Gonna Examine It

Science is.  Science is often not what you want it to be, because the facts don't care.

I strive, desperately, to not be a bigot in my behavior and thinking.

I tend to reject the bigot's answers for things because their answers are trite and made to fit preconceived notions.

But there's a kernel of doubt.

The OG racists in America were southern slave owners.

The people most familiar with American blacks, over and over, described "childlike" behavior and attitudes.

I always chalked that down to a culture imposed upon them because:  How much culture does a slave need to be a good slave?

They were not inculcated with Western Civ's values because those didn't help them be good property. 

Because I think in science, I read stuff that has conclusions I dislike.

Like this.  It's published by a thoroughly white supremacist group.  Take it with a carton of salt.  Remember what I said about trite answers fitting preconceived conclusions.

Just because I don't want the problems with American Blacks to be inborn and uncorrectable, doesn't mean I shouldn't consider it.

Science will not care if I don't want it any more than it doesn't care if a bigot does.

We're not going to do the research for real because it asks hard questions and the best solution could ultimately be extremely racist because, if that paper is correct, we'd have to, structurally, treat black people differently from white people.

That doesn't align well with "All men are created equal" in a document we just celebrated. 

Processed Chemicals

Just as every bit of matter is a chemical...

If you're not eating it raw, it's been processed.

Cooking is a process.

Harvesting is a process.

Butchering is a process.

Motor oil is organic, by the way.  All hydrocarbons are organic molecules.

All domesticated food sources are genetically modified.  Some by injecting genes and splicing, some by the old fashioned method of selective breeding. 

This has been your linguistic science fact diatribe of the day! 

Rephrasing The Problem Sometimes Helps

Wind and solar are what you put up with for energy production when you don't have gas, oil and nuclear power.

It's not an alternative until it's a replacement, and it will never be able to replace them. 

More To Say Than A Comment Will Bear

Joe Huffman posted.

At issue is:

Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down.

It’s not that the lower IQ person is “stupid” (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it’s that you’re literally operating on different systems.

A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means:

Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into “this good, that bad.”

Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language.

Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed.

Both walk away frustrated.

Both have wasted each others time.

Jøhnathan @Heavenly_Race_
Posted on X May 25, 2026

I have frequently been the person who's 20 to 30 points behind the person I've been talking to.  Marv's 152, for example.  The physics students who played in my Traveller campaign definitely had higher IQ's.  I dunno what FuzzyGeff or Technomad score, but I know it's higher than me.

I routinely tested around IQ 139, despite that being below the threshold for Mensa, I still passed their silly test.  I declined the membership because...  Have you been to a meeting?  It'd be faster to tattoo your score on your forehead so everyone can segregate properly and look down their noses appropriately.

I have noticed that I'm making connections that others do not see when figuring out something abstract and complex.

Because a draftsman is a translator between engineers and tradesmen, I learned to speak both languages.

And it's more of a dialect problem than a language problem.  Terminology not words.

But being smart doesn't give one the magic ability to suppress instant gratification.

Most of the smart people I know have poor savings skills.  But the ones who do have good skills in this regard have exceptionally good skills.

Many of us have extremely awkward social skills that have hampered conventional success.

Vocabulary is more a function of education than ability!  Those tradesmen include some VERY intelligent people who don't speak with a college vocabulary, but can understand and visualize what they're about to build and what they need to build it faster than I can.

Capitalism For The Win

Watch this:

If you're skeptical, remember that the plastics industry is the result of finding a use for the crud left over from refining oil into fuel.

If allowed to do so, Humanity is good at solving problems.

Genes

The Boy's psychiatrist ordered a round of genetic testing for him.

She did a bad job of explaining why, but we have the results in and...

It was a allele compatibility test with certain drugs and it actually explains a lot of observed things.

What it showed is that some drugs don't work like they're supposed to work with certain genetic markers.  Some as bad as having the opposite effect as expected.

This is particularly true of sedatives and The Boy.

The good news is that it also identifies drugs that should work correctly with his genetic markers.

It's kind of neat we're learning enough about this stuff to be able to tailor a cocktail just for one person. 

We Have Met Them And They Is Us

Science, being well known for settling things for all time...

Wait.

Science keeps on marching on and making your reference materials obsolete.

The latest theory running through anthropology is that Cro-magnon, neanderthal, and denisovans is that they aren't separate species, but simply different populations of humans.

Dog breeds show as much difference as the different homo-sapiens species.

If they were simply different populations of humans, then the neanderthals being "wiped out" is explained by two populations merging via breeding.

It's a neat theory and completely off limits in 1973 in my oldest book on neanderthals. 

How Many Of These Myths Are There?

Widner's did an article about how shooting out the tires doesn't work like Hollywood, and thus not like how most people think it should.

Linky dinky.

Anyone who's watched a live cop show has seen how long it takes spike strips to flatten a tire and seen that it will still run on the rims for a bit.

But the rims don't give a lot of traction or control...

Shooting out the tires could cause a car to do far more damage than the driver is trying to inflict.

Simpler Mechanism Than I Thought

In Engineering School they didn't bother with the why of gyroscopic precession.  They just covered the what, because that's all we needed to know.

Turns out it's simple!

 It's just applied vectors.

Something To Remember

The entire world was on the gold standard in the 16th and 17th centuries.

One of the reasons for the golden age of piracy was the massive devaluation of gold thanks to Spain massively increasing the supply of available gold in Europe because they were moving it from the new world.

It's a great example of how even gold can have inflation.

It seems unlikely that we're going to find a massive enough amount of gold to cause it to devalue like when Spain toppled all those kingdoms in the new world, but Elon is still working on super heavy launchers.

