I'd also argue that some of the little ivies and better small liberal arts colleges like Grinnell offer a better undergraduate liberal arts and possibly science education than large institutions like HYP. 
 
HYP students probably have a slight edge in IQ but a more significant edge in organization, ambition, wealth, networking and other factors that go into their admissions process. I would be interested to see a PhD or professor per capital statistic comparing a Reed or Amherst to HYP - the results may surprise many people.

agnostic, I totally agree on the Danica McKellar vote. She's the only actress I can see who studied in a challenging field, graduated and demonstrated she could've at least gone on to a PhD if not career in the field. 
 
So her chubby baby-faced bobble head is what is known as "Celtic". Who knew? She's attractive but still looks disturbingly jail-baitish. Her high-IQ probably probably makes her too stable and grounded for an actress.

Nico, I didn't mean to imply that HYP science students are weak. However, there are no liberal arts institution equivalents like Caltech/MIT, low-cost decent state schools like UMich, Berkeley, UWisc or UVa or even foreign universities like IIT that can directly compete with HYP in terms of providing a valuable undergrad sci/eng education. If one really wants to become a top scientist/engineer then the HYP prestige factor adds much less value compared to liberal arts majors. 
 
My point was HYP haven't cornered the market on sci/eng talent like they have for the liberal arts. Said another way, the delta between UMich, Berkeley, UVa vs HYP is much greater for English Majors than for Comp Sci or Physics.

Doesn't perceived personality count in the attractiveness? Hard to tell with good actresses what their true personality is like, but I would assume the norm would be your typical estrogen drenched drama queen prone to irrational and self-destructive behavior. Actresses in particular seem to highlight the worst of the typical feminine character, especially if they achieve wealth or fame (e.g. Za Za Gabor assaulting a cop, Wynona Ryder shoplifting, Eva Longoria racists insult to cop). 
 
Higher IQ may moderate the impulsive and destructive short-term thinking, but it also opens another can of personality disorders like neurosis, detachment, competitive awareness, persistent dissatisfaction, etc. Lisa Kudrow seems afflicted with these problems and is not a good enough actress to hide these daemons it seems.  
 
On another note, most of these purported high-IQ actresses are probably nothing of the sort. Many majored in areas like lit where intelligence is often undifferentiated and untested at the undergrad level or dropped out of challenging majors and college altogether after a year or two of simple general undergrad coursework that involved little of said challenging major coursework.

Nico, Harvard is the most competitive and generally recognized as the top liberal arts school in the country. 
 
Caltech, MIT and possibly others such as Stanford are better known as the top science schools in the country - not Harvard. You're not comparing the same things with liberal arts and science majors at Harvard. 
 
Besides science is far more egalitarian than liberal arts in terms of distributed talent. This is in no small part due to the fact that most liberal arts programs and trendy topics of study have become intellectually gutted by PC dogma, especially at the top institutions. On the other hand, the intellectual core and standards of science are relatively uniform, rigourous and undisputed.

Caledonian 
 
I think its the fact that weiners are getting chopped off that bothers me the most. 
 
But seriously... 
I think if doctors sold it as a permanent Halloween costume instead of a sex change procedure I would be ok with it. Another thing is that the "work" these surgeons perform makes hair plugs from 1972 look natural by comparison! Even after they've got their sausage hacked off they are still XY, they are still men. These aren't women stuck in male bodies. They are men with cratered gender centers who are otherwise healthy. There is a big difference. 
 
As for people born intersex they've got a case. Surgery to make them one sex or the other is understandable. 
 
In any case I feel sorry for all of them. Its a medical problem.

"...the U.S. still has a murder rate about 5 times higher than in Western Europe." 
 
Not when you adjust for the demographic differences between the U.S. and Europe. 
 
http://ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm 
 
BTW, I believe the Bureau of Justice Statistics uses FBI figures that lump Hispanics into the "White" category. Non-Hispanic Whites have a significantly lower murder rate than Hispanics, so the BJS gives deceptively high numbers for the "White" murder rate.

dougjnn 
 
The Brittish government (like the American) is not going to reform the immigration system. A few scattered employer raids, border patrol, "tougher" laws, etc. etc. are a prop. In 20 years Europe and America will be overrun by a hundred million legal and illegal, low skilled immigrants from the 3rd world.

"genetically unrelated conspecifics": I'd love to know what that's meant to mean.  
 
That means they are not of the same immediate family.

The tools of cutting edge adaptive robotics work, whether it's Kalman filters or HMMs or neural networks, make my head hurt - and my IQ is above the range you estimate. 
 
Eh, I've taken some classes in control theory, and Kalman filters are a cinch (basically just weighted averaging) and HMMs aren't that tough either (neural networks are harder but not impossible). And this stuff is hardly "cutting edge" these days. 
 
As regards the article - I never took a class from Tao but I've talked to several of his former students, and the impression I got from them was that he was your typical oddball brainiac (walks funny, strange personality, etc.), rather than your "well-adjusted" normal guy who happens to just happens to be a math genius.

I think about hearing that chimp rob. Did you hear about the Lion that started adopting Gazelles? I think the main strain of toxo would be in Egypt. The cat was looked at as a god with powers. Perhaps it was Toxo. The domesticated cat went to Greece and Rome next. 
 
I never thought of the South American connection later. It's worth more study. I never thought of a music connection. I thought more of Albert Einstein. See I have Toxo and me and my cousin got good affects but since it was a strict by the book family it wasn't able to adapt to the changes and well fell apart. I wouldn't think of treatment. I never had to read a book in my life and I still got 70-100% on all my tests. I didn't even need to know much of anything about the tests. The only subject I had to pay attention to was math. I'll be it I got a bit lazy, but I remember learning turbo pascal without a book or taking the class. All I needed was the help file and made a computer game in 2 weeks. Maybe it wasn't the toxo, but maybe it was. 
 
