The choice this election is between someone who might start World War Three accidentally (Trump) or someone who might kick it off deliberately (Clinton).

Damn.

Damn.

Sex differences in intelligence: A multi-measure approach using nationally representative samples from Romania.

I read the entire paper (all ya’ll sci know hub where bz to find it). The methodology seems solid and the sample size is large. The researchers found to quote the abstract that, “Romanian data show no support for the sex differences in either mean values or variance of scores which were reported by other studies.”

My guess is that if there are any sex-related intelligence differences that they are small and swamped by the effects of culture, priming effects, stereotype threat and other factors.

Since intelligence as expressed by humans in the modern context appears to be a re-purposing of the social comprehension mechanisms (and perhaps a few other modules glommed on), I don’t see any reason to believe women and men would differ all that much.

I was however surprised to see the SDs being so similar, but the data seems reliable and the paper is actually well-written as such things go.

I need to avoid sites where fat people complain about being fat, or sites that discuss or even lampoon any variant of that. It’s not healthy for me and it’s an enormous waste of time. They all have strayed far out of the realm of reason and science just as much as the crystal-caressers, flat-earthers and bible-beaters have.

There are so many more interesting and positive things to read, to learn, to do rather than listen to a bunch a whiny infants pule about something they could change if they wished and made the effort to do so. And even if they can’t, listening to them snivel on the internet is not helping them or me.

Life demands action. Most of them refuse to take any, but I can.

So I’m done with all that.

Three of my co-workers almost got run down in a legal crosswalk today as we did a circle around the block to get some exercise.

The woman didn’t even look, pause, or otherwise acknowledge their presence. She screamed by at 30MPH without braking, missing them by two feet or less. I was a few steps behind so I wasn’t in immediate danger.

As she drove by and we were yelling at her, I noticed she had a Florida plate. (I am 400 miles from Florida.)

I was so very unsurprised.

Someone was just quoting Yeats out loud in the office.

His most famous poem, but still — I’ve never heard anyone do that anywhere I’ve ever worked before, with any poet.

Definitely different than most IT shops in which I’ve worked.

(Yes, I know how “Yeats” is pronounced.)

Best Bang For the Buck in the United States?

No, not Ohio.

Tennessee. Particularly, Nashville.

Excellent music scene, extremely low cost of living (for example), proximity to really beautiful mountains, decent weather, loads of things to do, great economy (particularly for health care and IT) and pretty good and improving public transportation infrastructure.

I’m Asking You For A Peer-Reviewed Study Showing That A Typical Fat Person Can Become Sustainably Non-Fat Through Deliberate Weight-Loss.

This is a worthless approach epistemologically and health-wise. Instead, a better approach would be to find 10,000 people like me who have lost at least 20% of their body weight and kept it off for five years or more (personally, 27%, 5.5 years) and determine what allowed them to be successful.

The simple fact is that once you get fat, you are in fact probably doomed. And most people want to be doomed once they are standing in the temple of. It’s just easier.

Personally, I’ve never liked “easy” and I’m as stubborn as they come, so there’s that.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s when the first PDAs started arriving on the scene, it was conventional wisdom that no one would ever spend any time typing on tiny keyboards.

Now, nearly everyone in the world spends half their day typing on tiny keyboards.

I can’t say I understand it myself really, but it shows how often what “everyone knows” is just laughably wrong.

How obesity became the new face of disability in America.

That obesity is legitimately counted as a disability is astounding. I know, “make better choices” doesn’t help very much and because obesity is occurring so pervasively any rants about individual responsibility won’t do much. (Though I think the Fat Acceptance movement enables and celebrates obesity, thus making it worse.)

But when I see a veteran with his or her legs blown off in one of our damn stupid wars who can’t find a disabled parking space because someone who chose to eat themselves into absurd corpulence parks there instead — well, my rage face shows up.

At least the article discusses obesity as the result of a mental disorder — just like anorexia and bulimia — which I think is accurate.

When you cannot control your urges enough to allow you to continue to walk, or to avoid losing limbs from diabetes, yes you are mentally ill.

Electron spin explanation. Pretty good. I wish he hadn’t bothered with the classical explanation at the start. Who cares? That world just doesn’t work that way at that scale.

To me one of the most mysterious facts in quantum mechanics is that electrons have memories of previous states while being infinitely small point particles. Where is this information stored? What exactly stores it? How is it retrieved and under what conditions?

These are questions to which we’ll probably never know the answers; the universe just is that way.

It is completely idiotic to say that because corporations are just composed of people, that they cannot have goals and preferred states that are inimical to most humans — even those comprising the corporation.

That’s just the same as saying cancer cannot exist in a human body, by the way. And just as obviously wrong.

I first started thinking and writing about some of the things we’re only experiencing now way back in the mid-90s. A friend and I together posited many of the events and concerns of the present — among them, ubiquitous electronic tracking and surveillance, the corporate attempt and success of that attempt to re-assert control over information and the complete dominance of McJobs as the prevalent job type*.

Unfortunately few of my writings from that time survive. Not that it would matter, really. If you aren’t credentialed, you could discover free energy and teleportation and no one would care (until someone with credentials stole it from you and “validated” it and took all the credit and money).

Really it only matters to me, but I am glad to say that I saw the future fairly clearly in an area that I care about.

All that is just to segue into this review of Randall Collins’ Sociological Insight that discusses the psychological effects of ubiquitous surveillance.

Coercion, by the way, requires surveillance, which Collins meant in the old-fashioned sense of “someone watching you” as opposed to all-out electronic surveillance (which is still, eventually, someone watching you), and its effects on conformity, group think, and submission. High-surveillance societies are really coercion societies, and they produce people who appear dull and without any initiative.

This is something everyone should read and think on because we are moving from a low-surveillance society back to a high-surveillance society; perhaps the most high-surveillance society in history, in certain respects. Understanding what it is likely to do us is important.

I suspect one of the drivers of slow economic growth and something that mainstream (and many heterodox economists) will never consider as such is this all-consuming and ever-present surveillance. It’s impossible to model and extremely-difficult if not impossible to quantify, so no matter how large is effect it’ll always be discounted or just discarded outright.

By the way, lately I’ve been attempting to identify large-effect factors that are completely or mostly ignored by the math-obsessed quant culture.

Some of these factors I use to trade, so I will never write about them or discuss them here or anywhere.

Outside the realm of trading though, it’s a comparatively easy to be much smarter about the world, to punch above your weight and to comprehend more of the cosmos by identifying the huge gaps in math/engineering/quant culture and exploring the vast realms they ignore.

More on that later, though.

*One quote from that time I remember clearly: “Not everyone without a degree can be a burger-flipper. What are we going to do, flip burgers back and forth to one another? An economy just can’t work that way.”

Tammy Wynette and Jay-Z go together surprisingly well, it turns out.

Apartment No. H to the Izz-O.

Goddamn, Virginia Thrasher has a nice air rifle.

Makes the one I spent years as a kid saving for look like a piece of garbage.

Amazing shooter. I envy her skills, but never would’ve had the patience to practice as long as she must have to get that absurdly good.

I have something like 500 tabs open in various browsers all spread between the five VMs and remote machines that I use (MacOS, two Ubuntu, one very-cleaned/firewalled Windows 10, one Windows 7).

Do they make methadone for this sort of thing?