Half Sigma

The coolest June and July in the last 100 years

New York Times reports that both June and July were the coolest in over 100 years.

Maybe the Time Magazine article from 1974 about the coming Ice Age was on target after all?

Why private schools, part 1

The benefit of private schools is not about getting better scores on standardized tests. Public schools do a decent job of preparing children to take reading and math tests—if anything, a major problem with public schools, as of the time of this writing, is that they are too focused on standardized tests, an unfortunate result of the No Child Left Behind philosophy.

School, however, is a lot more than just learning the three R’s. School becomes your child’s primary form of socialization after he or she begins attending full time. On school days, children spend significantly more time with their teachers and classmates than they spend with their parents. Thus the character of their school plays a crucial role in how they will turn out.

When children attend a public school, at best they will attend school with other middle class children and pick up middle class speech patterns, behaviors and values. At worst, they will spend time with working class children and pick up working class values. These are not the values you want your children learning! You want your children to attend a school where all of the children are from upper middle class and upper class backgrounds, so they will pick up upper class speech patterns, upper class behaviors, and upper class values.

And why is it so important for your children to pick up these upper class behaviors? Because upper class people are the ones who are in power, and they feel most comfortable around people like themselves. The people who act upper class and sound upper class will make upper class friends and consequently have a network of people in positions to help them out in both their careers and their social lives. They are the ones who will get hired for important jobs and get promoted. The best explanation I’ve seen for this is phenomenon is found in the book 44 Insider Secrets That Will Get You Hired by Cynthia Shapiro. Cynthia writes:

One of the things most easily seen and recognized by those above you is how you look and outwardly behave. If you look like you fit in at the higher levels, those at the top will start to visualize you there and will soon feel increasingly uncomfortable having you lingering there in the lower ranks where you clearly stand out. None of them want someone who looks like “one of their own” sitting at a lower level, so they will unknowingly become your allies in helping you move up.

The child who graduates from a private school will become an adult who looks and acts like someone who should be successful, and this very fact will enlist the aid of other successful people to help him out.

* * *

Followup post: Why private schools, part 2: teachers.

$120K of student loans, $7.25/hr job

A Pittsburgh paper profiles a 26-year-old woman, presumably a single mom (the husband isn't mentioned), with $120K of student loans and only qualified for a $7.25/hr job. That's all a degree in "business administration" from Robert Morris University in Moon PA will get you.

This woman is screwed for life because she can't even make enough money to make her interest payments so her wages will be garnished and the debt will keep growing bigger and bigger, and as you know they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Her only way out is if her grandmother's house is worth more than her loans. Let's hope, for her sake, that grandma has a nice house.

Some people will chime in "servers her right," but come on, give this girl a break. She's barely smart enough to maintain a C average at a bogus university, how was she supposed to realize that signing those papers at the financial aid office, given to her by an authority figure, would mean she'd be screwed for life?

endh1b.com

www.endh1b.com. "www.endh1b.com is a portal for information related to the H-1B visa program that has been used by American companies to bypass the American workforce."

The Manhattan Airport Foundation

I think it's satire. How come I can never think of anything good like this?

* * *

KingM writes: "Wow, someone went to a lot of work for one, slightly funny joke."

After thinking about it, I agree. The authors of the website got a few blog links, but probably not enough fame to make the whole thing worthwhile.

My book

The bookstore shelves are full of books purporting to help high school students get into college. While some of these books provide good advice for both parents and students, the problem is that they don’t tell the whole story. The first problem is that by the time your child is in the eleventh grade, it’s too late! The preparation of your child’s future career path should really begin when he or she is born. At the very least, you need to have a plan for making sure your child attends a quality kindergarten.

The second problem is that the multiplicity of college books perpetuate the myth that college is the end-all and be-all of life in America, guaranteeing its graduates the good life of a high paying and satisfying career. In fact, the country is full of college graduates working in low-paying dead-end jobs, and the situation will only get worse in the future as the percentage of Americans with college degrees increase, and more of the good jobs are exported overseas to countries with lower wages. This obviously applies to people holding degrees from mediocre state schools, but even graduates of Ivy League schools often face underemployment and disappointing career experiences.

