I own the most aggravating, and therefore effective, alarm clock ever invented. It moves around the bedroom while I sleep, then shrieks like a jet engine every morning at 4:55. My wife has thrown it away three times, but it always crawls out of the dumpster and makes it way back to the table beside my bed. Yes, I hate it too, but it keeps me and my neighbors from being late to work.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m always late for other more important things. I didn’t learn the alphabet until I was 6, didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 20, didn’t graduate from college until I was 26, and didn’t find the girl of my dreams until I was almost 40. I fathered a son at 48, moved to Connecticut at 50, and became a reporter and columnist at 51. Full story »
CNN reported last week on a new study showing that liberalism, atheism and sexual exclusivity in males are linked to higher IQ scores. The findings are intriguing, for all the obvious reasons.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
Reactions have been all over the place, but there’s been strong suspicion of the findings from both “liberal” and “conservative” corners (especially conservative, as you’d expect). Which is good. Full story »
THE DEPROLIFERATOR — David Kay has “very bad news for you.” You may recall that he’s the man who led two teams to Iraq: one, after the Gulf War, determined that Iraq had a nuclear program; the other, before the Iraq War, that it then had no WMD program. Despite supporting the Iraq War anyway, Kay remains a credible voice on nuclear weapons.
His bad news, though, is about Iran, where, he recently wrote in the National Interest, “a weapons-inspection regime. . . will not work. Inspections themselves are most effective when both the state being inspected and the inspecting countries are fully on board — and even then there are limits.” For example, the “number of inspectors and level of intrusiveness necessary to ensure that [there are no nuclear weapons] in a country Iran’s size is far greater than anything that can be contemplated.” Full story »
