From How Stuff Works:

The term IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, generally describes a score on a test that rates the subject's cognitive ability as compared to the general population. IQ tests use a standardized scale with 100 as the median score. On most tests, a score between 90 and 110, or the median plus or minus 10, indicates average intelligence. A score above 130 indicates exceptional intelligence and a score below 70 may indicate mental retardation. Like their predecessors, modern tests do take in to account the age of a child when determining an IQ score. Children are graded relative to the population at their developmental level. What is this cognitive ability being measured? Simply put, IQ tests are designed to measure your general ability to solve problems and understand concepts. This includes reasoning ability, problem-solving ability, ability to perceive relationships between things and ability to store and retrieve information. IQ tests measure this general intellectual ability in a number of different ways. They may test:

• spatial ability: the ability to visualize manipulation of shapes
• mathematical ability: the ability to solve problems and use logic
• language ability: This could include the ability to complete sentences or recognize words when letters have been rearranged or removed.
• memory ability: the ability to recall things presented either visually or aurally

…Because IQ tests measure your ability to understand ideas and not the quantity of your knowledge, learning new information does not automatically increase your IQ. Learning may exercise your mind, however, which could help you to develop greater cognitive skills, but scientists do not fully understand this relationship. The connection between learning and mental ability is still largely unknown, as are the workings of the brain and the nature of intellectual ability. Intellectual ability does seem to depend more on genetic factors than on environmental factors, but most experts agree that environment plays some significant role in its development.

But can you increase your IQ score?

More here.

.
O she buzzed in my ear “I love you” and I dug at
the tickle with a forefinger with which I knew her.

At the post office I was given the official FBI
Eldridge Cleaver poster — “Guess he ain't around here.”

The escaping turkey vulture vomits his load of rotten
fawn for quick flight. The lesson is obvious & literary.

We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.
We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.

I say it from marrow depth I miss my tomcat gone now from
us three months. He was a fellow creature and I loved him.
.

by Jim Harrison
from The Shape of the Journey
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

Roy Scranton at The Opinionater:

The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

more here.

James Polchin at The Smart Set:

Some of the final works you encounter in this show are drawings and phallic sex toys from the collection of George Witt, a 19th century British doctor and later banker who amassed a large collection of contemporary and ancient erotic art. He left his entire collection to the British Museum in 1865, where the trustees placed it in its newly established “Secretum” or secret museum in the museum’s vaults. Stowed away with Witt’s collection were other sexual artifacts the museum acquired in the years to come and where its shunga art was hidden for decades, out of sight except for those well-educated men from Oxford and Cambridge who could handle such material.

A year before the Comstock Act, and about the same time as Hall was wandering the shops of Yokohama, American art critic James Jackson Jarve, writing in Art Journal, decried shunga as “inconceivably monstrous, betraying a liking for the absolute vices as no European nation would outwardly tolerate in any condition of society.” Such criticism, like others of the era, liked these works to the moral flaws of the Japanese. The aesthetics became a symptom of the nation.

The history of looking and not looking at shunga is deeply intertwined with our fantasies and fears about boundaries, those undulating lines between West and the East, between pornography and art. In his journal in 1863, Goncourt described his excitement with some new albums of “Japanese obscenities” he recently purchased: “They delight me, amuse me, and charm my eyes. I look on them as being beyond obscenity, which is there, yet seems not be there, and which I do not see, so completely does it disappear into fantasy.”

more here.

Sadakat Kadri at the London Review of Books:

The problem is that Rajapaksa, for all his eagerness to seize the Commonwealth’s helm, has spent years undermining those values and principles. Though democratically elected, he has relied on his popular mandate to sidestep or get rid of all the safeguards that ordinarily stop democrats from turning into demagogues. Soon after winning his second presidential term, he abolished a law that would have prevented him standing for a third; two of his brothers, Basil and Gotabaya, head powerful ministries, while another one, Chamal, has become the speaker of parliament. His government refuses to acknowledge, let alone investigate, allegations of serious official misconduct: the claim, for example, that the Defence Ministry, run by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, bundles away – ‘white-vans’ – those it perceives as opponents in unmarked white vehicles. There is compelling evidence that tens of thousands of civilians died during the army’s final onslaught against the Tigers; and according to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Sri Lanka has more citizens who have vanished without trace than any other country except Iraq. Free expression has suffered as much as all this suggests, with at least 22 outspoken journalists killed over the last seven years, all of them murdered by unidentified persons who remain at large. And the situation is not improving. The UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay reported last August that ‘surveillance and harassment appears to be getting worse… Critical voices are quite often attacked or even permanently silenced.’

more here.

