You need to post pictures of hot men to even things out. How about the hottest single guys from the brown millionaires set. I want a Mohinder Suresh lookalike.

I also think we should go door-to-door with literature. It can be tri-folded blank pieces of paper. "Hi, we're atheists, and we're here to share with you about the void."

I am totally lusting for Mohinder Suresh.

Cool. Will they be able to tell me if I'm really 1/8 Korean then? 'Cuz my great-grandparents were missionaries in Korea, and my grandmother looks NOTHING like her siblings.

Yeah, it sounds like those people are mixing up religion and ethnic background.

Razib, everyone assumes because I'm a white American that I must be some variant of Jesus follower. So I think it's just that most people assume that everyone they meet is religious, and then they assign whatever religion they think is most likely to that assumption.

Did they control for IQ?

But being that receptacle for white guilt and self-flagellation helps you score with the chicks, doesn't it? So it can't be all bad... :)

Didn't you guys have a post here once about twins separated at birth and raised by different families who still had the same level of religious *fervor* (even with different religions)? So if there is a genetic component to intensity of religious belief, and many (most?) of us are descended from relgious wackos who were willing to cross an dangerous ocean and set up civilization again from scratch for the sake of their beliefs...

(Then again, I'm willing to move to New Hampshire or Costa Rica for my beliefs...)

Razib!?!?!?! Have you been spying on me when I'm out on dates?!?!?!?!

This was an uncanny description of how many of my conversations with people go.....

So kids with an IQ below 60 don't have to take the test. I wonder what, if anything, they'll do for kids with an IQ over 140.

It really pisses me off that the schools have all sorts of special programs and classes for stupid kids but very little, if anything, for smart kids.

Oh and I wonder if this is just going to give schools incentives to figure out how to get rid of stupid kids so they don't drag down their average test scores.

Smart kids might actually start to be valued more -- but the schools also might try to make it harder for them to escape to better options (homeschooling, early college admission, etc.) because they want the smart kids to stay and take their standardized tests.

(When I left high school at 15 to go to college the school district could have gotten in the way if they wanted, but they were just glad to be rid of me and my complaining mother by then.)

Check out www.tardblog.com for stories about real special education students, written by a special education teacher. Occasionally she writes about their family backgrounds and it's obvious that the problems go way beyond what the school can do anything about.

You mean there are people who ever STOP thinking about sex?

I must be bringing that 12-second average down.

:)

The people who think having sexual thoughts or fantasies is morally unacceptable scare me. A lot. There is something seriously wrong with them.

It looks like atheists and agnostics are the fun people! Yay!

I think Americans' high consumption of refined sugars has more to do with the obesity epidemic than anything other factor. Sugar is bad stuff -- practically a poison, in my opinion. It has a lot of calories with almost no nutritional value, screws with your blood sugar and emotions, is addictive, etc. Sugar has only been widely available for the past few hundred years -- it's not really a natural part of our diet.

If anyone reading this has a weight problem try not eating any refined sugars for at least six months (you have to read labels -- sugar or "high fructose corn syrup" is in a LOT of processed foods including many that you wouldn't expect) and see if that helps. I lost 30 pounds just from eliminating sugar from my diet. That was almost a year ago and I've kept it off.

My favorite variant of the fish stickers is the one with the horrible tentacles coming off the front and “Cthulhu” written inside. (Seen in the parking lot of a hotel hosting a science fiction convention, of course.)

Intel does have a chip plant in Latin America -- in Costa Rica, which is 94% white.

You were such a cutie!