Tag: freakshow

The curse of the wereseal

Okay, ladies, time to fess up. Who fucked the selkie?

A new influenza strain found in New England harbor seals could potentially threaten people as well as wildlife, new research suggests.

“There is a concern that we have a new mammalian-transmissible virus to which humans haven’t been exposed yet. It’s a combination we haven’t seen in disease before,” report editor Dr. Anne Moscona, professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, said in a journal news release.

Mammalian-transmissible. But how ever could a seal virus be transmitted to humans? I fear we all know. There are stranger things, Kinsey, than have been dreamt of in your scientific research….

The rebel cow of the Romagna

And you wonder why I so love Italia and the Italiani:

I was wading through the daily mire of newspaper headlines the other day about the deepening euro crisis and the latest rich or famous Italian to be arrested when I saw this: “Mucca inferocita in fuga semina paura” (Ferocious cow on the run spreads panic). A cow, nicknamed “Libera” (free) by article’s author, had been on the loose now “for months” in the Apennine Mountains near the small city of Forlì where I live, and “quella enorme massa di 800 chili” (that enormous mass of 800 kilos) was charging anyone who approached it.

It was not that the cow had decided one day to become a bull, or a butch lesbian, or anything so boringly human. The cow’s feelings about its sexuality had nothing to do with it: The cow simply had enough of its life of slavery as a farm animal.

Capable of covering many miles a day, it had now bewitched two other cows from a different farm because, as the newspaper—La Voce di Romagna—explained, it “contagia” (infects) any other cow it comes across with the urge to be free. How many other cows in my neck of the woods, or indeed in Italy as a whole, would now heed the siren call to rebellion of this charismatic rebel cow and return to their primeval state? And where does the cow stand on the single currency? Is it for or against the euro?

According to La Voce, not even the farmer who owns the cow could get it to see reason. So the powers that be in the nearest town, Predappio, had at long last decided to swing into action….

Perhaps they convinced themselves that the cow was a fascist fifth columnist masquerading as a communist because according to the paper, one morning last week off they all went, up into those hills where there are no roads, just perilous mud tracks, woods, and the occasional field, in their four-wheel drives bristling with weapons. Amazingly, they soon found the cow and her two sidekicks in a scene described by La Voce thusly: “A sort of big game hunt. The forestale (forest rangers), veterinari (vets), and even the carabinieri (police) and the sindaco (mayor). All of them around Libera, at a safe distance, in order to immobilize her.”

But it was all in vain. They could not get near enough to the cow to capture it, and the only alternative was either to shoot it dead or shoot it with a tranquilizer bullet. But the sindaco, being a leftie and a staunch believer in animals’ rights over those of fascist humans, would not sign the order to kill the beast and nobody had any tranquilizer bullets. “The rebel cow has won her battle for freedom,” La Voce concluded, “for now Libera remains where she is, happy to roam the hills, and no doubt in the company of the other two cows.”

La dolce vita, baby. La dolce vita. I can’t wait for the inevitable political party, Mucca Ribella, to form around Libera. She certainly can’t be any worse as prime minister than Monti, and she’s already every bit as democratically legitimate.

Separating superintelligence from intelligence

I’m informed this ecard is “very me”, which I suppose is probably true, considering the source.  But in my defense, I should like to point out that when people quite reliably fail to understand what one is saying in a very clear, precise, and articulate manner, assuming that one will have to explain oneself to the unwashed, overweight, and quasi-illiterate masses is the decent and civilized thing to do.  Contra common assumptions, assuming MPAI is much more fair to one’s audience and one’s interlocutors than the assumption that everyone is capable of understanding what one is saying.  While I may happen to be arrogant, that is merely a coincidence and the impression that I may occasionally appear to be talking down to people is less an indicator of that arrogance than material evidence that I am a decent and civilized individual dedicated to mutual comprehension in conversation.

However, it did remind me of this article in the New Yorker, which helps explains why so many intelligent and educated people regularly make such prodigious asses of themselves:

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I’ve long observed that most smart people don’t actually want to question their core assumptions anymore than stupid people do, and they’re far more inclined to attempt to BS people into letting them skate by on a bluff. I think this may be part of what separates the superintelligent from the intelligent and it’s something that we’ve seen at work here numerous times, most recently in the discourse with the Three Pound Brain gang. It’s what I tend to think of as “the second pass”. While I’m just as susceptible to the shortcut problem as anyone else, I have a natural tendency to mentally “check my work” before answering. This doesn’t mean I’m any less biased than anyone else, or that I don’t have the usual blind spots, only that I am inclined to take the time to go and search those blind spots and see what my biases have caused me to miss on the first pass. The object is to treat one’s own mind as harshly, ideally even more harshly, than one treats the minds of others.