The nation’s upper classes are busy stacking the system so that their own children will have the best educations, the best careers, and the best life experiences. This book gives you, the regular middle-class parent, the tools you will need to ensure that your own children can compete with the children of wealth and privilege, and grow up to be among the small minority of haves rather than the vast majority of have-nots.

Admit nothing about PC from NYC Prep

A commenter writes:

Perhaps now would be a good time to admit that you were wrong about PC being straight. Also I'm curious as to why certain people are not able to pick up on homosexuality. Do you think that you are just not perceptive?

No, I was wrong about nothing. I picked up rather early that Bravo was trying to make PC’s sexuality one of the arcs of the show, as did everyone else.

It’s simply wrong to classify a kid as “gay” because he has some interests other than sports and getting laid.

As far as being able to “pick up” if people are gay, I admit that I can’t tell if people are gay, I can only tell if they have stereotypically gay mannerisms, but that has far from a perfect correlation with actually being turned on by the same sex. Gay mannerisms are, to some extent, picked up from hanging out with other gay people.

Response to an anti-IQ article

I was asked to comment on an anti-IQ article in The Atlantic.

All I can say about this is that the author just ignores the solid evidence, based on studies of identical twins, adopted children, etc, that hereditary is the most important influence on IQ scores. The evidence is so overwhelming that it has been generally, albeit reluctantly, accepted as the mainstream view among psychologists that intelligence is hereditary.

The author of the article simply presents his own view, which sounds good, but has proven to be false. Many attempts have been made to create the right environment that will cause all children to be smart, and all attempts have failed.

He also makes some of what I’ve previously called the binary argument:

People who make what I call the binary argument say that people who talk about intelligence are saying that a single number, one’s IQ score, says every possible thing worth saying about a person and that one’s entire worth as a human being is tied up in the one number. They then say this proves that intelligence is completely irrelevant to anything.

. . .

Another type of binary argument people make is that because one’s environment can have an impact on one’s intelligence as measured by test scores, this means that environment is so powerful it trumps any possible influence of genes. Once again, people are unable to understand that both effects can be important, or that environment can be important but perhaps slightly less important than one’s genotype.

The Green Religion in Korea

A commenter sent me a link to a Korean Benneton Green Ride website. In Korea, women apparently carry tote bags and wear T-shirts which read "Green Is My Religion."

Is this the singularity?

In Sweden, a man is attacked by a factory robot:

Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

RESPONSE TO CERTAIN COMMENTS

Some people don't get that I was being facetious.

Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

That’s the headline of an article at the Vancouver Sun which was linked to by the Drudge Report.

Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But [Ian Pilmer, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University in Australia] shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming.

. . .

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

This has been my point for a while, global warming is one of the main beliefs of the new post-Christian religion. Ian Pilmer, who is "vehemently anti-creationist," also understands the religion connection.

NYC Prep: Guests of Guests

This episode has more of a plot than any of the previous episodes. It centers around “Fashion Week.” It’s a week I’ve never heard of before, even though I’ve been living in Manhattan for the last four years. I’ve heard of Fleet Week but not Fashion Week.

JESSIE’S FIRST INTERNSHIP

Jessie gets an unpaid internship at the Charlotte Ronson fashion show, but all she does at this job is guard an entrance that no one is walking in or out of, so she quits.

TAYLOR, COLE, PC AND KAT ATTEND FASHION SHOW

PC invites Taylor to see the Jill Stuart fashion show. Taylor brings her boyfriend Cole. PC also shows up with his girl friend Kat (and there’s a bonus clip of PC and Kat having a cell phone fight) , and they are both wearing big sunglasses which they don’t take off even when they are indoors.

Cole doesn’t like PC, but Taylor is a big PC fan. Taylor even thinks that PC’s sunglasses indoors look is cool. PC gets them all front row seats. PC loves sitting in the front row at fashion shows. PC loves fashion. PC and Kat are seriously studying the fashions, while Cole is making high-school-boy comments like “she’s tall,” “she looks mean” and “nice butt.”

