Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The muse quote of the day is brought to you by Ursula K. LeGuin, in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, reprinted in The Language of the Night:

I do not say that artists cannot be seers, inspired: that the awen cannot come upon them, and the god speak through them. Who would be an artist if they did not believe that that happens? If they did not know it happens, because they have felt the god within them use their tongue, their hands? Maybe only once, once in their lives. But once is enough.

The Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards 2004 are open for voting. This fandom public service announcement was brought to you live, in real time, by the long-lost Jemima. Don’t hold your breath for the next live entry.

Someone emailed me about my experiences with Arraiolos kits. There’s been a wool problem with the kit I got a while back, and I really ought to chase down the company about it.

I probably should have gotten a kit from Serranofil or, even better, Rosários. I can’t tell whether they sell yarn alone - when I have time, I’ll look at the Portuguese version of the Rosários site and report back.

A couple of posts from Jason at Gene Expression discuss unusual variations in height between countries and within individual countries over the course of time. The first post has some interesting excerpts from a New Yorker article and his own doubts that nutrition is the explanation. The second post tells the sad tale of short Koreans and other Asian height variations.

Here are a few fun links on media bias:

• What would right-wing media bias look like?
• Orson Scott Card on The Fanatics Who Tell Us the News (via Ace of Spades) and non-fanatic Dennis Miller

Cheese link of the day: Guard Your Cheese

On June 22nd, 1940, the French surrendered to the Nazis. The newly-formed Vichy governmend asked for an armistice, the terms of which were signed in the same railway car as the armistice of November 1918. The car was then destroyed.

The latest installment of La Griffe du Lion considers why Asian incomes lag behind that predicted by their IQ’s. The math may bore the average reader to tears, but his answer is quite striking - Asians excell in the spatial reasoning portion of IQ but lag in verbal IQ, and this difference has an impact on the GDP of East Asian nations.

The relation between GDP and IQ doesn’t keep me up at night, but it surprised me to hear that verbal IQ (whatever that is) was a more important factor than the other kind. I’d have guessed that spatial reasoning, vital to engineering and physics, gave more of an advantage. Maybe this explains why the majority of students in higher education now are women, despite a lower average IQ - because women tend to have better verbal skills and men better spatial ones.

Ace of Spades asked whether conservatives volunteer the liberal-bashing as much as liberals spread the Bush-hatred:

Let me tell you what liberals in New York are like. They have absolutely no hesitation about injecting stridently liberal politics into conversations with perfect strangers they only just met. They have no sense that perhaps they ought not to be insulting those with different beliefs.

The vast majority of commentors agreed, and one linked Larry Elder (part 1 and part 2) on the same topic.

Why do the “decent, tolerant and open-minded” people throw social caution to the wind while denouncing President Bush? […] Bush’s critics call the president “arrogant.” But there’s a special type of arrogance that assumes any fair and open-minded person must think as I do.

He seemed to think it was simple anti-Bush media bias that made Bush-haters so forthcoming - if the press can say it, so can the average man. I didn’t find his explanation convincing. Ace’s commentors leaned towards the religion theory - liberalism is one of those religions that requires constant proselytization. A Christian will slip praise of Christ into casual conversation - he’ll risk alienating listeners for the chance to keep the message front and center. Likewise, a liberal will bash Bush, and when he finds out you voted for him he’ll try to save you from your political sins.

It’s an interesting theory, but I’m not sure I buy it. So if you’re one of those people who feels free to bash Bush in the course of casual conversation, maybe you can tell me why. The comments are open.

Classical Values has a fun list of Google results, showing that the spammers are now bigger than Satan, and as John Lennon once said, the Beatles are bigger than Christ.

There’s a new Cyberduck out, which I’m hoping will be less flakey than the last one. I’m downloading it now over a connection that feels slower than dialup. (Cyberduck is an open-source FTP client for Mac OS X.)