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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. (more…)

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Nuclear Disarmament and Ronald Reagan: ‘Trust, But Verify’
To hawks, verification is another hammer with which to bludgeon disarmament.

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Citizens who oversee the government … it can work when Americans hold their employees — the government — accountable.

Case in point is the mess at the Waynesboro treasurer’s office that was brought to the attention of the News Virginian and Waynesboro residents by citizen watch dogs, and resulted in a new treasurer being elected to that post. After Ellen and Phil Winter noticed what appeared to be shabby record keeping in the Waynesboro treasurer’s office, they took action. From the NV:

Close followers of city politics knew the Winters waved the red flags and then gathered reams of information from city government that showed a Treasurer’s Office in disarray. That led to a front-page story in this newspaper Sept. 30 reporting that Treasurer Sandra “Sandee” Dixon had been thumped in four straight state audits for tardy accounting and sloppy recordkeeping and had botched the handling of hundreds of thousands of dollars in city and state taxpayer money. Within slightly more than two weeks, two write-in candidates joined the treasurer’s race, doubling the field. On Election Day, challenger Stephanie Beverage topped Dixon for the job.

It was more involved than that … the NV editorial goes more indepth … but the end result was that citizen watch dogs stepped in to oversee government. As a result, the Winters have been nominated for the American Society of News Editors Local Heroes Award which recognizes people who help improve access to government.

The News Virginian concluded with sage words:

This is how a representative republic, powered by the people through open government and the accountability that affords, is designed to work. Thanks to the Winters for the lesson. Let us all follow it with due and equal vigilance.

It turned out well in this case but too often it is impossible to fight city hall and government overwhelms the watch dog citizen which would never happen if everyone was a vigilent as the Winters.

Find the full post here.

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It’s time for a new phone. After repeated drops on concrete and tile floors, my Palm Treo is starting to act up a bit. I haven’t been able to surf the web in a reasonable fashion since Palm and IBM had a falling out over the Java program the Treo needs to run Opera Mini. And with my AT&T contract up next month, it was time to figure out what my next phone would be.

After spending hours online and after playing with the available smartphones at both the Verizon and AT&T stores, I’ve concluded that the best touchscreen smartphone available, at least for my needs and wants, is not the iPhone. It’s the Palm Pre Plus.

In order to understand my reasoning, you need to something about me and why I bought my Treo in the first place.

I’m a trained electrical engineer with an advanced degree. That should suggest a number of stereotypes – nerdy, overweight, socially inept, and so on. While not all of the stereotypes apply, a couple of them do, and one more so than most. The stereotypical engineer is known for being able to focus on a task at hand to the exclusion of all external stimuli, a condition generally referred to as “tunnel vision” (and entirely distinct from the medical condition of the same name). I generally consider my tunnel vision as an asset because it enables me to focus and work very efficiently on one thing at at time. Tunnel vision makes multitasking more difficult, however, and so I rely on external stimuli to break into my concentration when I need to break out of my tunnel vision. So when I have to get to a meeting, I rely on my pop-up reminders on my Outlook calendar. (more…)

If you’ve been following my tweets you know my new-found dislike for the host country of the 2010 Winter Olympics. All Canada had to do was let Rush play in the opening ceremony. They let me, Rush fans, and their own country down.

My exclusive reporting has turned up an interesting twist to the “Dissing Rush” story. It has to do with the Winter Olympics logo:

It’s named, “Ilanaaq the Inunnguaq.”

Now, look at the album cover of Rush’s Test for Echo:

The logo is merely a cubist version of the album cover.

Canada steals from one of their most successful cultural exports, and doesn’t even let them perform for the world at the Winter Olympic opening ceremony. For shame!

Their failure to respect their own pop culture has turned me from friend to foe. The plans exist for a Canadian invasion from the USA. Join this cause by using the #InvadeCanada hashtag on Twitter.

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The New York Times parked a travesty of a story on its Web site today reporting that “the Iranians moved roughly 4,300 pounds of low-enriched uranium out of deep underground storage” to a small, above-ground plant, leaving it vulnerable to attack, sabotage or some other suitable, destructive fate. Interesting, but …

The story has no analysis or commentary tag, so presumably it’s a news story. It carries the byline of David E. Sanger, who has written for The Times for more than a quarter of a century and serves as the paper’s chief Washington, D.C., correspondent. He’s a foreign policy and nuclear deproliferation expert, which I am not. He’s a member of two Pulitzer-winning teams at The Times, an exceptional historian, and a damn good writer. But that doesn’t leave him immune from criticism.

It’s irritating that this piece carries only one — that’s one — named source. He expects his readers to swallow a steady diet of anonymice. Worse, Sanger provides no reason for withholding their names. That’s a disservice to readers, who have no way of assessing those grants of anonymity. And Times reporters do this frustratingly, irritatingly often.
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The news that an orca has killed a trainer at Sea World comes as a shock, but not really as a surprise. As has been widely reported, the killer whale, named Tilikum, grabbed his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, by her hair and pulled her under water, shaking her. The trainer apparently died of “multiple traumatic injuries,” although there hasn’t been much further on the cause of death since the incident. It sure looks as if she was just shaken to death. This all took place in front of an audience at Sea World in Orlando, Florida, which was evacuated shortly after the whale started playing, or whatever it was he was doing. This is part of the problem, of course—it’s often difficult to interpret motives to animals whose facial and body expressions we think we can make some sense of. For whales and dolphins (and orcas are actually dolphins) this difficulty is compounded immensely. At the moment, no one has a clear idea what Tilikum actually had in mind.
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“Working for a major studio can be like trying to have sex with a porcupine. It’s one prick against thousands.” Who said it? (more…)

Yeah, this will work.  NOT.

The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America has quietlylaunched an initiative aimed at making Obama supporters’ voices heard on the largely conservative airwaves.

“The fate of health reform has been a focus of debate in living rooms and offices, on TV and online — and on talk radio. And since millions of folks turn to talk radio as a trusted source of news and opinions, we need to make sure OFA supporters are calling in with a pro-reform message,” says the introduction to the online tool.

The online tool presents users with a radio show discussing political topics, to which supporters can listen live, and the phone number for that station, for when health care comes up. It also offers tips for callers and talking points on the issue.

Rush Limbaugh has long had a name for this sort of effort, which isn’t new and not very effective — seminar callers.

Find the full post here.

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Seems that the sleeping giant is awakening and it isn’t too happy.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.

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