IQ

Interesting Question ORG

The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another....We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men. Gustav Landauer, Schwache Stattsmanner, Schwacheres Volk!, June, 1910

Selected Correspondence:

Suffrage (the right to vote) does not exist except for land holders ("share holders") and even there voting power is in proportion to land ownership.

All executive power flows from a central committee. Female representation is almost unknown.

There is no division of powers. There is no forth estate. There are no juries and innocence is not presumed.

Failure to submit to any order can result in instant exile.

There is no freedom of speech. There is no right of association. Love is forbidden without state approval.

The economy is centrally planned.

There is pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication.

The society is heavily regulated and this regulation is enforced, to the degree many employees are told when, where and how many times a day they can goto the toilet.

There is almost no transparency and something like the FOIA is unimaginable.

The state has one party. Opposition groups (unions) are banned, surveilled or marginalized whenever and wherever possible.

Insofar as our decisions are an expression of who we are, we must make sure that we do not lack courage. Insofar as we want a full range of intellectual opinions, we must have the courage to accept the full range of emotional inclinations that lay behind them.

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X is an "average shy intellectual" and in that is a sounding for characters of his type. This type is often of a noble heart, wilted by fear of conflict with authority. The power of their intellect and noble instincts may lead them to a courageous position, where they see the need to take up arms, but their instinctive fear of authority then motivates them to find rationalizations to avoid conflict.

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A weaker form of the conservative argument (not mentioned here) is that a portion of seemly altruistic acts are covers for the fear associated with guilt.

When my eyes see phrases like 'right thing to do', 'appropriate' etc, I wonder what unstated world view I am meant to share. These phases smell of that unusually putrid whip; social sanction. But every man has experienced social sanction as the direct manifestation of morons baying at the moon, nodding and calling the result consensus.

Here, in Africa, there was a two page fold out on the "Night Runner" plague. Plague? Yes. Of people -- typically old, who supposedly run around naked at night (remember the population has pitch black African skin tones), tapping on windows, throwing rocks on peoples roofs, snapping twigs, rustling grass, casting spells and getting lynched because it's "the right thing to do".

Insofar as we can affect the world, let it be to utterly eliminate guilt and fear as a motivator of man and replace it cell for cell with love for one another and the passion of creation.

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In a world with radio waves flowing all around, it should be possible for people's thoughts to be as anonymous as the ether that caresses their skin. I wrote the following (using ruby and the mDNS library). It's amusing and pleasing for wireless travel or anonymity provided one has a domain name server somewhere. There are many situations where DNS is available but not other types of routing (e.g Starbucks). Works under Unix and OS X. You can get the code here: http://iq.org/crafty.rb An example: proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# ls -l crafty.rb -rw-r--r-- 1 proff proff 9106 Sep 20 18:00 crafty.rb proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# ruby crafty.rb ^Z [1]+ Stopped ruby crafty.rb proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# bg [1]+ ruby crafty.rb & proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# ifconfig ppp0 ppp0: flags=8051 mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.1 --> 10.0.0.2 netmask 0xff000000 proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# ifconfig ppp1 ppp1: flags=8051 mtu 1500 inet 10.0.0.2 --> 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# tail /var/log/system.log Sep 20 18:12:40 proffs-computer pppd[3434]: pppd 2.4.2 (Apple version 233-10) started by proff, uid 0 Sep 20 18:12:40 proffs-computer pppd[3435]: pppd 2.4.2 (Apple version 233-10) started by proff, uid 0 Sep 20 18:12:40 proffs-computer pppd[3434]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ ttype Sep 20 18:12:40 proffs-computer pppd[3435]: Connect: ppp1 <--> /dev/ ttypf Sep 20 18:12:46 proffs-computer pppd[3435]: local IP address 10.0.0.2 Sep 20 18:12:46 proffs-computer pppd[3435]: remote IP address 10.0.0.1 Sep 20 18:12:46 proffs-computer pppd[3434]: local IP address 10.0.0.1 Sep 20 18:12:46 proffs-computer pppd[3434]: remote IP address 10.0.0.2 proffs-computer:~/crafty/src root# ssh -l proff 10.0.0.1 Password: Last login: Wed Sep 20 17:58:52 2006 from 10.0.0.2 Welcome to Intelligent-Design! proffs-computer:~ proff$ w proff 18:14 up 2 days, 15:13, 6 users, load averages: 0.58 0.28 0.30 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT proff console - Mon03 2days - proff q0 - 17:56 13 bash proff q2 10.0.0.2 18:14 - w proff proffs-computer:~ proff$ It is not documented, optimized, or made user friendly, or multi- user, but the code should be readable and if people with ruby or DNS knowledge are interested and wish to optimize it or otherwise make it smile then I will assist. crafty.rb uses my http://iq.org/rhetoric logic suite, which I have prepended for ease of use.