Taylor says “purple is my favorite color.” Doesn’t she know that’s a prole color? I guess not because she goes to public high school.

SEBASTIAN AND KELLI GO ON A DATE

Sebastian takes Kelli to the Erin Fetherston fashion show. Sebastian explains to the audience that he’s not into fashion, but he’s into Kelli.

Kelli and Sebastian share their dislike of PC. Kelli hates PC. Sebastian agrees with her. “Yeah, he’s a dick.”

Sebastian make a big mistake by talking about how Taylor and he are no longer friends. “So now that I’m not hanging out with Taylor any more, maybe we should hang out.” It makes it seem like Kelli is his second choice rebound girl.

About the fashion show itself, Sebastian tells the camera, “I don’t think anyone would wear that shit, ever.”

PC is attending the same fashion show! He’s sitting in the front row (his favorite place) with Devorah, the magazine editor from last week's episode.

After the show, PC just happens to bump into Kelli and Sebastian in front of Bryant Park. (I feel like a lot of these coincidental meetings are set up by the producers of the show). PC attempts to apologize to Kelli for his behavior at the dinner party two episodes ago. But instead, he just winds up insulting her maturity again, and Kelli is pissed. “I mean like I feel like this is more, like I’m fighting with, like a chick.” Another hint about PC’s sexuality! And note that Kelli really likes the word “like.”

PC, JESSIE, AND KAT GO TO THE PAMELLA ROLAND FASHION SHOW

PC tells Jessie about his fight with Kelli. Then they go inside, where they bump into Devorah. Jessie immediately dislikes Devorah because she can tell she’s not from New York.

While PC is hanging out with Devorah and Devorah’s friend Katrina, Jessie and Kat take the two front row seats. PC is pissed when he finds out they didn’t leave him a front row seat because PC loves the front row. PC tells the camera that “Jessie is such a little fat [beep].” That’s mean, I think Jessie is cute at her current weight.

Jessie tells the camera, “your not even a girl!” implying that it’s not manly for a guy to want to sit at the front row of a fashion show. Perhaps Jessie didn’t get the message yet about PC’s ambivalent sexuality, but in a preview ad for next week’s episode, we see her asking PC if he’s gay!

CAMILLE AND KELLI

The producers have no idea what to do with Camille because she refuses to do anything interesting like have a boyfriend or be bisexual or get into fights with people. She also doesn’t seem to get along with any of the other kids, except for Kelli. So this episode, we see Camille and Kelli hanging out, but Camille gets on Kelli’s nerves because Camille doesn’t approve Kelli having a stylist. I don’t think that Camille approves of Kelli’s desire to be a singer. She thinks it’s prole (my word, not hers), and thinks that Kelli ought to be interested in going to an Ivy League school. But Kelli really isn’t Ivy League material.

It’s kind of hypocritical for Camille to look down on Kelli for getting a stylist, because didn’t Camille have a stylist help her throw out her old clothes a few episodes ago?

* * *

To be continued… this is taking a long time… didn’t even get to the part about Taylor explaining to the camera that PC is bisexual.

Another lesson in dealing with cops

A reader sent me a link to a story about a 72-year-old white woman who was tasered by a black cop at a traffic stop. What she was doing was basically the same thing that the Harvard professor Gates was doing, yelling and acting belligerent at the cop.

This story isn’t going to become national news and be a big story about reverse racism, because no one cares about prole white women, at least no one with any power cares about them.

She should have followed my advice that in the presence of a cop, you must always attempt to give the impression that you’re a non-violent person who would never do physical harm to a cop or to anyone else, because cops are always worried that the next person they pull over at a traffic stop could be a desperate criminal. Yeah, she may be an old woman, but an old woman could whip out a gun and kill a cop as easily as a big muscular man with a gun.

The issue isn't that you're not allowed to disagree with cops, the issue is that you must get the cop to think of you as a non-violent person. Then he will be more relaxed around you.

In a related issue, if a cop seems to think you are guilty of a crime that's more serious than a traffic ticket or jay walking, it's always a good idea to invoke your right to remain silent.

