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Category Archives: Eugenics

Jillian the FashionQueen refuted and I am proven right about Eugenics and Psychiatry – Video

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Jillian the FashionQueen refuted and I am proven right about Eugenics and Psychiatry
She said there is no proof that the people in my "5000 dollars to whoever can prove psychiatry does not include eugenicists challenge pt 2" were eugenicists....

By: mec loc

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Jillian the FashionQueen refuted and I am proven right about Eugenics and Psychiatry - Video

'Downton Abbey' Season 5, Episode 2 recap: Let's (kind of) talk about sex

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Now that Mary has found time to go upstairs to take off her hat, "Downton Abbey" -- and Mary's love life -- moves forward in an interesting second episode of the season.

And yes, societial changes still abound. Could you imagine even last season seeing Mary go on what amounts to a hook-up weekend? Or think about the possibility of Robert listening to a radio? Or Daisy learning math!?!

Or, you know, Thomas somewhat implying that he feels bad about, well, how bad he behaves?

What is happening in 1924?!

Sex, lies and Lady Mary

Lady Mary does not back out of her planned sexual rendezvous liaison thing with Lord Gillingham. In fact, she's planning ahead. To ensure that George doesn't have an accidental little brother or sister, Mary awkwardly asks Anna to help make sure that's there's no "consequences" to the trip.

It takes Anna sometime to catch on.

"You know..." Mary says.

"No I don't..." Anna replies.

[Pause]

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'Downton Abbey' Season 5, Episode 2 recap: Let's (kind of) talk about sex

Rogue Legacy coming to Xbox One

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Rogue Legacy! The game that teaches you that colour blindness and ADHD are valuable traits to have! The game that makes you want your children to have genetic mutations! IT'S COMING!

So now YOU can play the game that everyone's calling "Rogue Legacy" - because it's been confirmed on Xbox One!

...Just to clarify, it's been confirmed via Twitter, where the developers, Cellar Door games, responded to a tweet bemoaning the lack of Rogue Legacy on Xbox One with:

"It's coming."

We definitely can't have misunderstood that, right? It's coming? To Xbox One? The game, Rogue Legacy, is coming to the console, Xbox One? Yes? Good. Continue the party.

YAAAAAAAAAY

So, for the uninitiated, Rogue Legacy is a rugged platformer with a flashy roguelike cape. Most interestingly, though, it features this strange line of messed-up gamey eugenics, where your progeny will take over the quest once your character dies. Various abilities - though, in the game, they're more like deficiencies you can use to your benefit - will help you progress in certain ways. Quickly, the game will devolve into you choosing your favourite child based on how much of a mutant they are.

Gigantism, as it sounds, makes your character twice as big, but dwarfism means you can fit into small gaps - easier for collecting treasure. Colour blindness puts the game into black and white. ADHD makes your character move faster. Having 'two left hands' will make your character fire spells backwards. Or, your character can be gay - which makes no difference at all to your abilities. Cooool.

Each time you die, your skill tree is passed down to the child who will carry on your legacy - along with all your tasty, hard-earned gold. There's not even any inheritance tax! That gold can be used to buy upgrades, making each successive generation cooler and more powerful than the last. Just like real life!

There's no release date yet - chill your beans, guys, it's only just been confirmed - but it's definitely coming. Get your baby makin' trousers on.

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Rogue Legacy coming to Xbox One

10 historical facts only a wingnut could believe

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As you may have noticed by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it. Get a load, for example, of John Podhoretz explaining how the pro-choice Rudy Giulianireduced abortions in New York City(though, um,not really) because he cut crime, which is one of the spiritual causes of abortion.

Yeah, deadline pressures a bitch. But there are some bizarre notions of American history in which conservatives have become so invested theyve adopted them into their worldview. The best-known example is probably Jonah Goldbergs notion of Liberal Fascism; nowadays anytime a conservative talks about, say, Woodrow Wilson or Hillary Clinton, you may expect him to mention their resemblance to Benito Mussolini. They dont even have to think about it, even when normal people are gaping at them open-mouthed like audience members at Springtime for Hitler its part of the folklore that helps them understand the American experience.

There are plenty of others. Ive picked out 10 such ideas that are widespread enough to qualify. (In the nomenclature I have treated Republican and conservative as synonyms because, come on.)

10. The Robber Barons werent robbers they were capitalist heroes.

The overarching task of the conservative historian is to rehabilitate the image of capitalism, even at its most red-toothed and -clawed. Not a hard job, as both our history and culture ceaselessly celebrate the innovative dynamism of American business.

