Gates' big send-off | CNET News.com:
Bill Gates on “fungible IQ”:
“You even see another company in the industry doing this bit where you’ll hire somebody who’s a good scientist, and you say they can be a programmer, and you only–you interview them on sort of their–the depth of knowledge about the field they’ve spent in, and assume they can come to the other field. Some of that is true. But when you go into, say, management-type things or dealing with people-type things, then the number of people whose IQ is fungible is surprisingly low.
The thing that I would drool over is to walk over to Microsoft Research and see that here are people spending full time on vision, full time on speech, full time on machine learning, full time on software proof, where at early Microsoft we couldn’t give back to the intellectual base.
I mean, that’s the greatest surprise to me of all in my whole business career is that you find people who are so good at one thing, and where the principles and models and approaches in that and in the other area are actually very similar, very similar, and yet they’re very poor at the one and just beyond brilliant at the other.”
Itching and perception (kottke.org): “Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm-to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief.”
Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker :: rogerebert.com :: Commentary: “Barker: ‘I’m not doing an evangelical job here. I’m just saying that gaming is a great way to do what we as human beings need to do all the time — to take ourselves away from the oppressive facts of our lives and go somewhere where we have our own control.’
Ebert: Spoken with the maturity of an honest and articulate 4-year old. I do not have a need ‘all the time’ to take myself away from the oppressive facts of my life, however oppressive they may be, in order to go somewhere where I have control. I need to stay here and take control. Right now, for example, I cannot speak, but I am writing this. You lose some, you win some.”
FARK.com: (3687936) Remember the pictures of that "lost" Amazon tribe last month? Yeah, they were a bit of a hoax: “When I was a kid in Africa, my brother was stung badly by a jelly fish on his chest. He was in incredible pain. At the time, we were traveling with an older couple who happen to be American doctors. They FREAKED OUT and were running around getting their bags and taking my brother’s heart rate yada yada. Our guide (I forget now what tribe he was) just leisurely pulled out a little vile of clear liquid. He put a few drops on my brother and INSTANTANEOUSLY the pain cleared. The doctors were SHOCKED and were assured that they had just witnessed some amazing tribal medicine, sure to be the medical discovery of the century.
And what was in that vile our guide pulled out? Regular, plain old vinegar.”
Placebo doping more effective in men - UPI.com: “SAN FRANCISCO, June 18 (UPI) — If athletes believe they are using a performance-enhancing drug, but it is a placebo, it may still enhance performance, Australian researchers said.
This so-called placebo effect was greater in male recreational athletes than in females, said lead author Jennifer Hansen, a nurse researcher at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney.”
After Steady Climb, Childhood Obesity Rates Stall - NYTimes.com: “Childhood obesity, rising for more than two decades, appears to have hit a plateau, a potentially significant milestone in the battle against excessive weight gain among children.”
The Most Curious Thing - Errol Morris - Zoom - New York Times Blog: “Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny — particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology.”
Inside the Story: Gary Taubes: “I had spent my career writing about good and bad science and the difficulties of establishing reliable knowledge, so I think I am considerably more open to the possibility that academic ‘experts’ with impressive credentials can be misguided, if not dead wrong. I think the criteria by which I judge science and scientists is very different than many, if not most journalists, and those criteria were passed on to me by some very, very good scientists in the course of some long and arduous investigations, both scientific and journalistic.”