Who knows what's in the asteroids?

This Is Twice

"Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  The third time it's enemy action."

-- A Goldfinger 

For the second time a trans person has shot up a place associated with a religious school.

First in Tennesee.  Now in Minnesota.

We're getting perilously close to "where there's smoke there's fire" point and having to look a lot harder at the trans community and ask some hard questions.

One question that the LGBT community will fight tooth and nail to keep from being asked, let alone answered, is, "is gender dysphoria the primary ailment or a secondary symptom of an underlying problem?"

Modern psychiatry doesn't want to ask this either, from fear of the LGBT community's response.

I'll say it again.

The people with simple gender dysphoria are absolutely harmless.  The only problem is a mild delusion that the person in the mirror isn't them.  It's easy to work with and around.  They also tend to live long, reasonably happy lives.

Then there's the folks with gender problems that stem from something deeper.  Again, most of the time, it's manageable and has happy outcomes.

Outcomes that lead to them recognizing their genetic sex as their gender.

This is an outcome that's unacceptable to the LGBT political activists and they try to treat a symptom with little more than placebos and palliatives; leading to the underlying problem to run rampant untreated.

Why?

Because if you do, successfully, treat the underlying problem they stop being trans!

The activists can't fucking have that!

We can't even try to sort the different causes out from one another without being accused of LGBT genocide or other such nonsense.

So we end up with untreated psychoses which lead to violence to themselves and others.

There's some huge problems in modern psychiatry that need to be addressed, and there's a mountain of political activists in the way of what was once a promising scientific field. 

Cyclic

I finally remembered that I wanted to see what the explanation for there being no hole in the ozone later over the arctic when nearly all of the CFC emissions are in the Northern hemisphere.

It's because the polar vortex in the antarctic is stable compared to the same weather structure in the arctic.

What hit me in the explanation is the reason for the hole appears to be a "wall" of weather that keeps atmosphere from the outside from mingling with the inside and this, combined with colder temperatures than up North, allows the ozone to be depleted inside the vortex.

The cold also explains why this catalytic reaction doesn't run rampant across the rest of the planet.

You need chlorine and bromine radicals attached to sub-freezing ice crystals in an isolating environment for it to destroy ozone.

Since this vortex is cyclical, the "wall" dissipates and fresh ozone from the outside can flow in.

What this also means is this was never a world-wide threat to ozone.  It's a local phenomenon. 

National Life Support Day

1902 – Willis Carrier creates the first air conditioner in Buffalo, New York. This should be a national holiday.

h/t Mostly Cajun 

Vids On The Topic

It's been well covered.

Longer version:

I Thought Orangutans Were Bigger

 I was watching a video about gigantopithecus.

It's a 9' tall, 650ish lb. orangutan.  Maybe 700 lb.

Being the geek I am, I calculated the things ST from its weight.

17 or 18.

How strong is a normal orangutan?

I remember them being a lot larger, like 300 lb. for a male.

Nope.

Just 165 lb. on average for a GURPS ST of 11.  About the same as a chimpanzee.

Gorillas are 400ish lb. and rate a ST of 15 in case you're curious.

Rounding out the great apes is we humans at ST 10.

Who You Gonna Believe

I have to admit, I am bit torn.

I definitely don't want a nation that has "Death to America" rallies to have a nuclear device.

But, for as long as they've been at it, you'd think that Iran would have come up with something by now.  Something includes a power plant, by the way.

It took less than three years from theory to Trinity.  With 1940's tech.

On the other hand, it does feel like if they weren't up to something, we wouldn't keep finding out about secret nuclear research labs.

Which brings us to the recent statement by the IAEA chief that Iran isn't intending to build a bomb.  Considering how often a new, secret, facility that the IAEA had no knowledge of is found...  Forgive me for being skeptical of their analysis.

Looking at things, I've been hearing about how close Iran is to making a nuke for close to 30 years and there's, proven, timelines to get there that are far shorter.

Which does make me wonder just how bad the post-Shah brain drain was.

Was everyone smart enough to make a nuke also smart enough to escape? 

Biggest

 The biggest land dinosaur compared with the largest land mammal.

 With a paleontologist for scale in the bottom left.

Read Up!

Ammo To Go did the testing so you don't have to!

tldr: Your magazine springs are going to outlast both the gun and the magazine body.

This conflicts with personal experience a little bit.

When I changed over from Daewoo DR-200 to AR-15 I found that my "hoard" of USGI black-follower 30-rounders pretty consistently failed to feed the last three rounds in the AR's but worked fine in the DR-200.

Replacing the followers and springs cured it.  Since I did both at the same time I am not sure if it was the new spring or the Magpul anti-tilt follower that did it.

The magazines in question were obtained from an Iowa National Guard soldier who probably snagged them from the DX bin. 

I still have them someplace, but I haven't seen them in years.  I bought a ton of new magazines to supplement them, you never know when the next AWB will hit.

I Should Get A Grant

As an almost psychology graduate, some aspects of research make me wonder if I could have gotten the grant and done the study.

I was reading this article when I wondered:  In the absence of racial differences, will groups create their own divisions to mistreat in the same manner as racism. 

What made me think of it was my experience in high school in Iowa.

Iowa, at the time, lacked minorities.

But we had many "out" groups in the school.

It'd be an interesting field of study.

366.24

Did you know that every year the earth actually rotates 366.24 times?

"But there are only 365 days in a year!" I hear you object.

Both are true.

We lose a "day" each year to our rotation around the sun.

Neat, huh?