undead astronauts

so the economist has an article up written by geoffrey miller, an evolutionary psychologist. he makes some rather stark observations.

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

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trailer for the 6 revealed characters. there’s only a few more new chars to go.

omg i love it.

i have recently became aware that liberals exist who have looked at the available data and have become convinced of the reality of hbd. one of these liberals is now struggling to reconcile hbd views and liberalism.

i appreciate this effort b/c i’ve stated previously that if liberals ignore this area of inquiry, they automatically cede the intellectual ground to conservatives and outright racists. i say this even though i’m not a liberal. i just happen to value divergent points of view as long as they are based on evidence and not ignorance, even if that evidence points to reality being pretty ugly. but what of asian-americans that might hold hbd views?

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an entertainment tidbit i found funny is how 2012 is a big hit in china. no, the chinese were probably not more impressed by the effects of the catastraporn movie than other ppl around the world. what made the chinese happy was that they were portrayed as instrumental in saving humanity. (more…)

Live streaming video by Ustream

check it out. qualifiers on the 21st, and finals on the 22nd.

thought this was interesting. sure, it’s propaganda, but it’s still interesting.

all ethnicities here.

the nation’s 5 fattest counties are “Greene and Dallas counties in Alabama and Holmes, Humphreys and Jefferson counties in Mississippi.” these counties are mostly populated by poor rural african-americans, and some of the estimates might be off, the article said.

other righteously rotund counties are in appalachian territory like kentucky and west virginia.

sad and pathetic, but unsurprising. counties in colorado, new mexico and utah had the lowest obesity rates.

the nsa says it’s been involved w/ microsoft in designing security measures against hackers in windows 7. and this is neither the first time nor the only OS vendor it has helped. the nsa was involved in vista’s design and has consulted w/ apple, sun, red hat, symantec, mcafee and intel.

i’m not usually a conspiracy guy, but this bugs me. u have the premiere electronic eavesdropping agency involved w/ OS and security firms. sure, this makes sense on a practical level b/c they’ll likely know tons about defeating security measures. but does anyone remember the clipper chip? it was designed as a way the gov’t could have a backdoor into encrypted communication. who knows if something similar might be going on w/ this “consulting.” at the very least, the gov’t is getting vendor level knowledge about what is vulnerable and what isn’t on current OS’s. the nsa’s main task conflicts directly w/ what these companies are trying to accomplish in security. i hope i’m just overthinking this, but i just don’t know.

UPDATE: ms denies any backdoors were built in. like they would ever confirm something like that…

the most recent LSAT test (sept/oct ‘09) had a record number of takers. out-of-work young ppl are looking to law as a fallback option, but the problem is that a lot of other out-of-work young ppl have the same idea. that’s great if firms are hiring, but law firms have been laying ppl off or freezing hiring as the economy has stalled out. this can and will change in 4 years of course, but increased competition in any field means those in the field must work harder to either get in the school of their choice, or settle for a less desirable school. if law schools decide to admit more students due to increased interest, it will affect this cohort for a good portion of their career as the increased competition will follow them into the job market. (hat tip to hs)

I came across an interesting article on Sankaku (a site that is definitely NSFW in general), but essentially, it says 98% of korean women in their 20s or 30s would go under the knife if they could, with 46% already have it. As this was a face to face survey, it is likely that the number of women who claim their beauty is fake is under-reported for reasons of vanity, with one woman claiming 80% of women have had plastic surgery.

Source: (NSFW NSFW) http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/11/08/98-of-korean-women-want-plastic-surgery-46-have-it/ (NSFW NSFW)

i’m surprised i haven’t come across this guy before, as his story is fascinating and he has ties to huntsville’s most famous inhabitant. qian xuesan was a chinese born rocket scientist that passed away this halloween.

he was born near shanghai and later went to MIT and caltech. after reaching caltech, he got interested in rocketry and helped found the jet propulsion lab in pasedena as a response to germany’s V-2 rocket. he was part of the manhattan project and after WW2, the US sent him to interview werner von braun and other german scientists.

“No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space program.”

his US work would be an inspiration for the space shuttle. he then married a famous opera singer jiang ying, who was the daughter of one of chiang kai shek’s military strategists.

i’m not sure if i’ve ever heard of a modern equivalent of a match like this. who has ever heard of a famous singing babe marrying an uber rocket nerd? anyways, qian’s luck would run out in 1950. (more…)

Chinese meteorologists covered Beijing in snow Sunday after seeding clouds to bring winter weather to the capital in an effort to combat a lingering drought, state media reported.

Article here.

Wha?