For example, when I looked the two problems in the article, my brain leaped immediately to the conventional wrong answer, only it noted that the answer couldn’t possibly be correct. On the second pass, I worked it out instead of attempting to justify the initial assumption, and that answer subsequently turned out to be the correct one. The trick, I think, is attuning your mind to be suspicious and look more deeply when the answer seems obvious, but something doesn’t seem quite right about it. The fact that one’s intuitive thinking is prone to these errors doesn’t meant that one’s logical thinking will be. My philosophy is that since I will probably commit errors, I might as well be the one to catch them if I can.

This, of course, is why I am so adept at setting traps for others. The reason I know where to place them is that my intuitive mind has already fallen for them.

A blog of very particular interest

Being reliably informed that I may happen to possess a few idiosyncracies of my own, I’m always pleased to see when others unabashedly let their freak flag fly. Jamsco has launched a new blog that will no doubt be of massive interest to the State Park-visiting community as he is providing what he describes as A Guided Tour Of The Best State Parks In The World. And he’s not afraid to court a little controversy either, as exhibited by this daring call-out of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Last week the Star Tribune published its “Best Of Minnesota” magazine and in it they claim that the best state park in Minnesota is Whitewater State Park. They cite “miles of cool rivers, steep bluffs and deep valleys, drumming grouse and gobbling turkeys”

Now I will say that (A) Whitewater is a very pleasant place to visit, as I said in my review, and (B) it would be very difficult to choose the best state park, but no – Whitewater is not the best one. I will go on record and say that any one choosing a best state park that is not on the “East Coast” (i.e. Lake Superior or the Mississippi or St. Croix Rivers) will be wrong. Okay, probably wrong.

That’s right, it’s on record, bitch! While I am not among what I can only imagine to be the vast State Park-visiting demographic, I am very excited about the Guided Tour, as I cannot wait for the first serious East Coast-West Coast State Park blog war to kick off. Best of luck to Jamsco aka Biggie. (flashes sign) East Coast!

Obama’s IQ is still ~116

It will be interesting to see the disbelievers in pattern recognition attempt to explain this one away. You may recall that back in 2008, I noted that Obama’s IQ had an absolute sub-Mensa ceiling of 129 and that there was good reason to believe it is around 116. So, it was interesting to read this article discussing the relatively low quality of the 1981 class of students transferring to Columbia, which included one Barack Obama:

Breitbart News has learned that the transfer class that entered Columbia College in the fall of 1981 with Obama was one of the worst in recent memory, according to Columbia officials at the time. A Nov. 18, 1981 article in the Columbia Spectator, “Tight Housing Discourages Transfer Applications to CC,” written by student Jeremy Feldman and quoting admissions officials, reported: “On paper at least, the quality of the students accepted [as transfers] has declined along with the number of applicants, the officials say.”

Among accepted transfer students, the average combined math and verbal score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test is a 1,100 and their grade-point average at their former schools is about 3.0, Boatti said.

There were 67 transfer students with an average SAT score of 1,100. Guess what that equals on the SAT to IQ conversion chart? It’s between 115.51 and 116.55, depending upon whether one uses an SD of 15 or 16. Now, this isn’t absolute and conclusive proof that Obama’s IQ is 116, as it could well be a little bit higher or a little bit lower. But probably not much higher, because if he scored even 100 points more on the SAT, he wouldn’t have had to go to Occidental in the first place.

This is because the range from which that average SAT score was calculated was the 67 selected from the 450 who applied. That average was also 100 SAT points lower than the average Columbia freshman score of 1200. So, I would assume that the absolute low end SAT that Columbia accepted for transfers was probably half that gap, or 1050, which equates to a 111 IQ. So, we can reasonably conclude that Obama’s IQ is probably somewhere between 111 and 118, which is not very far from my original estimate of 116.

Nor am I the only one to have concluded that Obama possesses moderate intelligence rather than the exceptional intelligence in which the more credulous still believe despite the accumulating evidence of his presidential term. At the end of his 2011 post on the subject of Obama’s intelligence, which focuses on the Harvard Law Review and Harvard’s graduating honors, Ace of Spades said this:

Hah! This guy guesstimates that based on tangible proxy evidence, which is right in the middle of where I figured it would be. Now, this guy is not just completely making things up. He knows, because there are records of it, that Obama was not a National Merit Scholar, or National Merit Finalist, or the lowest subcategory, “Outstanding Participant.” (This seems to be an honor conferred by the College Board (the SAT people) primarily if not exclusively based on SAT scores.)

Since Obama did not make the list for any of those automatically-conferred SAT-based recognitions, we know his SATs must be below those thresholds, setting a hard upper cap on his possible SAT scores. We can then figure his highest, likeliest IQ score, because the SAT is just a modified version of the old Army IQ test. Current IQ tests and the SATs are both derived straight from the old Army IQ test, testing pretty much the same things and in pretty much the same ways. Different scoring system, but same ultimate term of comparison — how you rank compared to the general population, expressed as percentile.

Not dumb, but I never thought he was dumb — just not a genius. 116’s a perfectly respectable score, but no one goes bragging on it and claims to be a genius at 116. No on ever says, “I’m a mere 30 points away from qualifying for Mensa,” for example.