In Japan, more women want to be hostesses

According to the NY Times, hostess jobs in Japan are become more popular with women because it’s the highest paying job they can get with the economy so bad. The best hostesses make well over $100,000 per year. That’s a lot of money for a woman in her 20s with no education.

All hostesses have to do is flirt with male customers. There’s no stripping or sex. There’s no equivalent job in the United States. Men in the United States aren’t willing to pay big money just to have women flirt with them. But in the United States, I’m sure that strippers make a lot more money than anything else women in their 20s can do. I wonder if the recession has caused a surge of applications for stripper positions?

* * *

In the United States, attractive young women with no education can make good money working as waitresses. At good restaurants (but not the super-top-level restaurants where the waiters are older men trying to act aristocratic), the waitresses are young and attractive, and the tip from a single table is more money than someone would earn from several hours of work at Walmart.

Herbivore men in Japan

There’s an article about Japan’s herbivore men in today’s National Post.

Hotel worker Roshinante has no interest in actively pursuing women, is nonchalant about a career and finds cars a bore -- and he is not alone in opting for a quiet, uncompetitive lifestyle.

Roshinante, 31, who prefers the anonymity of his online handle, is one of a growing group of men dubbed "herbivorous boys" by the media, who are rejecting traditional masculinity when it comes to romance, jobs and consumption in an apparent reaction to the tougher economy.

It’s not just a few isolated men, but a huge national trend:

Almost half of 1,000 men aged 20-34 surveyed by market research firm M1 F1 Soken identified themselves as "herbivorous," defined literally as grass-eating but in this context as not being interested in flesh or passive about pursuing women.

It must be pretty easy to meet women in Japan if half of the men are not "actively pursuing women." That would create a quite favorable ratio for men.

* * *

More about herbivore men in Slate:

Unlike earlier generations of Japanese men, they prefer not to make the first move, they like to split the bill, and they're not particularly motivated by sex. "I spent the night at one guy's house, and nothing happened—we just went to sleep!" moaned one incredulous woman on a TV program devoted to herbivores. "It's like something's missing with them," said Yoko Yatsu, a 34-year-old housewife, in an interview. "If they were more normal, they'd be more interested in women. They'd at least want to talk to women."

A whopping 75% of single men in their 20s and 30s consider themselves herbivores.

Some women are stepping up to the plate:

Japanese women are not taking the herbivores' indifference lightly. In response to the herbivorous boys' tepidity, "carnivorous girls" are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing men more aggressively. Also known as "hunters," these women could be seen as Japan's version of America's cougars.

* * *

Some Japanese men are having sex with dolls:

When the 45-year-old, who uses a pseudonym of Ta-Bo, returns home, it's not a wife or girlfriend who await him, but a row of dolls lined up neatly on his sofa. … The man, who says he has had sex with five women but prefers the dolls, is one of a gradually increasing, though secretive, group of Japanese men who have given up on women.

* * *

According to the Japan Times, there’s an unexpected benefit of having such a high percentage of herbivore men:

[T]he (per capita) rate of murders committed by men in their 20s in Japan is now the lowest in the world.

"Behind all this is the fading of social values that have driven men into violent acts. Men don't have to be violent any more, and that's why they can be herbivorous."

Firefighting test is a disguised IQ test

Buried in Steve Sailer’s VDare article about the NY Firefighter’s exam thrown out by the judge as being racist is a link to the actual test.

The test is a disguised intelligence test. The questions only appear to be about firefighting, but in fact they are just math, reading comprehension, and logic questions which require no prior knowledge of firefighting. The judge figured this out and threw out the test, because using an intelligence test to hire blue collar workers violates the holding of Grigg v. Duke Power Co. This probably would have gotten past a less perceptive judge.

Why was the supposedly conservative Bush administration on the wrong side of this case? Because religious conservatives, like Bush, only care about issues like abortion and school prayer. On other issues, they can be liberal. This is why the future of conservatism is imperiled by the Christian Right takeover of the Republican party. The Christians don’t care that much about non-religious conservative issues. And Christians don’t believe in evolution, so don’t expect them to support HBD which is an evolution-based theory.