Our own multiple-award-winning art critic Morgan Meis in n + 1:

Arthur Danto, the art critic for the Nation who died last month in New York, was a man with a big idea. Art, he believed, had ended. Of course, it is one thing to proclaim the end of art; it is another thing to prove it. But Danto tried. He was Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, studied with Merleau-Ponty in Paris as a young man, and wrote a couple of books about analytical philosophy in his early career. Unusually for a postwar American philosopher, Danto thought a lot about Hegel. It was from Hegel that he got the idea that art could end. The idea that art ended never meant, for Danto, that art has died or that people will not make art anymore. Just like Hegel did not mean by the “end of history” that the world was going to explode. “End” here means something more like “completion.” The end of art means that the practice of making art has come to a historical culmination. The end of art means that art doesn’t have a story, a narrative, anymore. After the end of art, there is no such thing as “Art”—there is only art.

Danto came to his realization about the end of art one day in New York City in the mid 1960s. Danto was himself painting in those days. He was also, as he readily admitted later, something of a snob and aesthete. One evening in the late spring of 1964, he stumbled into the Stable Gallery on 74th Street. At the Stable Gallery, Danto came face to face with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. That’s the sculpture where Warhol took some paint and some cheap wood and made a few Brillo Boxes that look exactly like Brillo boxes. That’s to say, if you saw Warhol’s Brillo Boxes on the ground outside of a deli in midtown you would simply think that a delivery person was moving Brillo boxes into the store. There is nothing in the Brillo Boxes to suggest anything but Brillo boxes.

Danto was struck and confused by Brillo Boxes. Over time, he worked out a full-blown theory to deal with them.

More here.

Anna Pulley in Salon:

5. Cosmo: “Use your bra to bind his hands behind his back, then cover your nipples in yummy toppings and command him to lick them off.”

Ignoring for a moment why you would want to needlessly stretch out an expensive bra, and how many other better restraints exist in the world, does Cosmo think we all have mini-fridges full of Cocoa Puffs and slivered almonds by our bedsides? Because, there’s barely enough room for my Nutella bucket from Costco as it is.

6. Cosmo: “Sprinkle a little pepper under his nose right before he climaxes. Sneezing can feel similar to an orgasm and amplify the feel-good effects.”

A mini-fridge and a spice rack, got it. There’s nothing that aids an impending orgasm like a dry rub marinade. Besides, what’s sexier than sneezing? Crying, which is exactly what will happen if you’re one inch off.

7. Men’s Health: “According to new research, the smell of toast is a serious mood booster.”

A mini-fridge, a spice rack, and a toaster oven. Got it. We’re starting to think we know what the Beyond stands for in Bed, Bath &.

More here.

Liam Drew in Slate:

Some of you may be thinking that there is a simple answer: temperature. This arrangement evolved to keep them cool. I thought so, too, and assumed that a quick glimpse at the scientific literature would reveal the biological reasons and I’d move on. But what I found was that the small band of scientists who have dedicated their professional time to pondering the scrotum’s existence are starkly divided over this so-called cooling hypothesis.

Reams of data show that scrotal sperm factories, including our own, work best a few degrees below core body temperature. The problem is, this doesn’t prove cooling was the reason that testicles originally descended. It’s a straight-up chicken-and-egg situation—did testicles leave the kitchen because they couldn't stand the heat, or do they work best in the cold because they had to leave the body?

Vital organs that work optimally at 98.5 degrees Fahrenheit get bony protection: My brain and liver are shielded by skull and ribs, and my girlfriend’s ovaries are defended by her pelvis. Forgoing skeletal protection is dangerous. Each year, thousands of men go to the hospital with ruptured testes or torsions caused by having this essential organ suspended chandelierlike on a flexible twine of tubes and cords. But having exposed testicles as an adult is not even the most dangerous aspect of our reproductive organs’ arrangement.

More here.

Jessica Salley in Harvard Magazine:

I cannot remember the exact moment when I decided it was my dream to be a Rhodes Scholar. I think I was in fifth grade. It was around the time the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie Winning London came out on home video.

…During the past three years, this fantasy crystallized into something more concrete: I could apply for the Rhodes. I had a decently high GPA, leadership positions, and a unique project in mind. I thought the fact that I am from Louisiana, a chronically underrepresented state, would give me traction, and I spent countless summer hours writing draft after draft of my recommendation requests and personal statement. Our House tutors informed us all, of course, that the Harvard nomination process is nearly as cutthroat as the Rhodes competition itself. Of about 100 prospective applicants, they would endorse fewer than half to submit their materials to the Rhodes committee.