Good catch on that National Merit thing.

Well, its absence on Obama’s record appears fairly glaring when you’re a National Merit whatever yourself. Hilary Clinton, for example, was National Merit. I don’t remember if I was a finalist or a semi-finalist, though. I know they gave me some sort of certificate at a school assembly, but I can’t recall which one it was. I would assume semi-finalist, though, since in addition to having the SAT scores confirm the PSAT, being a finalist requires “having an outstanding academic record, and being endorsed and recommended by a high school official” My academic record would be better described as “unique” than “outstanding”, since I was the first National Merit student to graduate without honors in the school’s history. Intelligence is a poor substitute for hard work.

Furthermore, it should be noted that a 116 IQ is a full standard deviation above the norm. It’s not calling someone stupid to estimate that they are smarter than the majority of the American people. In fact, based on the 30-point communication gap, there is reason to believe that a 116-IQ president is more likely to be successful than a Mensa-qualified 132-IQ president. There is far more to success than raw intelligence, particularly in a field such as politics that requires lots of people to like you.

R stands for Rape

Does Undead Press publish Wängsty?

There’s recently been a flurry of posts about Undead Press, a small publishing house that a) doesn’t pay, b) allegedly humiliates its authors by inserting gratuitous rape scenes into their stories, without asking those authors if they want those rape scenes to be there, and c) has apparently published and continues to advertise a sequel to George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, showing an absolute lack of respect for copyright or concern for the legal consequences.

Trick question. As anyone who has ever read R. Scott Bakker knows, there is no such thing as a gratuitous rape scene. Or rather, as anyone who has ever read R. Scott Bakker possesses justified true belief, there is no such thing as a gratuitous rape scene.

One of these days, I’ll have to go through Bakker’s books in order to create a poll on Black Gate where the legions of Bakker readers can vote on their favorite rape scene written by Rapey McRaperson. After all, it’s so hard to choose between the one in Neuropath where the woman rapes the man accompanied by some of the worst sexual dialogue outside of 1970s era pornography or the one in The Warrior Prophet where the Sranc – a demonic winged creature with an Alien-style double skull – not only rapes a man, his wife, and their child to death, but also manages to make the woman climax while raping her. (Contra Umberto Eco, I have long regarded the orgasmic rape as the definitive indicator of pornography.) But make no mistake, these rape scenes are not gratuitous! They are philosophy.

I have to admit, however, that Mr. Giangregorio’s publishing style appears to be more than a little awesome. Some might see it as a strange little man humiliating female authors, but I tend to interpret it as a sardonic commentary on the sex scenes in seventies and eighties science fiction, which always seemed to feature that one completely pointless scene in which the hot primary female character – usually red-headed – seduces the unsuspecting male protagonist without ever having given any signs of being attracted to him. I always viewed it as the fat, clueless SF author’s perspective on the Stygian mysteries of inter-sexual relations.

He’s mad, mad, I tell you!

Delavagus is really reaching now… and he wants your opinion:

pdimov, 691 — you ‘like’ Vox, right? Meaning, you read Vox’s blog, you came here from there. Is that right? If so, I’m really interested to know what you make of posts like the above, from Vox. This post in particular seems to me addled, delusional, paranoid. I’m honestly beginning to think that Vox is mentally ill. (I’m entirely serious — I don’t mean this as an insult.)

So what do you make of it? Your posts here — at least the ones responding to me, i.e., the ones I’ve read — have struck me as sane and well-thought-out. So what do you think of Vox? Do posts such as this one not strike you as insane?

Okay. But what do you make of the post I was asking about? Can you recognize the features of it that strike me as delusional, paranoid, etc.? Can you provide any insight into what you think I’m supposed to make of the things he says? I’m honestly having trouble viewing him as a rational animal.

You all know what I have to say on the matter. Vox’s First Law. Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.

President to leave First Lady

That’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this belated announcement:

It was a long time coming: President Obama spoke out today in favor of marriage equality. “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” he said in an interview with ABC News.

Considering what an absolute vote loser this issue is, proven by the fact that 30 states have passed anti-homogamy laws and amendments now, one can only wonder exactly how personally important it is to Obama. It’s rather remarkable, as Obama appears to be making a stronger effort to throw the election than John McCain did, and it’s only May. At this rate, he’ll be wearing women’s clothing, eating dogs, and openly calling for human sacrifice by September.

The fictional memoir

Obama admits to writing fiction… how long will it be before he admits to NOT writing it?

One of the more mysterious characters from President Obama’s 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father is the so-called ‘New York girlfriend.’ Obama never referred to her by name, or even by psuedonym, but he describes her appearance, her voice, and her mannerisms in specific detail. But Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the ‘New York girlfriend’ was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.

The only real question here is if, by “multiple”, he meant “imaginary”, or if by “girlfriends”, he actually meant “boyfriends”.