More from the New York Times: Toward a Unified Theory of Black America, from Stephen J. Dubner.  Interesting article about Economist Roland G. Fryer, an assistant professor at Harvard who has some pretty outspoken views. “I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don’t think we […]

What do we make of this?  A listing of states, IQs, and how they voted. Looks like I’ll have to move to Mississippi :) Aficionados of this stuff might enjoy this and this as well… Update from Thras: Hoax. See here Posted by ole at 10:02 AM

CNN reports “Judge Orders Couple Not to Have Children“. Amazing. Monroe County Family Court Judge Marilyn O’Connor ruled March 31 that both parents “should not have yet another child which must be cared for at public expense.” “The facts of this case and the reality of parenthood cry out for family planning education,” she ruled. […]

I’m going to have more to say about this later, but for now let me recommend The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore.  This is an important book.  Any book recommended by Richard Dawkins is going to be good, but in addition to being interesting and entertaining, this book paves new ground in a very productive […]

Dalton Conley in Slate: Two is Enough:”The U.S. government encourages families to have children, as many of them as possible. The pro-child policies are based partly on romantic notions about mom, family, and apple pie, but they also have a rational goal: We subsidize kids so that our next generation of workers is ready to […]

Hey, guess what?  Welfare reform is working.  Check out this article by the Brookings Institution, regarding the behavioral changes in never-married mothers during the past recession.  [ via Micky Kaus, who summarizes: “The [welfare] rolls didn’t rise in the recession because single mothers kept on working.” ]  There is hope yet; you can influence people’s […]

Sometimes a picture is worth much more than 1,000 words.  Take this one: The Economist ran a great story recently about global economic inequality: More or Less Equal?  These graphs accompany the story. The graph plots a circle for each country in the world.  The X axis is the current [1980] GDP per person, and […]

Of possible interest, check out Gapminder.  Great visual displays of various global statistics, including human development trends, income distribution, health, etc.  A picture is worth a 1,000 numbers :)  [ via Joi Ito ] Posted by ole at 03:54 PM

Here’s a fabuous speech by author Michael Crichton given about a year ago at Caltech, to remind us about “fake science”, and the difficulty of predicting the future. I just came across it and thought GNXP readers would enjoy it. Posted by ole at 03:48 PM

Today’s survey: In the next 100 years, will people be more intelligent, or less intelligent? A few weeks ago I posed a series of “order of magnitude” thought experiments about the future of people.  I didn’t get much response, probably because they were thought experiments, and not multiple-choice surveys where people could just click to […]

The other day I asked: Can a cube be sectioned in such a way as to create a regular pentagon?It appears the regular hexagonal section has the greatest area of all possible sections.  Can you prove it? I know you’ve been breathlessly waiting for the answers, so here you go. First, no, a cube cannot […]

David B. posted a nice puzzle the other day, asking you to imagine cutting a plane through a cube in such as way as to create a regular hexagon.  I’m sure you had fun with that one. I have a couple of extra credit questions: Can a cube be sectioned in such as way as […]

Want to know whether you’re male or female? Among other ways to tell, you can use the Gender Genie. Enter a block of text and it will tell you the likely gender of the author. Cool.

Please check out the Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair website. High School Level, 1st Place:  Eileen Hyde and Lynda Morgan (grades 10 & 11) did a project showing how the power of prayer can unlock the latent genes in bacteria, allowing them to microevolve antibiotic resistance.  Escherichia coli bacteria cultured in agar filled petri dishes […]

Are you bright?  Do you know what the question is asking?  A Bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview These days “bright” is like “gay”, an ordinary adjective pressed into service to paper over an earlier, less-flattering term.  Being gay sounds better than being homosexual, more normal, less scientific, more acceptable.  And being […]

At the moment I am reading three different books, all great, and I want to share them with you.  Well, to be specific I am not actually reading any of them right now, I’m typing, but you know what I mean. First up we have In the Blink of an Eye, by Andrew Parker.  This […]

Earlier godless posted about the fascinating new study which appears to show that IQ heritability varies significantly with socioeconomic status (SES). Here are my thoughts… Back-to-school pop quiz:  Why do poor children, and especially black poor children, score lower on average than their middle-class and white counterparts on IQ tests and other measures of cognitive […]

Cerambycidaefrom the Insect Company(click for larger view) Blind Watchmakingsfrom Richard Dawkins(click for larger view) I recently discovered The Insect Company website, which has fascinating photo galleries of beautiful and interesting insects.  [ via Boing Boing ]  An example is shown at right; Cerambycidae are long-horned beetles, and this gallery shows the variations from different countries.  I […]

If you found IQ and Populations interesting, and especially if you’re curious about the derivations of the National IQ figures, please see this post from Steve Sailer in which he discusses “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”… The IQ structures of the two giga-countries, China and India, demand more intense study, in part because the […]

The other day I came across this table of National IQs for all the countries in the world.  (Drawn from Richard Lynn’s and Tatu Vanhanen’s “Intelligence and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations“, via Gweilo, via razib.)  This is fascinating information, particularly when combined with population growth rates. {For the purposes of this discussion, let’s […]