But I had faith. I could envision myself in front of the Rhodes interview committee, wearing those penguin-esque robes to Oxford matriculation, walking on the shores of the River Thames, engaging in spirited debates with accented men in pubs. And, impossibly slim as I knew the odds were, logically, I thought that wanting it as badly as I did would be enough to see me through. At 11:28 a.m. on Friday, September 13, after 15 hours of pacing my room, attempting fitful sleep, and checking my e-mail so much my phone battery was half-drained by the end of my 10 a.m. class, I received a short message from my House fellowships tutor informing me that Harvard would not be endorsing my application for the Rhodes. My tired brain registered what this line meant. Not only had I not won the Rhodes, I wasn’t even allowed to apply. I stopped reading after the second line. Instead, I behaved exactly as I would have in fifth grade: I called my mom and burst into tears. My mother’s response, too, was the same as always. She reassured me that life is not always fair, but this didn’t mean no graduate school anywhere would accept me. When my heaving sobs dwindled finally to a quieter form of crying, she reminded me, “You can’t win every time.”

More here.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times:

These days, one in five American children have a respiratory allergy like hay fever, and nearly one in 10 have asthma. Nine people die daily from asthma attacks. While the increase in respiratory allergies shows some signs of leveling off, the prevalence of food and skin allergies continues to rise. Five percent of children are allergic to peanuts, milk and other foods, half again as many as 15 years ago. And each new generation seems to have more severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reactions than the last.

Some time ago, I visited a place where seemingly protective microbes occurred spontaneously. It wasn’t a spotless laboratory in some university somewhere. It was a manure-spattered cowshed in Indiana’s Amish country. My guide was Mark Holbreich, an allergist in Indianapolis. He’d recently discovered that the Amish people who lived in the northern part of the state were remarkably free of allergies and asthma. About half of Americans have evidence of allergic sensitization, which increases the risk of allergic disease. But judging from skin-prick tests, just 7.2 percent of the 138 Amish children who Dr. Holbreich tested were sensitized to tree pollens and other allergens. That yawning difference positions the Indiana Amish among the least allergic populations ever described in the developed world. This invulnerability isn’t likely to be genetic. The Amish originally came to the United States from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and these days Swiss children, a genetically similar population, are about as allergic as Americans. Ninety-two percent of the Amish children Dr. Holbreich tested either lived on farms or visited one frequently. Farming, Dr. Holbreich thinks, is the Amish secret. This idea has some history. Since the late 1990s, European scientists have investigated what they call the “farm effect.” The working hypothesis is that innocuous cowshed microbes, plant material and raw milk protect farming children by favorably stimulating their immune systems throughout life, particularly early on. That spring morning, Dr. Holbreich gave me a tour of the bonanza of immune stimuli under consideration.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Bhaisab)

Stillborn

You were born dead
and your blue limbs were folded
on the living bier of your mother
the umbilical cord unbroken between you
like an out-of-service phone line.
The priest said it was too late
for the blessed baptismal water
that arose from Lough Bofinne
and cleansed the elect of Bantry.
So you were cut from her
and wrapped, unwashed,
in a copy of The Southern Star,
a headline about the War across your mouth.
An orange box would serve as coffin
and, as requiem, your mother listened
to hammering out in the hallway,
and the nurse saying to her
that you’d make Limbo without any trouble.
Out of the Mercy Hospital
the gardener carried you under his arm
with barking of dogs for a funeral oration
to a nettle-covered field
that they still call the little churchyard.
You were buried there
without cross or prayer
your grave a shallow hole;
one of a thousand without names
with only the hungry dogs for visitors.
Today, forty years on
I read in The Southern Star –
theologians have stopped believing
in Limbo.
But I’m telling you, little brother
whose eyes never opened
that I’ve stopped believing in them.
For Limbo is as real as Lough Bofinne:
Limbo is the place your mother never left,
where her thoughts lash her like nettles
and The Southern Star in her lap is an unread breviary;
where she strains to hear the names of nameless children
in the barking of dogs, each and every afternoon.

by Derry O'Sullivan
from Cá bhfuil do Iúdas?
publisher: Coiscéim, Dublin, 1987
translation: 2013, Kaarina Hollo

Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a triple-digit number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were very good as usual (with the normal number of incomprehensible and some even insane pieces thrown in just to test our sanity, I suppose) and it was hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. So hard, in fact, that we ended up deciding that we will once again dramatically expand the number of 3QD columns on Mondays, which have withered by attrition in the last couple of years. Hence today we welcome to 3QD the top 32 people (in the combined ratings of the editors). Without further ado, here they are, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Hari Balasubramanian
2. Bill Benzon
3. Grace Boey
4. Eric Byrd
5. Alexander B. Fry
6. Dwight Furrow
7. Kathleen Goodwin
8. Paul Gowder
9. Charlie Huenemann
10. Ahmed Humayun
11. Tasneem Zehra Husain
12. Yohan John
13. Tara Kaushal
14. Madhu Kaza
15. Mathangi Krishnamurthy
16. Jon Kujawa
17. Lisa Lieberman
18. Michael Anthony Lopresto
19. Katherine Blake McFarland
20. Matt McKenna
21. Debra Morris
22. George Myerson
23. Mara Naselli
24. Fausto Ribeiro
25. Alexander Richey
26. Tamuira Reid
27. Ben Schreckinger
28. Ryan Seals
29. Thomas Wells
30. Emrys Westacott
31. Monica Westin
32. Joshua Yarden

I will be in touch with all of you to schedule a start date. The “About Us” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers no later than the day they start.

The following people also sent in columns which we really liked a lot and I would like to give them an honorable mention here and also let them know that we will keep them in mind for the future:

1. Michel Chaouli
2. Shoaib Daniyal
3. Jason Friedman
4. Filipe Gracio
5. Brian Hanson
6. Robert Hunter
7. Lancelot Kirby
8. Andrew Lloyd
9. Beatrice Marovich
10. Ben Oren
11. Ashok Pannikar
12. Carl Pierer
13. Basharat Hussain Qizalbash
14. Adnan Ahmad Qureishi
15. John Sainsbury
16. Klaus M. Stiefel
17. Thomas Vozar
18. John Washington

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was sometimes tiring, but still a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new columnists!

Best wishes,

Abbas

Janet Echelman. 1.26 Sculpture Project at the Biennial of the Americas. Denver, Colorado.
July 6 – August 6, 2010

“The City of Denver asked the artist to create a monumental yet temporary work exploring the theme of the interconnectedness of the 35 nations that make up the Western Hemisphere. She drew inspiration from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s announcement that the February 2010 Chile earthquake shortened the length of the earth’s day by 1.26 microseconds by slightly redistributing the earth’s mass. A 3-dimensional form of the tsunami’s amplitude rippling across the Pacific became the basis for the sculptural form. Exploring further, Echelman drew on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) simulation of the earthquake’s ensuing tsunami, using the 3-dimensional form of the tsunami’s amplitude rippling across the Pacific as the basis for her sculptural form.

1.26 pioneers a tensile support matrix of Spectra® fiber, a material 15 times stronger than steel by weight. This low-impact, super-lightweight design makes it possible to temporarily attach the sculpture directly to the façade of buildings – a structural system that opens up a new trajectory for the artist’s work in urban airspace.”

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Jeanne Ackman Rosen.

Benjamin Kunkel in n + 1:

On Wednesday, November 6, Twitter, the so-called microblogging service, went public, in the private sense. Shares initially offered at $26 were by the end of the day trading near $45, giving a company with fewer than 900 employees a market value of more than $31 billion, and meaning that each of the service’s 230 million users—who are also, in a real sense, its producers—could be considered to be contributing $135 to the company’s value. That value is almost certain to fall, since Twitter shares appear ludicrously overpriced. As John Cassidy of the New Yorker calculated, “Investors were paying forty-nine dollars per dollar of revenues, and five hundred and forty-one dollars per dollar of cash flow . . . Apple, the most valuable technology company in the world, trades at less than three times its revenue and eight times its cash flow.” But large for-profit social-media services are contradictory entities at any price, because they attempt to profit from activity that, precisely because it is social, is basically non-economic and non-productive. Social media can either be profitable or it can be social. In the end, it can’t be both.

More here.

