Pod save America talked about this in a recent episode. There’s always a balance in the timing of these things. If you drip feed the endorsements, people might become used to it and not care. If many very famous people do their endorsements close to Election Day, it might motivate voters to actually go and vote. That’s one of the ways that those running the campaign might reason.

Maybe for now, but there’s fewer and fewer around. In ten-twenty years time it will be hard to find a 90s car with reasonable mileage.

And this is one reason why I hate modern cars. But then again, there’s no alternative, and that sucks.

I used the example to illustrate a point. The tests have a target population that they are constructed for. This is also the reason as to why modern people score really high on old tests, because they are not the target population. The thing is, people aren’t very different, neither across cultures nor across time. We should expect the average person of today to be just as intelligent as the average person of 1924, but they score differently in the test. It’s almost as if the test doesn’t measure intelligence at all! If the tests actually measured intelligence, they wouldn’t need to be specifically designed for a certain population.

When an IQ-test is designed, a number of assumptions are made, e.g., normal distribution, that an underlying factor is well described by the battery of questions and that this underlying factor is the best thing that can explain the variation seen. All these assumptions are debatable at best. I mean, it’s just factor analysis, and all the assumptions of that statistical method applies.

If you’re measuring heart rate, breathing and sweating, I guess you could use a polygraph. If you want to measure a potential cognitive decline in a single person, you can have them do several of these tests to see if there’s a trend. There is nothing pseudoscientific about using these methods in this way. The pseudoscience comes in when we’re trying to tie the results to truthfulness in the case of the polygraph or intelligence in the case of the IQ test. Or even worse, when trying to compare two individuals from their results.

No, studies on IQ have shown that the test design often assume something about the population taking the test. If you produce a test for British students in secondary school and give it to miners in Zimbabwe, then the miners will probably achieve way lower scores than is it expected. This is because the students are more used to taking tests. IQ tests have been used in this way to promote racist ideas, when the real problem is the methodology behind IQ tests.

There’s a whole book about this, “the mismeasure of man”, by Stephen Jay Gould.

Sure, but I guess that it’s just a small part in a battery of tests to evaluate the effects of an injury. I mean, it does measure something, even if it’s just the ability to sit for a test.

This is just Russian propaganda. Ukraine weren’t even close to being considered for NATO membership when the special military intervention was announced. They’ve had a border conflict with Russia since 2014 and therefore they could not join NATO.

Ukraine is defending itself. Zelenskyy said “I need bullets, not a ride” and the west simply helped Ukraine with what they actually needed. It’s completely reasonable that Ukraine can use western aid to strike military targets within Russia that threatens their sovereign territory.

I had a nightmare where windows 11 was automatically installed on my Linux computer since it shared network with a windows one.

That’s true, but you hardly blame any one else than the Russian government for this three-day special military operation that’s now in its third year. Allowing Ukraine to defend itself is just the right thing to do.

At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.

This is so annoying that it’s almost funny.

Truefitt and Hill makes a fantastic aftershave balm that I find greatly reduces razor burn and ingrown hairs. For my hands I use lanolin, it’s a bit greasy but works wonders for dry hands.

It’s really common here in Sweden. “Bastuflotte” we call them and there are a couple in every lake around where I live.

Damnit, I was hoping for Turkey to reject us!

I think that the key word here is moderately sized. If I would guess, the optimum could be somewhere around 5’000 to 75’000 inhabitants. With those numbers you would probably not need any public transport within the city since you could bike or walk everywhere. At the same time you will be able to support some local shops for the most essential goods.

The municipality where I live made a study on green house gas emissions by where people lived. Curiously, the people living in the city center where those with the largest environmental footprint and those living more than 20 km away from the city caused the least emissions. They claimed that the difference was mainly due to lifestyle. People in the city tended to travel more by plane, ate food that had been prepared in restaurants rather than making it themselves, shopped more clothes and so on.

When there was a bus strike in the same city, air quality improved markedly. I suspect that those who take the bus in this particular city are those who would’ve otherwise biked (university students in Europe).

Living in a city comes with certain limitations to what you can do in your weekends. You can easily go out to consume and thus cause emissions. When living in the countryside, you can walk to the closest lake and fish your dinner without any emissions. Pretending that cities is the most environmentally friendly place to live is to ignore what people do except working, sleeping and traveling between the two.

I called an associate professor by a common nickname derived from his actual name, thing is that it draws the thought to some drug addict from the 70’s. When I got my phd, he took to calling me by my title as a revenge.

I mean, with centralization going the way that it’s going we will end up there. If the cost of living in densely populated places is so high, I think it hints at an inefficiency with the arrangement. Maybe people should live in fields and bogs a bit more?

I had to use a Windows 11 computer a couple of days ago. I can identify with this meme.