IQ, Do U?
Lewis Terman
Remember the Terman kids? The high-IQ teenagers Lewis Terman collected in the 1920s to follow through their adult lives to see whether getting high marks on the test (their average IQ was 150) really did mean intellectual success as a grownup? In the end, two of his candidates wound up as Nobel laureates, but they didn’t show up on his results. Terman had dropped them from his study. Their IQs weren’t high enough.
If It Hurts, Talk Dirty
Psychologist Richard Stephens (UK’s Keele University), working with volunteers, applied pain stimuli to them and told them their audible response would be recorded. He instructed some, randomly selected, to avoid bad language while the rest were permitted to let the censorable words rip. On analysis of the results, the foul-mouthed sufferers turned out to be able to handle pain better than the prissy ones.
‘Stocks That Win If the Health Protestors Win’
That was a headline on Fox for one of its financial-advice guys the other day — for which I have to say:
Thank you, Fox! You’ve finally come clean! As was true all along. those “spontaneous” demonstrations of screaming or bellowing demonstrators, which have made it just about impossible to have a meaningful public discussion — the ones that you and all the other right-wing wheeler-dealers have been so assiduously nursing along — have just one real purpose: to prevent the passing of laws that would threaten the exorbitant profits of the giant so-called “health” providers.
Related post: More Little Known Fun Facts
Scott Hauger says:
Re: Health protesters:
August 17, 2009, 11:42 pmAin’t it so. They remind me of the brownshirts of the 1930s.
Robert Nowall says:
You make quite a leap from a single headline. What did the article say?
August 18, 2009, 4:20 amRBH says:
A couple of days ago the overall stock market was down about 2%. That was just after the Obama administration signaled that the ‘public option’ (government-sponsored not-for-profit health insurance competing with the for-profit firms) was likely off the table. The four largest health insurance companies were up 3% that day. Surprise!
August 19, 2009, 4:17 pmChookie says:
And you cannot imagine how stupid those protestors, and (to be frank) your health insurance system look from Down Under. Medicare (Australia’s universal health insurance scheme) isn’t perfect, and we don’t emphasise preventative care as much as we ought, but nobody here goes bankrupt after a heart attack, or holds off getting cancer tests because they can’t afford the doctor. One of our big problems is rural health — so much of Australia is sparsely populated that it’s hard to put doctors close to everyone.
August 20, 2009, 6:14 pmScott Hauger says:
Congratulations!
I read the article in the New York Times today about your high school diploma From Brooklyn Tech (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/nyregion/22bigcity.html). Who would ever have guessed that such a wonderful author was self taught. It reminds me of my experience 45 years ago in the UK, where I chanced into a pub whose clientele were (to generalize) non-college educated intellectuals. (This was in the days of the 11+ test which segregated students for the rest of their lives). What a wonderful experience for a 17 year-old American that was. Also a lesson that intelligence and intellectual accomplishment did not necessarily follow expected (by Americans in 1965) paths.
I should have known. My youthful mentor was a polymath named Ken Weatherby, a high school drop out who, by his own account at least, co-developed the first airplane with propellers im front of the wing, and later contributed to the Manhattan project.
I wonder what opportunities today’s talented and creative high school dropouts might have.
Scott
August 22, 2009, 8:48 pmScott says:
The part about the ‘right wing protesters’ is a hoot. We had a pro Obama protest here in Florida because the local schools were not showing his speech live, somehow his supporters just happened to have matching screen printed signs. Both sides use the same tactics and both sides are full of crap.
September 11, 2009, 4:21 amAnton Sherwood says:
Given how much regulatory ingenuity went into creating this mess, I reckon it’s right to be skeptical about any effort to increase the role of politics in medicine.
For years I’ve noticed that, whenever anyone wants a shining example of the inability of the private sector to deliver services effectively, they point to the most heavily regulated and subsidized of all industries.
March 3, 2010, 12:49 pm