Men are stronger than women

The response of some people to reading the headline will be, “duh!”

The above reaction probably explains why this phenomenon hasn’t been studied that much. But it’s worthy of study because, as far as I know, it’s the greatest example of sexual dimorphism in humans.

There is a lot of negative reaction from female readers at the suggestion that they might be 4/15 of a standard deviation less intelligent than men. But women don’t seem to mind at all that they are 2 SD shorter than men and, as far as my best guess goes, 3 SD weaker than men.

A 3 SD difference means that a very weak man would be weaker than a very strong women, but if men and women were paired off randomly it would be pretty rare for the man to be the weaker member of the couple. It would be a lot rarer than the woman being taller than the man because there is only a 2 SD height difference. A man of average strength may never encounter a woman who is stronger than him, unless he happens to bump into a female bodybuilder who cheats by taking anabolic steroids (drugs that reproduce the muscle-building effect of testosterone but are supposed to have fewer masculinizing side effects). Even female bodybuilders on steroids are not as strong as male bodybuilders, so there is more to the male-female strength difference than just testosterone.

As mentioned before at this blog, there is a significant difference in math ability between men and women (perhaps half an SD), but the difference doesn’t show up until puberty. The same is true of strength differences. The average prepubescent boy is only slightly stronger than the average girl of the same age, and because girls enter puberty about two years earlier than boys, there is a brief span at around the age of 12 to 13 or so when the average girl is actually stronger than the average boy. But then, just as boys pull ahead in math ability, they pull way ahead in physical strength.

The difference in math ability causes great envy among some feminist types, and this attitude has mostly gone mainstream. The typical modern woman will get very mad at you if you point out that men are better at math because they are men. But women don’t want to be strong like men. The ideal body type for women is to be skinny which gives off the appearance of weakness. The higher up the social class ladder you go, the more emphasis women will place on being thin. Most women don’t want to lift weights because they don’t want to be stronger. The most popular exercise activity for women in Manhattan seems to be running, which tends to make women look gaunt and less strong-looking.

Women generally like their men to be strong, and it’s common to hear the rationalization of “strong men make me feel safe.” But statistically speaking, a woman’s boyfriend or husband is far more likely to beat her up than anyone else. During the time of my brief internship at the city prosecutor’s office in Phoenix, I saw a whole bunch of men being tried for beating up their girlfriends or wives. Women would be a lot safer partnered with a weak man who couldn’t beat her up.

Is it any different in Japan. According to that NY Times article:

[T]he new Japanese woman, according to the fashion critic Ikuko Hirayama, is: "strong, robust, bursting with energy. She takes care of her body but is not obsessed with being thin. She's proud of her biceps and also proud of her sexuality."

And then later in the article, that role reversal couple:

Both Shirakawa and his girlfriend like the fact that she weighs more than he does, and is the leader of the couple. "She's a lot stronger than I am, can lift heavy things and go drinking until dawn. I admire that about her, and feel protected when I'm around her," he said.

People generally think this article is bogus and the reporter made most of it up. Most Asian women I see look pretty thin and weak to my eyes, but I haven’t been to Japan—maybe Japan is full of strong robust women showing off their biceps, but somehow I doubt it.

What are the evolutionary pressures which caused men to get so much stronger than women? Sure, we assume that muscles helped men fight other men for women, and helped men when they went out hunting, but why didn’t women also get stronger? Wouldn’t strength also be beneficial for women who often had to gather food for herself and her children? There must be something negative for women about being strong. Maybe muscles are detrimental to overall health? Women tend to live longer than men. Do big muscles lower one’s life expectancy? The least muscular race, Asians, have the longest life expectancy, and the most muscular race, blacks, have the shortest life expectancy.

Japan's 2-D men

Last week (how did I miss this?) there was an article in the NY Times Magazine about Japan’s 2D lovers. Those are men who have romantic feelings for inanimate depictions of anime characters. The article profiles a guy names Nisan who always carries around a stuffed pillowcase with his favorite anime girl printed on it.

