OneSTDV (who I'm a huge fan of) believes he has identified an indisputable fact of gender realism, that women rarely date men who are shorter than they are.The problem with this assertion is that in the US, the average height is 5'10" for men and 5'4" for women'. Contemporary measures of standard deviations for American height vary a bit, from about 2.5 inches to 3 inches. For the sake of argument, we'll error on the high end and call it 3 full inches....
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Reacting to Lawrence Auster's visceral reactions towards anyone on the right who is not viewed as sufficiently supportive of Israel, Dennis Mangan remarks that it was not so-called "Judeo-Christian" morality that shaped Western civilization, but simply Christian morality that did.While Dennis' assertion would have gone undisputed in the fifties when he was a toddling around,...
Thursday, February 24, 2011
On the passive suggestion of Parapundit's Randall Parker, I'm reading The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman that attempts to describe the future following the abrupt extinction of homo sapiens. It immediately strikes me as disappointingly misanthropic and distractingly quasi-religious (what Half Sigma terms "Gaia worship"). The recurring criticisms I have with this approach--the idea that humans have somehow unfairly intruded onto evolution's...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Mark Wethmen, who formerly blogged at Congenial Times (since deleted and then reincarnated, though not obviously related to its previous life), graciously sent me data from the Arizona Department of Health Services showing birth trends by race in the state over the last decade. Consequently, I'm going to take one more shot from the fecundity elixir, and then I'll really put...
Sunday, February 20, 2011
When I came across the video below (not for the squeamish) via OneSTDV, the following passage from Nick Wade's Before the Dawn sprung to mind (p148-9):Chimp warfare takes the form of bands of males who patrol the borders of their territory, looking for an individual of the neighboring community who has been rash enough to feed alone. ...Chimpanzees carefully calculate the odds and seek to minimize risk, a very necessary procedure if one fights on...
Saturday, February 19, 2011
... which, given that they top the list among states in the worst financial shape in the country, isn't too comforting. What I'm referring to here, though, is racial composition, exclusively. The following table* ranks each state by its racial disparities with the US on the whole:StateVariance1. Illinois4.12. New Jersey10.33. New York13.44. Connecticut15.75. Florida17.26. Virginia17.97. Colorado20.78. North Carolina21.48. Delaware21.410. Rhode Island25.511....
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
After this, I'm off the fecundity kick for awhile, promise. In the following graph, GSS respondents are broken up into five categories; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average number of children middle-aged adults in each category...
Sunday, February 13, 2011
A few weeks ago, Timothy Geithner was interviewed by NPR's Robert Siegel ahead of a "working dinner" between the US Treasury Secretary and the Chinese vice premier concerning currency policies and intellectual property. In response to a question from Siegel about how responsible the putative undervaluation of the yuan is for the ongoing US trade deficit with China, Geithner offered this response:Well, the big reason we have a trade imbalance in China...
Saturday, February 12, 2011
In the comments of a previous post on the relationship between fecundity and educational attainment in the US, Bruce Charlton wondered what percentage of women never had children by educational category, noting that in Europe around one-third of female college graduates are barren.Fertility in the US is higher than that among those with bachelor's degrees, but at the doctoral level, nearly one in three women never get around to starting a family....
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
++Addition2++Writing in November 11, I've added the results from Pew's October 2011 News IQ quiz. More of the same.++Addition++Writing in April 2011, I've added the results from Pew's March 2011 News IQ quiz. Same old, same old.---Steve links to a NYT article that is almost beyond parody where it is suggested that misogyny is behind the gender imbalance in Wikipedia contributions (in terms of content, though I suspect also in terms of financial donations)....
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Steve Sailer recently reiterated an observation made by Linda Gottfredson that perhaps the surest way to assess a person's IQ from casual conversation without risking a false positive is by asking the person whether or not he likes classical music. If the answer is "yes", his IQ is in the triple-digits. If he doesn't enjoy it, though, his answer is less suggestive.The brief post's comment thread is pretty heated but largely anecdotal, so let's turn...
Saturday, February 5, 2011
With the Superbowl a day away, here are correlations between several favorite stats and wins during the 2010 NFL regular season. This isn't a sports blog, and I'm not making any audacious claims about being able to provide special insights. Just the raw correlations for entire teams here, next to the same for last year for comparative purposes:Offense20102009Turnover ratio.72.69Points scored.71.88Team passer rating.68.813rd down conversion %.64.64Time...
Thursday, February 3, 2011
++Addition++Steve Sailer adds some flavor, pulling from his personal experience in a marketing research firm.---With occupational average IQ estimates constructed from median income and, separately, from wordsum scores, the question of which occupations garner earnings higher than the IQ of their practitioners would predict, and which occupations bring in less than IQ would predict, naturally arises. The following table ranks occupations by the income...
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