If you follow the link at the foot of the (1998) LRB article quoted above, there is a letter from Neubauer that states quite specifically that the decision to separate the twins was made by the adoption agency and that he only after the event decided to exploit the research possibilities.

Have you been to Scienceblogs today? I got this same effect at Respectful Insolence, and there are at last count 5 people complaining of the same in Pharyngula's thread about Curry. You didn't download a .exe, did you?

Oh, and a very romantic rat - one of my fellow-pupils had a massive crush on him.....

It's still fun to listen to so long as you give up on any hope of authenticity. 
 
Yes indeed. Also, I think Stanley Lombardo is somewhat unnecessarily melodramatic - he sounds a bit like an old-school Shakespearean. Better than nothing though! 
 
I was taught Greek by an Oxford MA and I think she said Al(kee)biades.....but I may be mis-remembering. Anyhow, she used to read us Homer out loud. She also used to holiday in Greece and speak to the Greeks in classical Greek, which she said caused considerable amusement but worked perfectly well.

It's worth listening to it in Greek even if you don't understand it, too.

As everyone else had said, you pays your money and you takes your choice. If you pick a more poetic translation, a significant amount of the poetry will be the translator's and not Homer's. If you pick a translation which tries to retain textual accuracy, it will probably not be very poetic in English. 
 
Many moons ago, I was able to read originals in Latin, Greek and Russian, and I would say that even if you can only do so very stumblingly and slowly and with the use of cribs, it's worth it.

TGGP - UK babies definitely get to have shape-sorting toys. 
 
I expect with a bit of diligence on other eBay.de etc you could prove the same for other countries.

It's diagnosed according to DSM-IV. I don't know what that says in detail, but I can tell you absolutely definitely that you can't trust the Times to give a meaningful summary (ie you need to look it up properly if you are interested). This book is a useful summary of the way the diagnostic criteria have developed (starting from not existing) and very much supports the view that there is not "an epidemic". The advantages flowing from being diagnosed are greater in the US than the UK.

Yes, theoretically a player should take whatever is offered when the game is played once. But the strategies we evolved to deal with these situations were in an environment where we had constant and lifelong interaction with the other players. That is, maybe even the conscious knowledge that the game is a one-time affair is not enough to override all that. 
 
This seems quite probable to me. Does anyone know of any studies where any specific attempt has been made to minimise this possible effect? Perhaps by doing it online with randomly-changing ids? 
 
A comparison between results of an experiment done in a more anonymous way with those of one done face-to-face would also be interesting.

That's why there has been barely a peep about the enormous Polish population transfer, while the headlines are obsessed with non-european migration 
 
Where I live (Scotland) there's plenty of peeping about migration from Poland and its effect on the jobs market. And I don't read the daily press much (waste of time) but surely the Polish plumber is a widespread meme? Also see here for example. 
 
Are you from the UK, cuchulkhan? This is just a question about whether perceptions are different in different parts of the UK, or whether your perception is gained entirely from the media.

dougjnn 
 
If you want analysis, rather than factual breaking news, you would do a lot better with the Economist than the Beeb. AFAIK their content goes public quite quickly. I had a little search around, and there's lots of interesting stuff, but the last para of this article still strikes me as quite a good summary of British opinion on the subject.

Jaspa, your original assertion was that because 20% of doctors in the UK are South Asian, Britain should have an Asian Prime Minister by now. I was pointing out some reasons why this does not flow logically (the doctors are skewed to the young end, many of them are only on temporary visas and, what I did not state in so many words, the population of Prime Ministers is tiny, so the claim about them is statistically dubious). 
 
Your new question about cabinet ministers is slightly less statistically dubious. AFAIK the most number of non-white people in the cabinet at any one time has been 2 (out of about 21-23). Is that due to racism (what I assume you're implying)? I doubt it, although it's a possible factor. South Asians in Britain are, on the whole, quite concentrated in particular areas, so there is no obvious "racist" reasons why local constituency parties would not select SA candidates nor that they would not then be voted into office. And the party which has been in power for the last 10 years would be overjoyed to be able to show that it had the "right" number of ethnic minorities and females at all levels. FWIW, I don't think the fact that there's currently only 5 women out of 23 in the cabinet is due to sexism, either. 
 
dougjnn - not impossible, no, it's talked about frequently, although mostly in rather a Daily Mail sort of way. IMHO the serious issue is whether we have struck the right balance between free speech and letting in/allowing to stay/insufficiently curtailing the activities of various extremist Islamists who have been banned by other countries, often including their own, for Islamist political activity and preaching jihad - the "Londonistan" charge.

