Wilt had a day job, and his... adventures... took place after the advent of birth control. I doubt he'll end up with the same sort of advantage. I suppose a particularly prolific raping soldier might be singularly responsible for an influx of a particular trait into a neighboring region. Perhaps more likely?
Anything of value is in the comments section. Yes, crap gets upmodded, good stuff gets downmodded, a lot of people are shit-stupid, the admins come in every so often to fling their authority around and hide their lying abuses of the system, and fully half of the dialogue consists of Slashdotters complaining that the good old days were so, so much better.
But still, I come here for the comments.
Subscription money doesn't go to the commenters, it goes to the editors---who don't even bother to edit. Why send money to them?
Really, 1927 was the star year for eugenics, in America, at least. That was the year of Buck v. Bell, wherein the USA gained the distinction of passing forced sterilization laws before Nazi Germany ever did. (Well, it was before Germany was even Nazi, but you get the idea.) Go US!
Where I went to school, we had a "Q test" that tested if you needed to take stupid math or not. Basic arithmetic sorts of things. There wasn't an analogous test for English, though, and certainly not one for computer use. I suppose a basic level of math is required for some classes more than English is. Is it, really?
I dated a marketing major for a time. (She was mentally unstable, it ended badly, and I learned my lesson---marketing is fucking evil.) One of her classes consisted entirely of learning to use PowerPoint... and making a simple PowerPoint presentation. That was it! And there I was in these frickin' impossible algorithmic theory classes slaving away for the same three 200-level credits...
One of the greatest moments in my early college career came when a professor said that he didn't care if we showed up or not; if we didn't learn what he was teaching, it was our problem, not his.
It was then that I realized I was truly no longer in high school, and I rejoiced.
Friend of mine is in law school. Goes to teach street law to poor, mostly Hispanic high school kids. He has forty students, twenty in a "we're going to college!" class (where the few white kids were) and twenty in a "holding cell" class. He assigned a one-page writing assignment, over three weeks. He got, I think, four or five back, none of which contained a majority of complete sentences. I could write better than that when I was in elementary school.
They're not stupid---they're very, very interested in knowing the nuances of search-and-seizure law and precedent---but they can't read, can't write, and can't do basic math. So, among kids, the original poster, lol, was Einstein.
I asked my parents why I learned to read by that age and those kids didn't. They said something about the fact that they read all the time, and so we had some kind of tradition of literacy. I was just depressed by the whole thing. I had this idea (I suppose it comes from my parents' Jimmy Carter liberalism) that those kids, hell, one of those kids was a brilliant diamond in the rough, who could be properly inspired by the right teacher and... no, none of them care.
I work at a phone support desk. When we ask people to power-cycle their computers, we have to tell them to power-cycle that little box under the desk, where they put the floppy disks in. Not the monitor.
Why, oh why, is this paradigm so hard to imagine? Take the (Monitor, Computer, Keyboard) tuple, and map it to the (Television, DVD Player, Remote Control) tuple. Why, exactly, is the latter so much easier to understand than the former?
Bah. Pet peeve of mine.
More on-topic, folks back in school used to blink and ask how on earth I managed to flick between windows, minimize them and so forth so quickly, without touching the mouse. They really thought that "Alt-Space, N" was magic. Someone once wrote that a single mouse move-and-click is equivalent to about eighteen keystrokes by a competent typist. The mouse is a good tool for some tasks, but it's frequently not even close to the right tool for the job.
A university degree doesn't prove that one is smarter; a lack doesn't prove one is dumber. I went through school; my brother dropped out in his first semester because "they're all assholes!". The difference? Well, he's a terrible, antisocial pain in the ass to work with. A much better coder than I am, if you can get the right kind of work out of him, but there's a reason he dropped out of school.
I do agree that there's far too much vocational training. Hell, I supposedly went to a research university, but they taught us Java and nothing else. (Well, C++ for my first year, before they switched over.) No Lisp, no functional programming, just exactly what we'd need to know to become code jockeys. At least the Discrete Math professor rocked.