Ian Clark's Freenet has forums. However, they have zero political impact because only very highly motivated users can perceive them. We want to stand and fight AND run and hide, falling back to the next technical defense only when political defenses are over come. This requires placing trust in some people. That's ok. We can engineer a situation that motivates people, not just machines, to have courage.

Isaac's Question/Quest ("Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?" (Genesis 22: 7))

Isaiah 6:10-11 "10 Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they, seeing with their eyes, and hearing with their ears, and understanding with their heart, return, and be healed.'. Then said I: 'Lord, how long?' And He answered: 'Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste.

#!/usr/bin/ruby # add this code to your .forward+secretname file like so: # "|/home/me/public_html/iq.org/strew_incoming_mail.rb" Dir.chdir(ENV['HOME']) Dir.chdir('public_html/iq.org/strew') # change iq.org here to reflect your site's directory s = $stdin.read if /^Subject: ([^.\/].+?)

/m =~ s subject = $1 f = File.open(subject, "w") f.write(s) f.close Dir.chdir('..') exec "./index.rb > index.html" end

#!/usr/bin/ruby # save as index.rb # puts "<html>" etc here strewdir="strew" Dir.chdir strewdir strews = `ls -t ???*`.map {|name| name.chomp} strews.each { |name| File.open(name) { |f| linkname = URI.escape(name.gsub(/ /, '')) puts '<h3><a name="' + linkname + '">' + f.stat.mtime.strftime("%a %d %h %Y") + ' : ' + name+ "</a></h3>

" s = f.read firstline = s.split(/

/)[0] if firstline and /^(From |[A-Za-z_-]: )/m =~ firstline body = s.match(/

\r?

/m).post_match else body = s end x = body.scan(/--\{\s(.+?)\s\}--\s/m).join if x != "" body = x end if /<blockquote>|<html>|<i>|<p>|<p ?\/>|<b>| <a href/ =~ body puts body else puts "<pre>" + body + "</pre>" end puts '<br>' puts '<font size="-2"><i>' puts "<a href=\"\##{linkname}\">link</a>" puts '<hr>' puts '</i></font>' } } strews.each {|name| puts '<li><a href="#' + URI.escape(name.gsub (/< /, '')) + '">' + name + '</a>'} #puts footers here

If you saw the people, what cancer can do!

The children stopped playing, the men downed their tools,

The young stopped to pause, the old paused to stop,

The women gave poise, the leaders made noise,

The rich stopped their feeding, the poor forwent feeling,

And the followers listened, and the listeners followed,

The first world woke up, the third world sat down

And the clouds cleared away, and all of the people --

Not just your people! -- not just my people! -- but

All of the people that ever, and always,

and now and forever will ever have lived! --

With the ghosts of their parents, their parents and parents,

Generations stretched back to the dawn of the species

Thousands and, nay, hundreds thousands years past,

You could not avoid them, the whole of the family:

