Why Americans Aren't Dumb

I ran into this article on MSN earlier today and thought I would pass it on. It tries to make the argument that Americans are smarter today than they ever have been, and are getting smarter. If you actually look at hard data, rather than listen to the usual collection of old people, who for thousands of years have liked to think, despite all evidence, that their generation is superior to the younger one, it is a pretty hard conclusion to avoid.

"The average IQ has increased steadily for decades, at a rate of about three points every ten years. The phenomenon's even got a name: the Flynn effect."

"Almost every age group of students has shown increased [math] scores over the last 30 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Almost twice as many students are taking advanced math as were 20 years ago. In general, we are just better at solving problems. The huge leaps in IQ have come in areas such as pattern recognition."

""Kids today don't know their facts." Evidence conflicts. The government stats say knowledge of history and geography is actually up slightly."

Save up to one cent!

I ran into this at the local P&C. The text at the bottom right is advertising that if you do not have their savings card you have to pay $2.99 for a cantaloupe. With the card however you only pay 2.98! What a deal!

Ron Paul

I remember why I support the guy despite his large number of crazy ideas to go along with his common sense:




I doubt many people can go on fox news, and make the case better than he can.

Watermelons

Cornell's webpage on crop varieties has about 450 varieties of melon. Since there are at least 2000 of them I have been helping them track down more, particularly watermelons. It really is a neat page, but it rather lacks in pictures of varieties it lists. This makes it difficult to figure out what is interesting, and what is like everything else.

While chasing down rare seeds I found this page on watermelon varieties. They actually grew over 100 watermelon varieties side by side! They then posted the yield for the variety in Washington State. That makes for a much more impressive way to see just how many types of watermelon there are. It also allows me to know that it would be really interesting to grow:

Desert King:



Petite Perfection:


Golden Midget


Yellow Bird:





Orange Sweet:



Japanese Cream Fleshed Suika:

Unfortunately no one on the internet sells seeds for this last variety!

And the two that are the size of gumballs in my garden.

Blacktail Mountain:

Which is among the best cold weather melons

And Cream of Saskatchewan

A variety that originally was from Russia before it was grown in Canada.


They also did similar for some other crops such as beans. I found these pages less impressive however.

Iphone number storage

I finally have an iphone again. A used 2g one, not 3g. While the whole experience was generally a pain, I was happy to find out one thing about the iphone. When you lose your phone, you don't lose your phone numbers. Usually whenever I lose a phone I spend weeks chasing around the phone number of everyone I know. With the iphone however I just had to tell my computer to restore my old settings on this iphone and sure enough it gave me all my phone numbers without any trouble.

Why do SWAT teams dress like thugs?

Recently SWAT teams have taken a lot of flak for incidents where innocent people have been killed. A common case goes like this: SWAT team breaks into wrong home. Home owner sees them and assumes they are trying to rob them and someone gets shot in the chaos. This is a fairly reasonably situation. If I saw these people in my house and I had a gun I cannot say that I wouldn't shoot:



They look like military commandos, or convenience store robbers, not police. If I was dressing up for a crime I would want to look pretty much the same. All black, with my face behind a mask. These are police officers however, they really should look like police officers.


If these guys broke into my house, I wouldn't shoot. It is fairly obvious what they are, and why I shouldn't be shooting them. Now, I understand that protective gear is rather important to the people who break into homes in the middle of the night, but there really needs to be more effort put into making these people look like police.

Iraq

Some good news that I haven't seen anyone call attention to is that July just beat the record for fewest deaths of U.S. military in Iraq for a month period. That record had been set in May with 19 deaths, unless some last minute additions get tacked on the current number for July is 13. Just one year ago 80 people were killed in the same month. It really is getting fairly reasonable to expect that within two years Iraq won't be an issue. The relative calm has managed to hold up since last October. Afghanistan however has been getting worse so it may be the net effect isn't much of an improvement.