Month: March 2008

Suppressing IQ research

Research on intelligence is a tale of good and evil—or so the media would have us think. On one side we are presented mean-spirited pseudoscientists who are greasing the slippery slope to oppression and genocide with their elitist, racist ideologies about human differences. On the other side are the earnest souls who would save us from those horrors by exposing the nonscientific and immoral basis of the so-called “science” of intelligence differences. Even when the science is conceded to be accurate, it is often labeled dangerous and irresponsible. If not life-imperiling, it at least threatens the foundations of American democracy. In short, we must make the world safe from intelligence research. Perhaps ironically, institutional psychology has itself been busy doing just that for over 30 years. The media can keep repainting its libelous portrait of intelligence research only with the complicity of intelligence’s mother field, psychology. Although intelligence tests are often cited as psychology’s biggest success, psychology often treats researchers who study the origins and consequences of individual and group differences in general intelligence as its biggest embarrassment—the troublesome child or mad uncle whom a socially ambitious family would lock up or have disappear. In doing so, it has undermined the integrity of psychological science, encouraged fiction-driven social policies that continue to disappoint and ratchet up blame, and blinded us to the daily risks and challenges faced by the less able among us.

we need to learn a lot about intelligence fast to face today’s challenges, but the PC bs movement is blocking any research into it.

Google Earth Ate Our Town

The city’s planning department has, over the past 5 years, steadily fed Google a wealth of information about its buildings, property lines, utilities and streets. The result is earth.nanaimo.ca, a clearinghouse of city data viewed through the robust and freely available Google Earth 3D mapping program. The site sorts and maps every business, from restaurants to car dealers, while a click of the mouse brings up the lot size for every property in the city, including the building permit number and zoning history. Homeowners can use the facility to find out specific information about their garbage collection schedule, while the city’s 150-year-old downtown core is rendered in 3D and dotted with 360-degree panoramas.

how to wire up a whole town with geodata

Earth Water

All the water in the world (1.4b km3) and all the air in the atmosphere (5140 * 10e18 kg) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

2008-10-30:

An “atlas of hidden water” has been created to reveal where the world’s freshwater aquifers really lie. “The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.”

Useful to predict the wars of the future.
2013-12-07:

The volume of this water resource is 100x greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s subsurface in the past century

2020-11-24:

The mantle transition zone (MTZ) at a depth of 410 to 660 km is considered to be a potential water reservoir because its dominant minerals, wadsleyite and ringwoodite, can contain large amounts of water up to 3 weight %. To fit the observed mantle viscosity profiles, ringwoodite in the MTZ should contain 1 to 2 wt % water. The MTZ should thus be nearly water-saturated globally.

The MTZ is estimated to hold 3x the amount of water as the world’s oceans. This makes books like Flood more plausible. earlier estimates thought it was more like 2x:

Evidence suggests the middle of Earth’s mantle holds as much water as the planet’s oceans. If scientists can prove without doubt that the middle mantle is filled with water, it calls into question theories that suggest water arrived on Earth from comets.

See also 2.8t Tons of Fresh Water Under the Ocean

Low-salinity submarine groundwater contained within continental shelves is a global phenomenon. While low-salinity groundwater is thought to be abundant, its distribution and volume worldwide is poorly understood due to the limited number of observations. The data suggest a continuous submarine aquifer system spans at least 350 km of the US Atlantic coast and contains 2.8t tons of low-salinity groundwater.

Ice Man

Wim Hof should be dead for doing the following: running a half-marathon in the Arctic Circle in his bare feet, climbing the Everest in his shorts, and diving under the ice at the North Pole. Here’s a fascinating story about a 48-year-old Dutchman nicknamed “The Ice Man” for his uncanny ability of withstanding fatally freezing temperatures:

Normally, when a person is exposed to freezing temperatures for a prolonged period of time, the body goes into survival mode, as its liquids begin to freeze.

Frostbite sets in, and in order to save the major organs, the body sacrifices blood flow to the extremities, cutting circulation from the fingers, toes, ears and nose to keep the blood flowing to the organs necessary for survival.

If not treated immediately, the damage to these extremities is irreversible. The other danger is hypothermia, an abnormally low body temperature. At 0 celsius, body functions start shutting down, and once that starts, you could be dead within minutes.

But Hof stayed in his tomb of ice for 72 minutes. Then, the ice was poured out of the tank, and Hof emerged, his skin still pink.

“He’s not moving, he’s not generating heat, he’s not dressed for it, and he’s immersed in ice water. And water will transmit heat 30x faster than air. It literally sucks the life right out of you. And yet, despite all those negative factors, Wim Hof was very calm, very comfortable the entire time that he was immersed in that water

scan that guys dna already

Fuck You And Your H2

Welcome to FUH2.com, home of the official Hummer H2 salute. So…why all the fuss? Well, it breaks down like this: The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle. It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it’s a Chevy Tahoe in disguise. So, if you see it our way, tell a Hummer owner what you think and show ’em the bird. If you do, send us a picture–we’d love to post it on our site.

nearly 5000 middle finger salutes