According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex. One of the biggest best sellers in the country last year was “Health and Physical Education for Over Thirty,” a six-chapter, manga-illustrated guidebook that holds the reader’s hand from the first meeting to sex to marriage.

Toru Honda is the “guru” of the 2-D movement:

Honda argues that romance was marketed so excessively through B-movies, soap operas and novels during Japan’s economic bubble of the ’80s that it has become a commodity and its true value has been lost; romance is so tainted with social constructs that it can be bought by only good looks and money. According to Honda, somewhere along the way, decent men like himself lost interest in the notion entirely and turned to 2-D.

I love these articles that show how Japan is so much different than the United States when it comes to relations between the sexes. I think that so many centuries of arranged marriages have bred out of a lot of Japanese the ability to navigate romance on their own.

Evolution causing women to become more beautiful?

A reader asked me to comment on an article alleging that women have been evolving to become more beautiful.

I believe that evolutionary pressures cause sexual dimorphism. For example, men are much stronger than women. But women must gain something from being physically weaker—perhaps better overall health?

Anyway, it may be that in the past, physical attractiveness didn’t do much for men’s reproductive opportunities, but that’s not so true today when women are behaving more like men in that they are looking for good looking men rather than stable providers.

How can the NY Times make more money?

Traditional revenue from advertising and sales of the print edition are falling, and the New York Times can’t figure out how to monetize its website. Giving stuff away for free is a business model which only works if the stuff costs very little to produce. The New York Times, however, seems to be quite an expensive operation. According to its 2008 annual report, the New York Times had an annual operating cost of $2.8 billion. That’s a lot of money!

The New York Times previously had the idea that people would be willing to pay $50 per year to read its op-ed pages. This didn’t work because the internet is full of high quality opinion articles which you can read for free.

I have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal’s website. It’s worth the money because the Journal has a lot of high quality articles which you can’t read anywhere else, and it’s still less expensive than paying for a print subscription.

Unfortunately for the New York Times, its content isn’t quite as unique. If the NY Times closed off its national and international news to non-subscribers, you could read the same stories at the Washington Post or CNN. Some would see unique value in the way the NY Times presents these stories, but the majority of internet readers, accustomed to reading the news for free, will turn to other websites.

An example of the type of content only available at the NY Times is the article currently atop the most-emailed list, 101 Simple Salads for the Season. Is this content worth paying for? Maybe if you’re the type of person who serves salads to a lot of guests and want to impress people with your knowledge of the latest trends in salads. I think I could live without it.

If the NY Times simply said, from now on, you can’t read our website unless you pay us, a certain percentage of readers would definitely pay. I would probably pay, but the majority of readers won’t. The New York times fears that the loss of readership would ultimately harm its reputation as the premier source of news, and is probably also hesitant about making predictions regarding what percentage of its internet readers, accustomed to reading the news for free, will pull out their credit cards.

One plan that’s guaranteed not to make a whole lot of money is the one described at Gawker in which the news remains free but subscribers are given access to special new content. Would I pay $50 per year to view “videos of [] reporters telling the story behind the story”? I don’t think so, who has time for that? I also don’t need a New York Times tote bag. The NY Times might make one or two million dollars a year from this plan, but it’s not going to save the company.

Maybe the only way to make the NY Times really profitable is to cut costs. Does it really require $2.8 billion to run the NY Times? The cynical view of corporate spending is that expenses always rise to the level of revenue available. Why can’t the Times produce a product nearly as good for a lot less money?

The real name blog, part II

The real name blog would not replace Half Sigma, but complement it. It would have as little impact on Half Sigma as any of my other infrequently updated blogs. I would not even link to it from Half Sigma, but certain members of the community of readers whom I trust might be given the url to it.

One thing that I’m really good at is blogging, so the real name blog could be a plus by demonstrating my writing skills and my commitment to virtues which are socially valuable and would be seen as a positive by future employers rather than a negative. It would not be a politics blog, although maybe 20% of the posts would comment on the news. Other posts would be about personal topics, show off some of my photographs, essays about life in New York City, etc. It would not be updated as much as Half Sigma because obsessive blogging would be seen by some people as a negative personality trait.