Usually Christian movie reviews are good for a laugh (see CAPAlert.com) and not much else, but this guy really knows his stuff. He's a movie reviewer who happens to be a Christian, not just a Christian who thinks he automatically knows about movies. I'll be reading his stuff from here on out...
I know this is necessary. I know the server admins have been worked far beyond their level of volunteer competence, reduced to whining that they're not being paid, so why would the users expect silly things like more than fifty percent uptime?
And now we have corporate sponsorship. It's inherently tainted, and it's insane to think it's not, simply because the sponsors can pull out and leave the project high and dry. What happens when Yahoo!'s CEO is discovered to be a baby-eating monster, or Sergey Brin is discovered nude in an elementary school courtyard at midnight, entirely covered in peanut butter? When Google or Yahoo! demand that the articles on them be sanitized or they're pulling funding, the finding that Wikipedia would be inoperable without... well, what exactly happens then?
I'm not saying there's a better way. I'm saying doom awaits in either direction. Doomy doomy doom...
And does this mean all the people who sent in free money in the recent fund drives just pissed that away?
You know, over on Wikipedia, we call that Slashdot Style. (But seriously, see the Manual of Style on the subject of links.) Articles frequently get overlinked, and linked on the wrong things because there's a certain level of blue one gets used to seeing, and the naive user will wikify things until that level is reached, regardless if it reads like "and in the finale, [[Darth Vader]] is [[surprise|revealed]] to be [[Luke Skywalker]]'s long-lost [[father]]". (Which should really have two links in it, not four.)
Give me an example. Wikipedia tends to put really good references in an 'external links' section. If you can point to a place where there was once a really good primary source on the internet that's now drowned out by the sixty copies of Wikipedia showing up on Google---and which isn't prominently linked to from the article---I'll be very, very impressed.
You're right in saying that IQ needs renormalization every so often, but wrong in saying that it's in a downward direction. It's called the Flynn effect.
That's not information-age slang, that's stupid kids talking smack because it's easier than learning to spell. The distinction is vital, and I'm a mite disappointed that whoever wrote the guide blurred the distinction.
"Phishing", "open source", "kernel"---these are actual words which the layperson will not understand if they haven't been exposed to them before, but which can be readily looked up. "l33t", "w4r3x0rz", "$|^4/\/\"---that's fucking retarded, unless it's actually a short Perl script that draws the Mandelbrot set in ASCII. That'd be hot.
I've been working on phone support for a month or two. I've been mostly impressed by how the users are generally able to do clear paper jams from their printers, replace toner cartridges, and so forth. And then I remember that it's very important to tell them to power off the box on the floor, not just the monitor, because to them, that's the computer. (We have this paradigm already with DVD players and televisions. Why isn't it obvious with computers?)
Everyone at the installation I support has a uniform, centrally controlled environment, so I do get to make simplifying assumptions about a user's setup. And generally we distinguish between server and workstation problems by asking "can the next guy over access it?", so the problem you talked about generally doesn't happen.
Mostly I deal with "the so-and-so server is down", whereupon I check it and it is, in fact, down, and then I bother the site support people. If it's not that, it's usually "my password doesn't work", which means "I forgot my password", which is fine; I can reset it.
Then there's "my computer is slow", which means spyware. And I've learned to take harmless error messages (complaining that drive A is empty on startup when it shouldn't need to read from the floppy) seriously, because they also frequently mean spyware.
So it's been different than I expected. Users regularly thank me, and I've only had one user ever become really, really irate, when I didn't move fast enough for her. ("HELLO? [thwacking the phone] HELLO? HELLO?") Thankfully, that was the only really awful call I've had in more than a month.
Dear me, you seem to have said "LOL". Please turn your geek membership card in at the nearest comics shop or computer repair place. You've failed it, young padawan.