Many animals seem to have a group mind. Perhaps that's how I knew the answers to tests. 
 
English was a no go for me with extreme dyslexia and A.D.D.

Were hormone levels measured? 
 
Was muscle mass / fat tissue percentages measured? 
 
How about social predisposition? 
 
It's too hard to generalize about people this way.... it doesn't make it so. 
 
For example, I know a geek, IQ off the chart with Aspergers who is a pimp'n lady's man. 
 
Lack of socialization oppt'y, communication skills or self-perception are more likely. All of these are fixable, if so desired.

To Caledonian: I agree, definitely. I think I hit a peak and no amount of practice, etc. would substantially change the results. I understand that many people do improve significantly on these tests with courses, etc.; however, I had read that significant improvements (ie 50+ points on each subtest) did not happen very often. It may seem like more but I think it's because these isolated cases are the ones more likely to "chime in" on a comment forum such as this to say "hey guess what!! ...." 
 
As for self-labeling and mental conditioning, I would say yes, it's quite probable that many people had their potential sundered by external factors, such as bad teachers or influence. But for me, I was always told I was great at math and strived to do well in school. In hindsight, though, I think I was misplaced in some of those classes. I'm not "bad" at math per se, I'm simply "average". Nothing tragic. :-)

After reading this passage, among numerous others such as Frey/Detterman's 2004 piece, I gave into the fact that the SAT (at least the ones I took in 1998) does, in fact, measure intelligence. It seems that when someone's score is high, he/she probably wouldn't criticize it because it was a verification of intelligence. But since my composite was a modest 1090, I just dismissed the results as 'due to nerves' or whatever else made me feel better. 
 
Looking back, I realize that having taken one of those waste-of-time-and-money Kaplan prep courses (GUARANTEED to raise your score 150 points!) actually verified, not discredited, the whole SAT/IQ association. We tried and tried to get my math score up and it went down 30 points. For the 3 times that I took it, there was only a 10-20 point variation on each composite score. The instructor was baffled why my math didn't go up, due to the prep and the advanced math courses I'd taken throughout high school (none of which I scored higher than a 'C' in). Well, it's probably because my mathematical abilities are just 'average.' And I think the SAT proved that. And numbers don't lie either. While correlations (in this case SAT and 'g') may or may not be real in all circumstances, this, I'm sorry to say, is. I think everybody could save a lot of time and money by just acknowledging their weaknesses (but also their strengths) and accept the bottom line conclusion that this pain in the ass test measures something...and something pretty static.

Regarding the perhaps snide remark about the intelligence of people at ETS -- I used to work there and knew plenty of people there who scored 800s on there GRE V or Q. One research scientist I knew there was reputed to have an IQ of 200, and I suspect that was true both because he was the leading person in the world in his field and all I could tell from my conversations with him was that he was way our of my league. 
 
Regarding GRE changes, I am fairly sure the primary reason they withdrew this is what they said, but I will be asking colleagues who work on the program about this at a conference next week. The bigger issue is why they computerized the test to begin with. My focus is on the why, not the computer. It appears to have been approached as a technology in search of a problem rather than the other way around.

I don't get your point. Razib brought up the issue of hypocrisy here. Are you saying that societies with open air porn stalls, rampant prostitution, and frothing imams have their heads screwed on straight? (And please don't mention Ted Haggard. I concede the point upfront. Haggard is a total hypocrite and as many Xtian fundies.)  
 
I did not take Razib?s comment to be about hypocrisy. I thought he was pointing it out to disprove my absolute claim that women in Bangladesh don?t dress like ?hos.? When I answered I told him that ?the prostitutes don?t count, since they?re from the ?bosthi? (slum) and in Bangladesh nobody cares about them as people. Therefore, many of the mullahs wont get angry because they also believe that theyr?e not people. I probably did not sketch it out more clearly because I figured Razib, being from the Big Bang like me, would know what I was talking about. To make it even more clearer,majority of the mullahs have class issues along with their gender issues. Yes, it is hypocritical and vile. And Bangladesh is not a stable society at all. Recent events have shown that democracy might not be good for poor countries such as Bangladesh, and they might need a strong willed dictator to clean up the crime and scum. 
 
Why do Muslims get more upset about sexual/gender mores in the US than in Europe?  
 
 
Is there some study for this?  
 
The quote that I cited is an example of this. To paraphrase YOU: "American women is quite a broad category to just generalise like that..." 
 
You?re right I should have made that more clear. Not all American women dress like this of course, but I was making a quick comparison case with somebody who I know is from the place and has lived in the place I?m talking about. What distinguishes Bangladeshi society as of now and in this case from American society is in America more women dress openly. That is not some inherent quality of America though or something.  
 
In fact, American women wear all sorts of styles, so your comment tells me more about what you look at than what we wear 
 
Again, I'm talking about the ones who show me the goods or at least clothes that give me good ideas of what the goods might look like.  
 
So why the obession with the oversexed USA? 
 
Many of these religious people have problems with their cultures takes on the female body as well. I don?t think that Muslims make that much differentiation between regions, flesh is flesh. It?s a matter of degrees.  
 
"Lastly, "I've read "fatwas" from Bin Laden that echoed the same sentiments that Western feminists have expressed about the commodification of womens bodies. " 
 
They are saying the same thing only on the surface. The Western feminists decry the fact that women wear stilettos to please
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