There are a lot of respectable people with blogs, so the only question is whether or not some future employer might see any blog, no matter how innocuous, as a minus.

Beware of Chinese women

I was following the links in the China Daily newspaper, and came across the following article:

A woman in Haikou, Hainan province, thrashed her husband black and blue after he brought home a fake banknote.

The man, 48, a grocery store owner, suffered several fractured bones.

He returned home one evening and, as usual, handed over the day's earnings to his 32-year-old wife, who spotted a fake banknote and began beating the daylights out of him.

The woman later apologized to her husband, who is still recuperating in a hospital.

That’s a 16 year age difference between the husband and the wife.

Agreeableness and physical attractiveness

According to this article (which I can’t actually read because I don't feel like paying for it), there is a 0.43 correlation between agreeableness and physical attractiveness.

That’s an extremely high correlation for a personality trait. It explains why atheists are uglier than average. People who are agreeable would go along with the majority belief in god, and even if they weren’t religious themselves they wouldn’t want to upset people by publicly proclaiming their atheism.

I am pretty sure the cause and effect is in the direction of lower physical attractiveness causing people to develop less agreeable personalities. People who are good looking benefit from the status quo and thus agree with it. It has also been noted that criminal behavior is correlated with low physical attractiveness.

Shanghai encourages couples to have two children

According to China Daily, the one-child policy has been relaxed in recent years. Urban couples who are both only-children are allowed to have two children. But apparently, not enough urban couples are biting, and the city of Shanghai is now actively encouraging more children:

Family planning officials and volunteers will make home visits and slip leaflets under doorways to encourage couples to have a second child if both grew up as only children. Emotional and financial counseling will also be provided, officials said.

"We advocate eligible couples to have two kids because it can help reduce the proportion of the aging people and alleviate a workforce shortage in the future," said Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission.

Shanghai, the country's most populous city, has more than 3 million registered residents aged 60 and above, nearly 22 percent of the population. By 2020, the proportion is expected to rise to about 34 percent.

From a eugenics standpoint, China’s one-child policy is not thought out so well. China should be giving people IQ tests and allowing those with high IQs to have as many children as they want. Instead, China is giving preferential treatment to rural areas and minorities; these policies will have a dysgenic effect and make the next generation of Chinese less intelligent.

The NY Times interpretation of the China Daily article doesn't quite have the facts right. The NY Times seems to think that Shanghai is changing the policy, but if you read the article you see that the policy has already been changed, and Shanghai wants to encourage more people to take advantage of it because there are too many people like the 26-year-old office worker Xiao Chen who says, “I don't think we will have a second kid. After all, it is stressful work raising a child." Probably, the natural birthrate in China's urban areas is similar to Korea and Japan where women, on average, have 1.2 and 1.3 babies, not anywhere near close enough to replace the current population.

New blog under real name

I'm considering starting a new blog under my real name. MyRealName.net. Someone has already stolen MyRealName.com.

The advantage of blogging under my real name is that I would have a web presence under my real name. When someone typed my name into Google, my blog would appear at the top of search results.

Of course such a blog is fraught with peril. For example, no posts during work hours, no posts about HBD, no posts about anything controversial, no colorful language or negativity or anything else that would cause me to not get hired by future employers.

If the blog had no controversial topics, why would anyone want to read it?

Manhattan is New York's thinnest county

Manhattan is the thinnest county in New York State as measured by the percentage of people who are “overweight” or “obese.”

This should have been easily predicted based on a whole bunch of demographic reasons.

(1) Rich people are thinner than poor people.

(2) Young people are thinner than older people.

(3) Single people are thinner than married people.

Manhattan residents are more likely to be affluent young single people compared to any other county in the state. When Manhattan residents get married, they often move to the suburbs.

Calorie restriction is bogus

There was a hubbub in the news recently about how an experiment showed that monkeys on a calorie restricted diet lived longer.