You know, I thought the preview looked pretty good too. But I don't trust George Lucas. You don't know the power of his urge to make shitty movies! Hayden Christenson will be a whiny bitch, there's going to be some sort of "American Idol" in-joke, and you're going to be so surprised, and you're going to bring your abused, broken heart here, blubbering your sorrow all over another thousand-comment thread, and you're going to receive the biggest "I told you so" ever fucking constructed.
This guy makes me look slick, urbane and balanced. Can he even hear himself talking? Has it dawned on him that he's not only a nerd---which you can't blame him for---but also a pretentious ass, which is totally his fault, and makes him a completely legitimate target for atomic wedgies.
Remember those media reports about girls wearing a hojillion colored plastic bracelets, and the media was breathlessly reporting that those bracelets were exchangeable for sexual favors? Oh, hey, it's on Snopes. When I was in high school, it was soda-can tabs. Kids talk smack, adults take it seriously, and we play "scare the adults". What a crock.
And where did it say that the project was both begun and completed in 1998?
Anyway, the whole thing'd fit on a Blu-Ray now. Not impressive at all. I mean, Metallica's latest requires a huge pile of CDs for the WAVs, but that ain't too impressive...
Frink: [drawing on a blackboard] Here is an ordinary square.... Wiggum: Whoa, whoa - slow down, egghead! Frink:... but suppose we extend the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe, along the hypothetical z-axis, there. Everyone: [gasps] Frink: This forms a three-dimensional object known as a "cube," or a "Frinkahedron" in honor of its discoverer, n'hey, n'hey.
Slashdot Mirror
Wilt had a day job, and his... adventures... took place after the advent of birth control. I doubt he'll end up with the same sort of advantage. I suppose a particularly prolific raping soldier might be singularly responsible for an influx of a particular trait into a neighboring region. Perhaps more likely?
--grendel drago
Not to mention the first forced sterilization, before the Nazi party even came to power. See Buck v. Bell.
--grendel drago
Anything of value is in the comments section. Yes, crap gets upmodded, good stuff gets downmodded, a lot of people are shit-stupid, the admins come in every so often to fling their authority around and hide their lying abuses of the system, and fully half of the dialogue consists of Slashdotters complaining that the good old days were so, so much better.
But still, I come here for the comments.
Subscription money doesn't go to the commenters, it goes to the editors---who don't even bother to edit. Why send money to them?
--grendel drago
Really, 1927 was the star year for eugenics, in America, at least. That was the year of Buck v. Bell, wherein the USA gained the distinction of passing forced sterilization laws before Nazi Germany ever did. (Well, it was before Germany was even Nazi, but you get the idea.) Go US!
--grendel drago
Where I went to school, we had a "Q test" that tested if you needed to take stupid math or not. Basic arithmetic sorts of things. There wasn't an analogous test for English, though, and certainly not one for computer use. I suppose a basic level of math is required for some classes more than English is. Is it, really?
I dated a marketing major for a time. (She was mentally unstable, it ended badly, and I learned my lesson---marketing is fucking evil.) One of her classes consisted entirely of learning to use PowerPoint... and making a simple PowerPoint presentation. That was it! And there I was in these frickin' impossible algorithmic theory classes slaving away for the same three 200-level credits...
--grendel drago
One of the greatest moments in my early college career came when a professor said that he didn't care if we showed up or not; if we didn't learn what he was teaching, it was our problem, not his.
It was then that I realized I was truly no longer in high school, and I rejoiced.
--grendel drago
Friend of mine is in law school. Goes to teach street law to poor, mostly Hispanic high school kids. He has forty students, twenty in a "we're going to college!" class (where the few white kids were) and twenty in a "holding cell" class. He assigned a one-page writing assignment, over three weeks. He got, I think, four or five back, none of which contained a majority of complete sentences. I could write better than that when I was in elementary school.