But one of the rare areas in which history teachers are allowed to criticize unfettered capitalism is the Gilded Age of the robber barons Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Fisk, et al. These men, many of whom first rose to prominence throughunseemly wartime speculation, built enormous fortunes on the exceedingly generous terms of the times, which includedbribery,monopolies, andstock manipulation, perverting the alleged power of the free market on their own behalf. They were kind of like the Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers of their day except they never got caught.

Most of us still look on this as a shameful thing. But historians of the conservative-libertarian persuasion such asThomas E. Woods,Lawrence W. Reed, andThomas J. DiLorenzo(better known now as aneo-Confederate) look at the robber barons dirty records and ask: So what? J.P. Morgan built a nice library!

They tend to skirt the smelly stuff, and talk instead about how Carnegies machinations drove down the price of steel surely youre not against low prices? And if Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt paid off legislators to acquire land for their railroads, the railroads got built, and thats what counts.

Why do they so eagerly defend the robber barons even at their worst? Maybe because, as economistBrad DeLonghas noted, the grotesque inequity in American wealth that characterized their era has only one equivalent in U.S. history that of our own time. And if ones business is excusing the perfidy and criminality of todays speculators and swindlers, it is helpful to make heroes of the speculators and swindlers who are their models.

9. Sputnik bankrupted the Soviet Union.

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10 historical facts only a wingnut could believe

College entrance exams fail to make the grade

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LOS ANGELES Before the Central Council for Education undertakes the formidable task of revising Japans university entrance exam, it needs a refresher course in assessment. Thats because standardized tests are poorly understood.

To begin with, there is a fundamental difference between an aptitude test and an achievement test. Although scores sometimes correlate, the former is designed to predict how well a test-taker is likely to perform in a future setting. In contrast, the latter is designed to measure the knowledge and skills a test-taker possesses in a given subject.

By indicating that the current unified exam for admission to public universities in Japan places too much emphasis on mere academic knowledge, an education ministry council implies that the new instrument should be an aptitude test. But the history of the SAT in the U.S. shows that changing the focus produces confusion and resentment.

In 1926 when the test was conceived by Carl Brigham as an instrument to promote greater meritocracy, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the assumption that it measured innate ability. By 1994, however, the College Board, which oversees the SAT, was having second thoughts.

In response to concern that the original designation was associated too much with eugenics, it changed the name to the Scholastic Assessment Test. When criticism still failed to subside, the College Board again altered the name in 1997 simply to the SAT, which ironically stands for nothing.

Despite the additions and subtractions over the years, the test has been shown to have poor predictive value. In 1984, Bates College made submission of SAT scores optional for students seeking admission. In 2004, the college announced that its 20-year study had found virtually no difference in the four-year academic performance and on-time graduation rates of 7,000 submitters and nonsubmitters.

Since then, more than 850 colleges and universities that have followed the same policy have reported similar results, calling into question the indispensability of the SAT.

Theyve found that high school grades and courses taken are a far more reliable indicator of success.

Japan now has a tough choice to make. If it decides to ignore the experience of the United States and instead rely heavily on interviews, essays and group debates, it will run into a logistic nightmare in assessing the roughly 550,000 university applicants. Rubrics will need to be established and staffs will have to be expanded and trained. Moreover, the policy will leave itself open to criticism about subjectivity.

The most important question is to first determine what an admissions test is attempting to measure. Its one thing to proclaim that the goal is to identify applicants who possess the ability to think critically on their own and quite another to develop an instrument that actually does that.

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College entrance exams fail to make the grade

Nikola Tesla's Incredible Predictions For Our Connected World

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We might complain that it's 2015 and we're still waiting on our hoverboards. But if Nikola Tesla were alive today, he'd probably wonder where the hell our fuel-free, super fast airplanes were. And who could blame him? Fuel-free planes aside, he actually predicted a lot of 21st century technologies quite accurately.

The January 30, 1926 issue of Collier's magazine included an interview with the legendary inventor. In it, Tesla relayed his amazing predictions for the future a world of flying machines, wireless power, and female superiority. Some of the predictions were spot on. Others, not so much.

July 1922 cover of Science and Invention imagining broadcast TV

At the beginning of 1926, when this interview with Tesla was published, television was barely making its first baby steps. But Tesla was already looking into the distant world of videophones, broadcast TV, and worldwide mobile communication.

Tesla explained:

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

We shall be able to witness and hear eventsthe inauguration of a President, the playing of a world series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battlejust as though we were present.

