Oh, the humanity…
I have a relative who sells appliances, and met Gordon Jump (who was later The Lonely Maytag Man) at some convention. Apparently a lot of people asked him about this episode.
Daily Archives: November 27, 2008
Dude, Where's My Car?
I was playing around with Live Search Maps, typed in my mom’s address, and then the “bird’s eye view” option. Whoa. My car’s in the driveway. In one view — it’s gone when you rotate through the other angles. Which means it’s probably from Thanksgiving in the past few years, unless, OMG! That view is live! They’re outside right now!
(Nah. I was handed the creeping crud at the office in lieu of pay and didn’t make the trip this year)
Help with Baccarat Not Included
Where do you Keep Your LEGOs?
In your LEGO® safe?
You would think that breaking into a Lego safe would just mean taking a few bricks off but this one is quite a bit more complex. The safe weighs 14 pounds for starters. It has a motion detecting alarm so it can’t be moved without alerting people in earshot. The lock require five double digit codes to open it, which results in over 305 billion different combinations.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
It’s Thanksgiving, so why not stir the pot?
Larry Summers debacle, resurfaced over at incoherently scattered ponderings, (in response to a freakonomics blog post)
Do this simple experiment – go around and ask people to tell you in their words what was it that Summers said that got him in trouble. It’s an interesting Rorschach-test type question with a wide spectrum of answers. Then go to google and find the full transcript of his speech.
Political overtones aside, the question of whether there is a greater variance of certain skills in males or females is a legitimate scientific question, the one that can be answered with data, without all media hysteria. Since there are studies that show that males also vastly outnumber women on the low-IQ tail of the spectrum means that this hypothesis is not so outlandish after all. This may also be related to the fact that males are much more likely to be involved in risky (e.g. criminal) behavior.
Since I am not an expert in this field, I can’t take sides in this discussion, but the argument often presented by anti-Summers side that merely asking a hypothetical scientific question about origins of differences in cognitive abilities between genders is sexist seems very un-scientific and dangerous to me.
(edit: fixed link)