Mothers with children, and fathers with children,

And wizened old voices, and laughter and stories

And wisdom and knowledge, and questions and reason

And passion and folly and crying and love,

Not just the past, not just hundreds thousands,

But hundreds of thousands and millions years on! --

Millions years more of those yet to appear,

Those innocent children -- yet more as unborn --

In full expectation of their turn to be,

All your children, my children, their children and children

Till the end of the sun and the end of all days,

None was excluded, none were held back,

Not fascist, nor Nazi, nor Caesar, nor sultan,

Nor Jew nor gentile, nor emperor nor citizen,

Nor conqueror nor conquered, nor blackfella nor whitefella,

Nor good fellow, bad fellow, criminals, generals,

Nor executives, nor lawmakers, oilmen nor lobbyists,

Tradesmen nor women, housekeepers, wives,

Farmers, houseworkers, outworkers, sweatworkers,

Hunters nor gatherers, slaves nor free men

Nor free women, landowners, aristocracy, slaves,

Proletarian, vegetarian, serf nor bourgeois,

Nor communist nor capitalist nor anarchist nor phalangist,

Nor futurist, nor traditionalist, mercantilist, imperialist

Nor faithful nor secular nor agnostic nor heretic

Nor stoic nor epicurean, neither Catholic nor Protestant,

Nor Pagan nor Buddhist nor Hindu nor Mormon

Nor Serb nor Albanian nor Muslim nor Croat,

Not the Palestinians nor Israel, nor the citizens of Iraq,

Nor the Syrians, the Koreans, Venezuelans, Iranians,

Kenyans, Bolivians, Namibians, Nicaraguans

The kind with the vicious, the healers with murderers,

The scholars with bigots, the artists with Philistines,

Don't let me die, some said! Don't make me cry, some said!

I'll take anything -- but please not my child!

Let me have more, some said! Fuck you all, some said!

Take me whole, some said! Hold me tight, some said!

Save yourselves, some said! Be ye saved, some said!

Sieg heil, some said! Fight a war, some said!

Hold the line, some said! Tow the line, some did.

But for the most part -- and for the best part! --

The ordinary people, not -ese and not -ism,

They stood there and shrugged -- I'm just a human! --

And spilled over borders, and greeted their neighbours,

And played with their children, and looked to the future,

And cared not for great things, but just to continue;

Not for them all of these overblown trumpets!

The best part said nothing, and wandered, confused,

Staggering now, they tottered unsteady,

As if the earth lurched, besmirched by their industry,

As if the earth's spasm had shaken them too,

Robbed of their pleasantries, certain no more,

Oh there was more -- oh there was more! --

To life in this world than cheap petrol prices!

Again insignificant, floating in space,

Without direction -- there's no up in space! --

Roused from conformity, forced into puberty,

Silenced by grim revelation of wrongs,

This planet is only a miniature starship!

Swiftly reverted to innocence lost,

So eager to reclaim the goodwill they'd lost!

All of them! -- All of them! -- All of the people

That ever, and always, and now and forever

Will ever have been and will ever have lived! --

The whole civilization, pre-civilization,

Post-civilization, ancient and modern,

Post-modern to present and all that's to come,

Entire human project, evolutionary epic,

Thirteen thousand million years long in the making,

In all of their habits, their rituals and fears,

The whole of the species paraded before you,

Put on their best faces and virtues and smiles,

Turned out for the moment, for this one occasion,

And played, and laughed, and studied, and shook

Each others hands, and their heads, and remembered nostalgia,

They crammed on the land mass -- they jammed all the land mass! --

And Europe grew warm, and Africa thundered,

And Asia flowed over, and Australia sweltered,

And America repented, Antarctica melted,

From the weight of the gathering -- reunion -- preunion! --

The party had gathered, the crew had been summoned,

And filled all the islands with shocks of bright vestments,

The ship filled with passengers, decks cleared for the crush,

The siren had sounded, the islands had foundered

As ships on an orb that, deluged and flooded,

Threatened to sink those few vessels remaining.

So stood the humans, so stood the proud

And the humble, the paragons of animals -- sometimes! --

Packed on to continents, over the globe!

The clouds cleared away and the crowds turned away

From the ground, and looked up, at the skies there above --

Like spokes on a wheel, a luminous wet sphere,

Like floodlights ascending to heaven from home,

Like cancerous cells of a terminal tumour,

Beautiful, innocent, terminal tumour,

Their eyes pierced the void and looked into the cavity

To broadcast their tragedy out to the world,

And half saw the stars, saw an infinite blackness,

Saw the coldness and loneliness, nebular nothingness,

Themselves at the helm of a ship in deep space,

But bound to observe from the terrestrial observatory,

Observed the distance -- and gave up on escape! --

Saw the world as it is, there would be no saviour,

They'd grown -- how they'd grown! -- and outgrown their mother,

Couldn't quite yet leave home, but yet it was time:

Grow up now children, stand on your own feet!

The dreamers still dreamed of a yet better world,

The couples still kissed and the dispossessed smiled,

But the lonely found loneliness appeased their loneliness

As their neighbours all huddled to fight off the chill

Of the universe -- they drank, to the meaning of it all!