But, it turns out, this conclusion is bogus. Sandy, at the Junkfood Science blog, bothered to read the actual study, and the real results were that there was no statistically significant difference between the death rates of the two groups of monkeys.

I remind readers again that multiple large studies of humans show that overweight people (BMI between 25 and 30) have the lowest death rate.

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Found this article by following links in comments on the FeministX blog.

The Henry Louis Gates incident

People have wanted me to comment on this, so here goes:

(1) It’s clear to me that the police had probable cause to assume that Gates might be a burglar, because they were responding to a phone call from a witness who claimed she saw two men breaking into his house. So when they asserted the right to make him prove he lived there, they were just doing their job.

(2) It’s also clear to me that it’s always a stupid idea to lose your temper at cops. To give the cops the benefit of the doubt here, they always fear that the next guy they approach might turn out to be a desperate and violent criminal, so you should always try to give cops the impression that you’re a non-violent person who would never do physical harm to a cop or anyone else.

(3) Gates is supposed to be a smart Harvard professor, so he should know the truth of point #2 above. If he wanted to demonstrate his superiority over the less intelligent blue collar cop, he should have done it by being calm and well behaved. And yes, sometimes cops do act like assholes (although it’s not clear whether this cop was acting like an asshole), but the smart thing to do when cops act like assholes is not let them provoke you into doing something stupid.

(4) Whether or not Gates should have been arrested for going off on the cop is not clear to me. Whether or not Gates’ race made the cop more likely to arrest him is also not clear. Believe it or not, cops arrest white people all time. Even though the cop is not as smart as Gates, I am sure he’s smart enough to know the difference between a ghetto black and a middle class back, so I think it’s more likely than not that a similarly situated white perp would have been given the same treatment.

(5) Apparently, Gates is walking around with a huge racial chip on his shoulder such that he sees some huge racial insult whenever someone doesn’t treat him like a big shot Harvard professor.

(6) Obama had no business commenting on this.

The future of manned spaceflight

Tom Wolfe has a billiant essay on manned spaceflight which appeared in the NY Times a few days ago, but somehow I overlooked it until today.

More than four years ago (wow, I've had this blog for more than four years), I wrote:

Manned space travel is a huge waste of money. Since 1972, the date of the last manned moon mission, we have accomplished absolutely nothing except putting men into low orbit again and again for no purpose but at extraordinary cost and risk to their lives.

The people making up this policy have been watching too much Star Trek. People need to wake up and realize how pointless it all is.

Today I make the following bold prediction: China will be the first nation to send men to Mars.

Men smarter than women

I was reading through a J. Philippe Rushton journal article about brain size.

There is the usual evidence of how Asians have larger brains than whites who have larger brains than blacks. But what’s interesting is that men have larger brains than women, and the article presents a lot of evidence that men have higher g, on average, than women.

According to Rushton, one of the reasons why people have been confused about sex differences in intelligence is because a lot of IQ measurements are of school-aged children. Girls mature earlier than boys, so until the age of 14, girls and boys score approximately equally on IQ tests. But when adults are tested, the IQ gap is approximately 4 points.

There is a valid evolutionary reason for higher male intelligence. There has always been a woman shortage, which means that nearly all women are able to find mates and reproduce, but the lowest ranking men in the group have their genes culled from the gene pool. Thus the least intelligent men more often lose out in the competition for women and don't get to pass on their genes. Apparently, physical strength has, historically, been more important in the competition for women than intelligence, because there’s much greater sexual dimorphism for physical strength than there is for intelligence.

But women have higher verbal skills. Why are verbal skills more important for women than for men? Rushton is silent, but my own theory is that verbal skills help women figure out which men are the alpha males, and women who are able to mate with alphas will have sons with alpha traits and thus have more grandchildren, via their male children, than women who mate with beta men.

So female intelligence is most heavily geared towards figuring out which men are the most alpha (or most prestigious, most socially connected, etc.), while male intelligence is most heavily geared towards obtaining resources and defeating other men in competitions. Mathematical skills helped primitive men when they went hunting, and helped more civilized men be better farmers or tradesmen, but it didn't help men figure out what's popular and trendy.