Daily Archives: September 23, 2009

Oscar the Grouch Was My Landlord…Until He Died

While I was living in an Armenian enclave near Boston, this happened: A Turkish-American jeweler with a shop in Somerville was driving his car somewhere around Medford, and was ambushed. Several bullets were fired into his car, killing him and totally ruining the Cadillac. The Armenians partied, and the secret organization of assassins took credit.

Please check out my latest post at Quiche Moraine. Thank you very much.

Human Brain Size: Does it matter? And has it decreased?

ResearchBlogging.orgSometimes people walk around with only half a brain, or a large portion of their brain disconnected, or simply having never developed, or an extra large brain, and we usually take little notice. But when there is a five or ten or twenty percent difference between two groups of people we are quickly willing to use that to decide (as in the Bell Curve) that those people with the (on average) smaller brain are inferior. The fact that all the well known studies comparing groups of living people that show such differences have been shown to be bogus (i.e. made up or doctored data) is often ignored.

Anyway, the following is the abstract of a 1998 paper by M. Henneberg that is still relevant of some interest:

Continue reading Human Brain Size: Does it matter? And has it decreased?

Palin fails to impress world

Sarah Palin gave her first speech outside the US, to the CLSA Investors Forum, in Tokyo, on Reqaganomics, China and Human Rights, Tibet, and the economices of the United States and Asia. She apparently also covered Alaskan Moose. The speech was 90 minutes long. Several people left early, there was apparently some kind of non-disclosure agreement because the press could not get most people to issue any kind of opinion, and those who did opine were generally non-committal with some mildly positive, some mildly negative. Opinions gleaned from the CNN story:

Continue reading Palin fails to impress world