favorite hymns.  Merry Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 Sunday   TOP        Current View  

 Current Mail

This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 8,000 - 12,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so. If  you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front page of this site, click here for a better explanation of what we're trying to do here. This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.

If you have no idea what you are doing here, see  the What is this place?, which tries to make order of chaos. 

Boiler Plate:

If you want to PAY FOR THIS, the site is run like public radio: you don't have to pay, but if no one does, it will go away. On how to pay, I keep the latest HERE.  MY THANKS to all of you who have sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods.

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