They're not stupid---they're very, very interested in knowing the nuances of search-and-seizure law and precedent---but they can't read, can't write, and can't do basic math. So, among kids, the original poster, lol, was Einstein.
I asked my parents why I learned to read by that age and those kids didn't. They said something about the fact that they read all the time, and so we had some kind of tradition of literacy. I was just depressed by the whole thing. I had this idea (I suppose it comes from my parents' Jimmy Carter liberalism) that those kids, hell, one of those kids was a brilliant diamond in the rough, who could be properly inspired by the right teacher and... no, none of them care.
Why is that?
--grendel drago
I work at a phone support desk. When we ask people to power-cycle their computers, we have to tell them to power-cycle that little box under the desk, where they put the floppy disks in. Not the monitor.
Why, oh why, is this paradigm so hard to imagine? Take the (Monitor, Computer, Keyboard) tuple, and map it to the (Television, DVD Player, Remote Control) tuple. Why, exactly, is the latter so much easier to understand than the former?
Bah. Pet peeve of mine.
More on-topic, folks back in school used to blink and ask how on earth I managed to flick between windows, minimize them and so forth so quickly, without touching the mouse. They really thought that "Alt-Space, N" was magic. Someone once wrote that a single mouse move-and-click is equivalent to about eighteen keystrokes by a competent typist. The mouse is a good tool for some tasks, but it's frequently not even close to the right tool for the job.
--grendel drago
A university degree doesn't prove that one is smarter; a lack doesn't prove one is dumber. I went through school; my brother dropped out in his first semester because "they're all assholes!". The difference? Well, he's a terrible, antisocial pain in the ass to work with. A much better coder than I am, if you can get the right kind of work out of him, but there's a reason he dropped out of school.
I do agree that there's far too much vocational training. Hell, I supposedly went to a research university, but they taught us Java and nothing else. (Well, C++ for my first year, before they switched over.) No Lisp, no functional programming, just exactly what we'd need to know to become code jockeys. At least the Discrete Math professor rocked.
--grendel drago
Usually Christian movie reviews are good for a laugh (see CAPAlert.com) and not much else, but this guy really knows his stuff. He's a movie reviewer who happens to be a Christian, not just a Christian who thinks he automatically knows about movies. I'll be reading his stuff from here on out...
--grendel drago
I know this is necessary. I know the server admins have been worked far beyond their level of volunteer competence, reduced to whining that they're not being paid, so why would the users expect silly things like more than fifty percent uptime?
And now we have corporate sponsorship. It's inherently tainted, and it's insane to think it's not, simply because the sponsors can pull out and leave the project high and dry. What happens when Yahoo!'s CEO is discovered to be a baby-eating monster, or Sergey Brin is discovered nude in an elementary school courtyard at midnight, entirely covered in peanut butter? When Google or Yahoo! demand that the articles on them be sanitized or they're pulling funding, the finding that Wikipedia would be inoperable without... well, what exactly happens then?
I'm not saying there's a better way. I'm saying doom awaits in either direction. Doomy doomy doom...
And does this mean all the people who sent in free money in the recent fund drives just pissed that away?
--grendel drago
You know, over on Wikipedia, we call that Slashdot Style. (But seriously, see the Manual of Style on the subject of links.) Articles frequently get overlinked, and linked on the wrong things because there's a certain level of blue one gets used to seeing, and the naive user will wikify things until that level is reached, regardless if it reads like "and in the finale, [[Darth Vader]] is [[surprise|revealed]] to be [[Luke Skywalker]]'s long-lost [[father]]". (Which should really have two links in it, not four.)
--grendel drago
Give me an example. Wikipedia tends to put really good references in an 'external links' section. If you can point to a place where there was once a really good primary source on the internet that's now drowned out by the sixty copies of Wikipedia showing up on Google---and which isn't prominently linked to from the article---I'll be very, very impressed.
--grendel drago
You're right in saying that IQ needs renormalization every so often, but wrong in saying that it's in a downward direction. It's called the Flynn effect.