In the Guardian, [this one:”a group of women from Calcutta, many of whom came to work as nurses in the newly created NHS, 1957″]:

I've been meaning to post about Geras's death. I didn't always agree with him, but then I don't always agree with Abbas or Morgan. But I did respect his mind. Ben Cohen in Tablet:

There is one memory of Norman Geras–the distinguished academic, prolific author and blogger, and doughty fighter against anti-Semitism and racism, who passed away in England earlier today–that has stayed with me for the last twenty-five years. It was a dreary afternoon in the northern English city of Manchester, late in 1988. About twenty students, nearly all of us professed Marxists, had gathered for Geras’s weekly university seminar on Marxism. As we discussed how class interests manifest in politics, one participant, who clearly wasn’t a Marxist, opined that not every owner of the means of production was hellbent on class warfare. Could we not accept, in his inimitable phrase, that there were “cuddly capitalists?”

Immediately, there were dismissive grunts and sycophantic glances in Geras’s direction. Surely the great Professor, on whose every word we hung, would rip this insolent pawn of the hated bourgeoisie a new one? But Norman Geras was not that kind of man. He answered with clarity and sympathy, artfully guiding the student through whatever text it was we were examining. In those few moments, the aspiring revolutionaries in his classroom were taught a salutary lesson on the enduring bourgeois values of respect, tolerance and kindness.

More here.

Simon Critchley in The NYT's The Stone:

[H]ow are we to understand the nature of eros as it appears in Plato’s “Phaedrus”? And here we approach the central enigma of the dialogue. For it appears to deal with two distinct topics: eros and rhetoric. My thought is very simple: I will try and show that these twin themes of eros and rhetoric are really one and they help explain that peculiar form of discourse that Socrates calls philosophy.

For the ancient Greeks, there was obviously a close connection between the passions or emotions, like eros, and rhetoric. We need only recall that Aristotle’s discussion of the emotions is in the “Rhetoric.” Emotion was linked to rhetoric, for Aristotle, because it could influence judgment, in the legal, moral or political senses of the word.

Of course, in the Athens of Socrates’ time, the two groups of people capable of stirring up powerful emotions were the tragic poets and the Sophists. Let’s just say that Socrates had issues with both groups. Tragedy, again in Aristotle’s sense, stirs up the emotions of pity and fear in a way that leads to their katharsis, understood as purgation or, better, purification. The Sophists exploited the link between emotion and rhetoric in order to teach the art of persuasive speech that was central to the practice of law and litigation. Classical Athens was a very litigious place, but mercifully did not have lawyers. Therefore, men (and it was just men) had to defend themselves and Sophists taught those who could pay a fee how to do it.

More here.

Rob Horning in The New Inquiry:

Foucault’s last two lecture series at the Collège de France, in 1982-83 and 1983-84 — published in English as The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of the Truth — offer a series of interpretations of ancient Greek texts Foucault’s Berkeley lectures from 1983 also deal with parrhesia.to examine the relation of the “self” to public truth-telling. What did it mean to “know thyself,” as the Delphic oracle advised? What procedures guaranteed the truth of such knowledge? And why would telling the truth about the self be a precondition for having a self in the first place? Here’s how Foucault describes what he hoped to do in these lectures (poignantly, slipping into the subjective; he knew he wouldn’t get the project finished):

What I would like to recover is how truth-telling, in this ethical modality which appeared with Socrates right at the start of Western philosophy, interacted with the principle of existence as an oeuvre to be fashioned in all its possible perfection, how the care of self, which, in the Greek tradition long before Socrates, was governed by the principle of a brilliant and memorable existence, […] was not replaced but taken up, inflected, modified, and re-elaborated by the principle of truth-telling that has to be confronted courageously, how the objective of a beautiful existence and the task of giving an account of oneself in the game of truth were combined …

The emergence of the true life in the principle and form of truth-telling (telling the truth to others and to oneself, about oneself and about others), of the true life and the game of truth-telling, is the theme, the problem that I would have liked to study [Feb. 29, 1984, lecture].

I’ve bolded the parts that jumped out at me in that passage, the ones that reminded me of social-media practice. The archive social media compiles of us could be seen as an “oeuvre to be fashioned in all its possible perfection”; it allows us to live with that ideal much more concretely in mind. Social media give us an opportunity to “confront courageously” the principles of truth-telling — how much to share, with whom, and with how much concern for our and others’ privacy — that are activated by the various platforms.

For Foucault, that aim of living a “beautiful existence” has not been understood as something that can be achieved through a passive documentation of what we’ve done — escaping reflexivity does not make life more beautiful or pure as those who make a fetish of spontaneity insist. Instead, he argues that the “beautiful existence” came to hinge on playing “games of truth” that reveal the self to itself, as courageous.

The “true life” is no longer given automatically to ordinary people as a reward for their ordinariness. We too must prove our lives are true, are real, are legitimate, to the audiences we marshal on social media.

More here.