You May Be Able to Get There From Here

There’s a fascinating interview with Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant best known for reciting 22,514 consecutive digits of Pi. Tammet, though, seems to spurn his categorization as savant, and finds other classifications of intellegient as a poor indications of how people really think:

When I was a child, my behavior was far from being what most people would label “intelligent.” It was often limited, repetitive and antisocial. I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as looking someone in the eye or deciphering a person’s body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time. I also struggled to learn many of the techniques for spelling or doing sums taught in class because they did not match my own style of thinking.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to intelligence than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.

Tammet also refers to an interesting ligustic bit, on the gendering of language:

Another finding, by cognitive psychologists Lera Boroditsky, Lauren A. Schmidt and Webb Phillips, might also offer a useful insight into an important part of learning a second language. The researchers asked German and Spanish native speakers to think of adjectives to describe a range of objects, such as a key. The German speakers, for whom the word “key” is masculine, gave adjectives such as “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged” and “metal,” whereas the Spanish speakers, for whom “key” is feminine, gave responses such as “golden,” “little,” “lovely” and “shiny.” This result suggests that native speakers of languages that have gendered nouns remember the different categorization for each by attending to differing characteristics, depending on whether the noun is “male” or “female.” It is plausible that second-language learners could learn to perceive various nouns in a similar way to help them remember the correct gender.

My friend Rachel sent me this vivid image from Rapture Ponies:

Jesus Riding a Dinosaur

This tattoo doesn’t seem to bad, until you realize where it came from:

Wolf Blitzer is the CNN new anchor’s real name, and it is a Jewish name.

Update:

Holy Fuck: Stone Phillips is the Dateline NBC anchor’s real name.

Also, Anderson Cooper really does, among intimate friends, refer to himself as “The Silver Fox” of cable news.

1. Main Page‎ [1,897,388]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,488,013]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [516,193]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [416,767]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [387,438]
6. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [328,045]
7. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence‎ [325,547]
8. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [314,076]
9. Homosexuality and Syphilis‎ [262,015]
10. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [249,14]

This data has be given many other places, yet its so telling I’m also posting it here. Besides the top ten, it sort-of embarrassing of the conservative encyclopedia that no other topics have received more than 300,000 views.

Although some argue he’s going mad, Chris Hitchens in still a lucid writer.

In Vanity Fair, Hitchens has written a two-part piece on the physical self-improvement industry:

There now exists a whole micro-economy dedicated to the proposition that a makeover is feasible, or in other words to disprove Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Objectives: to drop down from the current 185 pounds, to improve the “tone” of the skin and muscles, to wheeze less, to enhance the hunched and round-shouldered posture, to give some thought to the hair and fur questions (more emphasis perhaps in the right places and less in the wrong ones), to sharpen up the tailoring, to lessen the booze intake, and to make the smile, which currently looks like a handful of mixed nuts, a little less scary to children.

Read the full article at Vanity Fair .

This week, Eurozine responds to the recent success of books like Chris Hitchen’s  God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkin’s The God Dellusion:

We should begin by recognising that the “New Atheism” is not really new. Its distinctive themes – religion as the enemy of science, of progress and of an enlightened morality – are in a direct line of descent from the eighteenth-century enlightenment and nineteenth-century rationalism. The “new” movement is better seen as a revival, a reassertion of the values of rational thought and vigorous argument. It has struck people as new because it has given new life to old disagreements and debates and done so with great panache and style. But we need to beware of fighting old battles in a world which has moved on.

Read the full article at Eurozine.

The past couple winters, when I’m reading or working on a cold weekend morning, I’ve found myself siting next to the radiator in my apartment, so I can continually warm my coffee mug on the radiator.

This designer has extended such a practice:

More at Yanko Design

First of all, David Byrne has a blog. (Unfortunately, the blog is not called Talking Head, or any variation of this).

Secondly, Byrne makes fun of IKEA on his blog:

My sister had the idea that we would take my parents to IKEA to look at possible replacements for their kitchen cabinets, counters, sinks and storage. I loved the idea of a trip to IKEA since I’d never been there ever. And as it was to be a look-see and not a buying trip, the pressure would be low. I was looking forward to the famous Swedish meatballs for lunch too.

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.

Additional Authors Note: I want to write a history, or some kind of work about IKEA. At this point I only have a title, Do It Yourself: How IKEA Transformed Modern Furniture.