Sorry, that last bit should read "not being British or Commonwealth country citizens". Were they in fact South Asian, they would be able to vote in British Parliamentary elections, as long as they had got themselves onto the Electoral Register (not difficult), since India, Bangaldesh and Pakistan are all Commonwealth countries.

Two confusions about doctors:- 
 
(i) between proportions of doctors overall and proportions of medical students/junior doctors. Here is some useful information about the latter, which does indeed suggest that the proportion of juniors is 20% (sorry, I haven't absorbed it all properly, though; this is half an analysis, but my brain is not currently up to completing it and I thought someone might be interested in the raw data). 
 
(ii) there are a large number of doctors (particularly, but not exclusively, South Asian doctors) working in the UK at the moment who were not born in the UK and/or are not British citizens. (This is for reasons to do with the European Working Time Directive into which I will not drag you). 
 
Given that nationality, age (MPs and particularly Prime Ministers are not usually very young) and indeed inclination are all relevant to whether someone becomes an MP, possibly indeed more so than educational level, Jaspa's assertion makes no sense. (Especially the bit about the PM!) 
 
I'm not sure whether we "know" yet, but it looks relatively likely that the doctor-bombers in fact fall into (ii) above; in which case they're "disenfranchised" because they were never enfranchised in the first place, not being British citizens.

Thanks for the various good wishes, guys. I mentioned this issue on my own blog and - amazingly, given that I am not high-traffic - have a comment from someone who has at least a passing professional interest, and who has found some studies on cognitive function in children with specific infections. 
 
dougjnn - reading sites like this (ie input) is still much less cognitive effort than output! Blog output is not too bad, but with more serious output I can practically feel the energy draining away, as mentioned in the post I've linked.

Yes, which would increase the possible effect. 
 
I don't have the energy to pursue this myself right now, but it does seem to me to be a possibly significant confounding factor. 
 
In Western countries, only a minority of people know what it's like to be in a permanent state of ill-heath and how much impairment it can cause. I suspect it is a factor which, at the very least, isn't considered sufficiently to be ruled out in various cross-cultural comparisons.

Can anyone tell me whether anyone has considered the possible effect of the proportion of people who were actually ill when they took the test? 
 
My observation of myself (I have metastatic cancer) is that my measured IQ would probably vary quite a lot depending which day I took the test, even counting only days when I am more-or-less functional. Being ill is the exception in rich countries. Being ill - with assorted low-level infections, leaving aside the more life-threatening ones such as AIDS - is quite possibly the norm in sub-Saharan Africa. 
 
This is a separate point from the effects of nutrition.

See this recent article in Nature 
 
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7129/abs/nature05510.html 
 
which says (roughly) that sibling-detection works for older sibs by observing which other child spends a lot of time with one's own mother, and for younger sibs by observing which other child spends a lot of time with oneself. 
 
I should think that there is considerable variation across modern cultures in the extent to which either of these methods works for first cousins.

gene berman - I agree with what you say about lying, on the whole. But, on the limited evidence avaiable on Edge, I wouldn't judge Orr to be a very good liar. His attempted disengagement that I quote above is rather clumsy. 
 
Maybe a good lair would never use the word "frankly"? Or maybe a really super-brilliant liar would be able to use it effectively as a sort of double-bluff? 
 
I don't think Orr is in that league though. 
 
(BTW, an exception to your claim in the first sentence of your last para is when we are "on the same side" as the liar (ie privy to their lies), because then we can know when they are successful. A previous boss of mine falls very neatly into your description of the very best liars.

The preamble to Orr's Edge response to Dennet:- 
 
Daniel Dennett seems to think that the author of any review he doesn't like is obliged to spend the rest of his days debating him? even if the review in question was of someone else's book, not his. The sort of extended exchange Dennett now seeks can grow unproductive ? especially when the discussion devolves into ad hominem attack ? and, given this, I'm less than enthusiastic about continuing it. I will, though, briefly address Dennett's main points here. And then that's it for me. 
 
The "high-minded refusal to continue the argument to disguise the fact I'm losing" gambit. Rather inclines me to agree with your view of Orr.

Doesn't that word "frankly" in your quotation from Orr immediately suggest to you that, in fact, he is not being frank at all? 
 
I submit that the word "frankly" is almost always a signal of the use of one or more rhetorical trick in argument.