--grendel drago
He's still a tool. I had a better page describing precisely why he's a tool, but I lost it. Anyone remember where it was?
--grendel drago
That's not information-age slang, that's stupid kids talking smack because it's easier than learning to spell. The distinction is vital, and I'm a mite disappointed that whoever wrote the guide blurred the distinction.
"Phishing", "open source", "kernel"---these are actual words which the layperson will not understand if they haven't been exposed to them before, but which can be readily looked up. "l33t", "w4r3x0rz", "$|^4/\/\"---that's fucking retarded, unless it's actually a short Perl script that draws the Mandelbrot set in ASCII. That'd be hot.
--grendel drago
I've been working on phone support for a month or two. I've been mostly impressed by how the users are generally able to do clear paper jams from their printers, replace toner cartridges, and so forth. And then I remember that it's very important to tell them to power off the box on the floor, not just the monitor, because to them, that's the computer. (We have this paradigm already with DVD players and televisions. Why isn't it obvious with computers?)
Everyone at the installation I support has a uniform, centrally controlled environment, so I do get to make simplifying assumptions about a user's setup. And generally we distinguish between server and workstation problems by asking "can the next guy over access it?", so the problem you talked about generally doesn't happen.
Mostly I deal with "the so-and-so server is down", whereupon I check it and it is, in fact, down, and then I bother the site support people. If it's not that, it's usually "my password doesn't work", which means "I forgot my password", which is fine; I can reset it.
Then there's "my computer is slow", which means spyware. And I've learned to take harmless error messages (complaining that drive A is empty on startup when it shouldn't need to read from the floppy) seriously, because they also frequently mean spyware.
So it's been different than I expected. Users regularly thank me, and I've only had one user ever become really, really irate, when I didn't move fast enough for her. ("HELLO? [thwacking the phone] HELLO? HELLO?") Thankfully, that was the only really awful call I've had in more than a month.
--grendel drago
And Mithras! And sorta kinda a pinch of Osiris! But mostly Mithras.
--grendel drago
Dear me, you seem to have said "LOL". Please turn your geek membership card in at the nearest comics shop or computer repair place. You've failed it, young padawan.
--grendel drago
You know, I thought the preview looked pretty good too. But I don't trust George Lucas. You don't know the power of his urge to make shitty movies! Hayden Christenson will be a whiny bitch, there's going to be some sort of "American Idol" in-joke, and you're going to be so surprised, and you're going to bring your abused, broken heart here, blubbering your sorrow all over another thousand-comment thread, and you're going to receive the biggest "I told you so" ever fucking constructed.
--grendel drago
This guy makes me look slick, urbane and balanced. Can he even hear himself talking? Has it dawned on him that he's not only a nerd---which you can't blame him for---but also a pretentious ass, which is totally his fault, and makes him a completely legitimate target for atomic wedgies.
--grendel drago
Remember those media reports about girls wearing a hojillion colored plastic bracelets, and the media was breathlessly reporting that those bracelets were exchangeable for sexual favors? Oh, hey, it's on Snopes. When I was in high school, it was soda-can tabs. Kids talk smack, adults take it seriously, and we play "scare the adults". What a crock.
--grendel drago
What, the fact that relationships eventually end invalidates any and all meaning they may have had? Everything dies.
--grendel drago
And where did it say that the project was both begun and completed in 1998?
Anyway, the whole thing'd fit on a Blu-Ray now. Not impressive at all. I mean, Metallica's latest requires a huge pile of CDs for the WAVs, but that ain't too impressive...
Frink: [drawing on a blackboard] Here is an ordinary square.... ... but suppose we extend the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe, along the hypothetical z-axis, there.
Wiggum: Whoa, whoa - slow down, egghead!
Frink:
Everyone: [gasps]
Frink: This forms a three-dimensional object known as a "cube," or a "Frinkahedron" in honor of its discoverer, n'hey, n'hey.