Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Passports, Microscopes, IQ Points
Actually, it's taking tests that reduces IQ. The guys at Mind Hacks have dissected the widely reported story that 'email destroys the mind faster than marijuana' [Posted on Slashdot a few days ago -- T.] and found that it is more spin than science. The results show simply that people do worse at IQ tests when distracted, although Hewlett-Packard are not releasing details of the experiment, so others cannot even evaluate if the research is sound. The use of psychobabble for marketing marches on.
One day this will all be commemorated as ... an opera. GreyPoopon writes "It looks like Jon's attempt at swimming the Atlantic has ended in early failure. Taking the blame once again is is PR Manager, Eskil Sivertsen. The raft he was using was somehow punctured this morning, and Jon had to abondon his trek to perform a heroic rescue. Perhaps someone should take on the task of sending our downtrodden adventurer a cup of Mom's hot chocolate."
PCP theorem simplified, still way over my head. Stridar writes "Sanjeev Arora's proof of the PCP theorem was a great acheivement. This theorem, a reduction of NP to PCP, allowed for many striking results on the difficulty of finding approximate solutions to NP-Hard problems. However, his original proof is long and technical, focusing on the arithmetization of booelan formulas. It has long been an open problem to simplify this result. Now Irit Dinur , a mathematician at the Hebrew University, has given a purely combinatorial proof of the PCP theorem, in her exciting paper "The PCP Theorem by Gap Amplification" ."
I think several other things end at death, too. microbee writes "The Register reports that Yahoo has complied with a court order to give a dead soldier's email account to his parents. It's not clear to me from the news whether they got direct access to the actual mail box, or just hard copy of those emails. If the former, it's a bit funny to read "the family complain they have only got emails received by Justin, not those he wrote." People have to wonder whether their privacy ends at death."
Haven't they ever seen The Killing Fields? valdean writes "Following up on past Slashdot stories, Wired News reports that the State Department is now considering adding a password to the new RFID passports, in response to 'criticism from computer security professionals and civil libertarians.' According to the article, 'The data... would be locked and unavailable to any reader that doesn't know a secret key or password to unlock the data. To obtain the key, a passport officer would need to physically scan the machine-readable text that's printed on the passport page beneath the photo... The reader would then hash the data to create a unique key that could be used to authenticate the reader and unlock the data on the RFID chip.'"
Anything with LEDs in it makes me happy. HunterD writes "Apparently a company called DigitalBlue purchased the rights to the Intel Play series, which included the Intel QX3 microscope. Well, DigitalBlue has released an upgrade called the QX5 that features an Ultrabright LED, a better camera, and a number of other upgrades."
This isn't so much directed at the parent but at the set of arguments surrounding MJ.
Seriously, anyone who has tried marijuana or observed many stoners will testify that it lessens mental agility.
Now mental agility is not the sum of intelligence.
Comparing IQ scores and intelligence are like comparing a weight lifter to a boxer, in some raw abstract test the weight lifter out-performs the boxer. But in every other case, fitness, agility, the boxer kicks his ass (literally also).
Now, while I can appreciate some smokers of the green will say that there is an intelligence there, that you gain new perspectives on things, this is nothing that cannot be achieved by reading an interesting book.
The bottom line is, it lowers your mental agility and in certain portions of the population is causes (or exacerbates) mild mental health problems.
On the whole, while I appreciate the libertarian argument that you should be able to smoke whatever the fuck you want, it's not a particularily good thing. So why the big deal over it?
In fact it's fucking boring, and most of the people who use it aren't quick enough to make interesting conversation or make interesting jokes. And while I appreciate that the mundate household items are now hilarious, I prefer my comedy to be a little subtler and a little faster, no?
I am sorry, but smoking the green is one of the biggest wastes of money, time and often nice people. And yes, people who get into green do often go on to try other drugs, I would imagine they are the type of people to try other drugs without having first tried MJ, but the fact remains it is still somewhat of a gateway drug (yes, I speak from experience).
to sum:
libertarian and "legalise it to stop the criminal elements" arguments considered, it might well be better off legal... but it's hardly the pressing issue of our times. There are many other unfair and unjust laws and relations of power etc. that abound. That someone would care enough about MJ to make it their first political priority is evidence of how far they have fallen. It's lame, it steals a certain edge/quickness from your mind (much more than it's supposed "benefits" - do a philosophy course and tell me which one "expanded your mind" more).
On the whole it's fucking boring and I wish the middle class whingers would stop complaining in the face of the science that ANY type of smoking is bad for your lungs (I pity the fool who tries to dispute that, yes you can eat it), and that MJ is bad for your intelligence (there is evidence of this), bad for some people's mental health (there is evidence of this) and on the whole there are some convincing arguments that it's bad for society.
Stoners will probably mod me down for this "he's an angsty ex-smoker". But you know I am right. Fuck em if they can't take a joke.
I bet there will be a FreeBSD version, first..