And from their huddle, while the void loomed above,

Declared -- Brother and Sister!

-- if we should survive,

And, surveying the scene, realising what that meant,

Then -- and then they broke off, and left it unsaid

And again shook their heads, and wept,

-- never again!

The other half saw blue sky, and warmth -- unseasonable warmth --

And celebrated the day, gave thanks for the day,

Seized hold of the day and seized hold of the life

And seized hold of each other, looked out to the blue,

And wished that it would never end.



If you saw two bodies entwirled in the dance

Bound to each other with effortless grace,

Joyous, momentous, elliptical grace!

They whirled through the ether, in delicate spirals,

One was all gold, and one was all blue --

But not yet all blue -- for marooned in the sea

Were the islands that founder, with inhabitants that flounder,

But for you they came out, all of the people

That ever, and always, and now and forever

Will ever have been and will ever have lived!

And you did not see green or brown 'twixt the seas,

But all of the people: all of the whole

Conurbation, the cities, the landscapes of faces,

All staring out, all through the dance,

The whole human family, whole human endeavour,

Staring out, eyes wide open, hopeful and afraid,

Knew what you'd done, knew that the dancer

Was slowing and coughing and covered in rash,

As cancer descended on dancers romancing

As the vastness descended on all of the people

Of what they had done to their dear mother earth,

Pock-marked and bleeding, suffocating and searing,

You saw all these faces and eyes and bright places,

The universe, and time, and one poor tragic planet:

What would you do if the cancer was you?



And if you could see -- if you can bear with me! --

If you could see all of the faces before you,

If you could look into their full expectation,

Knowing that you were part of the problem,

Knowing that all of us hurtle to death:

Personal death, planetary death,

All of the people -- yes all of the people! --

And didn't do nothing, did not stay the course,

Did not shy away, did not run away,

There's nowhere to run from this speck in the universe,

But helped turn the tide -- helped them to survive --

Then you, my friend, deserve to be human.

[ By Daniel Mathews http://math.stanford.edu/~mathews ]

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"Another time I approached Ajita Kesakambala and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings and courtesies, I sat down to one side. As I was sitting there I asked him: 'Venerable Ajita, there are these common craftsmen...They live off the fruits of their crafts, visible in the here and now...Is it possible, venerable sir, to point out a similar fruit of the contemplative life, visible in there here and now?' "When this was said, Ajita Kesakambala said to me, 'Great king, there is nothing given, nothing offered, nothing sacrificed. There is no fruit or result of good or bad actions. There is no this world, no next world, no mother, no father, no spontaneously reborn beings; no priests or contemplatives who, faring rightly and practicing rightly, proclaim this world and the next after having directly known and realized it for themselves. A person is a composite of four primary elements. At death, the earth (in the body) returns to and merges with the (external) earth-substance. The fire returns to and merges with the external fire-substance. The liquid returns to and merges with the external liquid-substance. The wind returns to and merges with the external wind-substance. The sense-faculties scatter into space. Four men, with the bier as the fifth, carry the corpse. Its eulogies are sounded only as far as the charnel ground. The bones turn pigeon-colored. The offerings end in ashes. Generosity is taught by idiots. The words of those who speak of existence after death are false, empty chatter. With the break-up of the body, the wise and the foolish alike are annihilated, destroyed. They do not exist after death.' "Thus, when asked about a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here and now, Ajita Kesakambala answered with annihilation. Just as if a person, when asked about a mango, were to answer with a breadfruit; or, when asked about a breadfruit, were to answer with a mango. In the same way, when asked about a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here and now, Ajita Kesakambala answered with annihilation. The thought occurred to me: 'How can anyone like me think of disparaging a priest or contemplative living in his realm?' Yet I neither delighted in Ajita Kesakambala's words nor did I protest against them. Neither delighting nor protesting, I was dissatisfied. Without expressing dissatisfaction, without accepting his teaching, without adopting it, I got up from my seat and left.

"The Great lawyers?" asked K. "Who are they then? How do you contact them?" "You've never heard about them, then?" said the litigant. "There's hardly anyone who's been accused who doesn't spend a lot of time dreaming about the Great lawyers once he's heard about them. It's best if you don't let yourself be misled in that way. I don't know who the Great lawyers are, and there's probably no way of contacting them. I don't know of any case I can talk about with certainty where they've taken any part. They do defend a lot of people, but you can't get hold of them by your own efforts, they only defend those who they want to defend.

