Michel.Evanchik.Net

Here’s an online IQ test that uses pattern recognition:

IQtest.dk

I’m above the curve but not as smart as I thought I was. I certainly did not do well enough to post my score online : (

The test is timed at forty minutes for 39 questions, and the questions do get progressively harder. You can go back and change your answers. It took me the full forty minutes to complete the test, and I rushed a bit at the end. My brain was tired afterwards.

I wonder if I would improve with practice? I expect training specific to this type of test would also be helpful. I suspect experience working matrices and linear algebra would improve one’s results. But for all my speculation, it seems a pretty good test.

I did take the test by just answering randomly a few times.  This gave an average score of about 80 (100 being average).  This seems to invalidate some of the test’s usefulness, at least on the lower level.  As a corollary, if you are advising an imbecile on how to score well, suggest that he just guess!

The sports blog With Leather is funny. I mean that it gives me hearty, stupid yuck-yucks, which are sorely appreciated in this complex and dangerous world.

Where else will you find links to two minutes and forty-seven seconds of bicycle mishaps and dead-on appreciations for the essence of professional baseball?

I would even recommend this to my non-sports following friends, especially the men, as it will de-wussify you just a little bit.

A wonderful French online exhibition on Utopian visions has some startling galleries of illustrations. They deal with old conjectures about the future, contemporary accounts of Western encroachment into the New World, and social and economic revolution. I have posted some of the most striking images below. Read the rest of this entry »

Sex chronicler Violet Blue reveals a little-known legacy of the Burning Man festival — increases in sexually transmitted diseases. Health clinics in the San Francisco area report a regular spike in sexually transmitted diseases in the weeks after the big brouhaha on the playa. Once again, it is shown that hippies and their cultural descendants are hazardous to your health.

Wow, it’s been ten days between posts on this blog.  It’s not that I haven’t had ideas in my head, or that I’ve been too busy.  It’s just that I haven’t bothered.

Ennui is a most dangerous feeling.

It’s an open secret that the Bush administration wants to bomb Iran.  So if Iraq is like Vietnam, according to the forty-third President, then is Iran like Cambodia and Laos?

This is going to end well.

Here’s a shout out to all my good friends who have linked to me:

Todd Seavey

Citizen Chris

Game On sports blog

It’s not late to send a little love, people. If you’re online, then post a link. Check out the “Best of” section if you are wondering what to specifically link to, or choose your own favorite post, or just link to the home page at michel.evanchik.net.

That ends today’s shameless self-promotion. Thanks for reading. Special big mega-thanks for linking. And a super-special gasface for everybody else.

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With even the conservative National Review admitting that departing Attorney General Gonzales is an incompetent way out of his depth,  there can be little doubt that his departure is well overdue.  But every cloud has a silver lining, as the liberal Talking Points Memo has helpfully pointed out.  They have compiled a video “top ten” of Gonzales miscues.  Saturday Night Live hasn’t been this funny in years.

Check it out.

Predatory lending is a real and serious problem. Lenders are not legalized confidence men, but have a fiduciary duty to look after their clients’ interests. Predatory lenders are those that have abrogated that trust, and they are, unfortunately, the norm. A borrower has an explicit right to expect that a lender will be honest and forthright in his dealings, and that the lender will make a conscious effort to make a loan on terms that are most advantageous to the borrower.

When this fiduciary duty is not kept, bad things happen. It is a crime, just like a doctor performing unnecessary surgery or a lawyer billing unnecessary hours to pump up their fees.

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There’s a pretty good discussion about the moral implications of the Michael Vick pit bull case in the comments to one of my recent blog entries.  It’s mostly me against the world.  Check it out.