When the wireless transmission of power is made commercial, transport and transmission will be revolutionized. Already motion pictures have been transmitted by wireless over a short distance. Later the distance will be illimitable, and by later I mean only a few years hence. Pictures are transmitted over wiresthey were telegraphed successfully through the point system thirty years ago. When wireless transmission of power becomes general, these methods will be as crude as is the steam locomotive compared with the electric train.

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Nikola Tesla's Incredible Predictions For Our Connected World

Killer 'Nazi cows' too aggressive for British breeder

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Several cows belonging to a breed that was specially bred by the Nazis have been sent to the abattoir by their owner because they "would try to kill everyone," the Mail Online reports.

The cows are thedescendants of a Nazi attempt to revive the auroch, a massive ox that featured prominently in Teutonic folklore. Over-hunting led to the extinction of the auroch in Europe by the mid-17th century.

The new breed was named after its breeders, zoologist brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, who mixed animals from the Scottish Highlands, Corsica and the French Camargue, as well as Spanish fighting bulls, in the 1930s.

The attempt, which was ultimately unsuccessful, won the support of the Nazi regime, with Hitler reportedly taking a personal interest. But most of the offspring were destroyed after the fall of Nazism, being uncomfortable reminders of the German attempt to build a master race.

Derek Gow, an ecological consultant who runs a 600-acre farm in Devon, southwestern England, bred a herd of 20 Heck cattle, after importing 13 of them from European wilderness sanctuaries.

He has now reduced the herd to six, after finding most of the cows "incredibly aggressive."

"The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could," said Gow, 49. You couldnt walk through a field with them in it. They would try and kill you. We just couldnt have animals like that."

Gow said the cows he sent to the abattoir would be turned into sausages and sold in Europe.

The cattle, which have lethal-looking horns and a muscular build, are unlike any modern commercial breed of cow, Gow said. His cows were slightly shorter than the original aurochs, but retain their ancestors' muscular build, deep brown complexion, and shaggy coffee-colored fringe.

"What the Germans did with their breeding program was create something truly primeval," Gow said. "The aurochs were wild bulls.

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Killer 'Nazi cows' too aggressive for British breeder

Turns Out the Internet Is Bad at Guessing How Many Coins Are in a Jar

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A few weeks ago, I asked the internet to guess how many coins were in ahuge jar (below). For more than 27 years, my parents had saved their spare change. My mother recently trucked the whole load to a bank to cash in, and in so doing finally learned the stockpiles actual value, or at least the value as calculated by that particular coin-counting machine. The update from Mom got me wondering: Might someone be able to guess that amount? What about our collective estimateis the crowd really as wise as some say it is?

The mathematical theory behind this kind of estimation game is apparently sound. That is, the mean of all the estimates will be uncannily close to the actual value, every time. James Surowieckis best-selling book, Wisdom of the Crowd, banks on this principle, and details several striking anecdotes of crowd accuracy. The most famous is a 1906 competition in Plymouth, England to guess the weight of an ox. As reported by Sir Francis Galton in a letter to Nature, no one guessed the actual weight of the ox, but the average of all 787 submitted guesses was exactly the beasts actual weight.

Galton, who also happens to be the inventor of eugenics, was shocked to find such value in democratic judgment.

The notion that the hive is more intelligent than the individuals comprising it is a seductive one, and a keystone of todays bottom-up Big Data revolution. Its democratic ideology, open-source goodness, the invisible hand, and New Age humility all wrapped into a big networked hug.

But is it true? The results of the coin jar experiment offer some clues. I wont bore you with the finer points of asymmetric non-parametric one-sample T tests, but lets put it this way: The crowd was waaaay off.

The actual value of the coins was $379.54. The mean value (x) of the 602 guesses submitted was $596.12, about 57 percent too high. Whats more, a massive (by crowd-wisdom standards) 40 percent of the individual guesses were closer to the actual value than that of the crowd.

After looking at the histogram above, keen observers will notice that the data are highly skewed. In these cases, how do you summarize what the crowd thinks?

The mean, or average, is still considered the gold standard for aggregating crowd wisdom, although Francis Galton himself recommended using the vox populihis term for median, or the middle-most guess where half of the other guesses are higher and half are lower. In our case, a weighted mean might be the most appropriate value, giving more influence to guessers who reported having actually done the math.

The problem is, people who claim to have done some math were far less accurate (x =$724.81) than those who made a snap judgment (x =$525.02). This may explain why estimates submitted from .edu or gmail addresses were less accurate than guesses submitted from hotmail and yahoo addresses. (Here are the data.)

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Turns Out the Internet Is Bad at Guessing How Many Coins Are in a Jar


  1. Eugenics