Lawyers look to increase their self-perceived status by seeking precedent setting judgements in ever higher courts with higher status legal teams and defeating ever more powerful enemies in legal combat.

I saw a chapel all of gold that none did dare to enter in, and many weeping aloud without, weeping, mourning, worshipping. I saw a serpent rise between the white pillars of the door, and he forced and forced and forced, till down the golden hinges tore; And along the pavement sweet set with pearls and rubies bright, all his shining length he drew, -- till upon the altar white, vomited his poison out on the bread and on the wine. So I ran into a sty, and laid me down among the swine. W. Blake, The Defiled Sanctuary

Real hacktivism is at least as old as October 1989 when DOE (US Deptartment of Energy) HEPNET and SPAN (NASA) connected VMS machines world wide were penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK worm, which changed the system announcement banner to be: W O R M S A G A I N S T N U C L E A R K I L L E R S _______________________________________________________________ \__ ____________ _____ ________ ____ ____ __ _____/ \ \ \ /\ / / / /\ \ | \ \ | | | | / / / \ \ \ / \ / / / /__\ \ | |\ \ | | | |/ / / \ \ \/ /\ \/ / / ______ \ | | \ \| | | |\ \ / \_\ /__\ /____/ /______\ \____| |__\ | |____| |_\ \_/ \___________________________________________________/ \ / \ Your System Has Been Officically WANKed / \_____________________________________________/ You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war. In our book, Suelette Dreyfus and I track the source of the worm to Melbourne, Australia. At the time there was considerable anti-nuclear sentiment in the country. Australia had (and still has) a number of US spy, early warning and nuclear submarine communications bases, most of which were first and second strike soviet targets (Australia would not otherwise be a nuclear target). Additionally in 1984, New Zealand, a country with which Australians feel a special affinity, had under Labour pri-minister David Lange, made NZ a nuclear free territory, precluding the admission of nuclear armed or powered warships into NZ ports. The US in response rescinded its defence treaty obligations to NZ, cut intelligence ties (or at least pretended to, see Nicky Hager's excellent book ``Secret Power'' for futher details) and instigated a number of trade sanctions against the country. But New Zealand's nuclear woes were not to end there. At 11:59pm on the night of July 10 1985 the Greenpeace flag-ship ``Rainbow Warrior'', docked in Auckland harbour preparing to sail in three days time to Mururoa Atoll to demonstrate against French nuclear tests, was blown up by amphibious DGSE (French Secret Service) agents, killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira. Within days, two DGSE agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur were arrested, following an investigation by Australian journalist Chris Masters, plead guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced by the NZ high court to 10 years. The other DGSE agents escaped via a French Nuclear sub off the NZ coast. The French, a significant NZ trade partner, immediately instigated trade sanctions against the country. In June 1986, a political deal was struck; France would lift sanctions, pay a few million in blood money, and the two agents would be transferred to Hao Atoll, a French military base in the pacific, where they would supposably serve out the remainder of their sentences. However, by May 1988 both had been smuggled back to France. Examination of the worm source code show specific instructions to avoid infecting New Zealand. Policy has unintended consequences but it should be remembered that some are blessings. So, go boldly and change!

His name was William James Sidis, and his IQ was estimated at between 250 and 300 [8, p. 283]. At eighteen months he could read The New York Times, at two he taught himself Latin, at three he learned Greek. By the time he was an adult he could speak more than forty languages and dialects. He gained entrance to Harvard at eleven, and gave a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematical Club his first year. He graduated cum laude at sixteen, and became the youngest professor in history. He deduced the possibility of black holes more than twenty years before Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar published An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure. His life held possibilities for achievement that few people can imagine. Of all the prodigies for which there are records, his was probably the most powerful intellect of all. And yet it all came to nothing. He soon gave up his position as a professor, and for the rest of his life wandered from one menial job to another. His experiences as a child prodigy had proven so painful that he decided for the rest of his life to shun public exposure at all costs. Henceforth, he denied his gifts, refused to think about mathematics, and above all refused to perform as he had been made to do as a child. Instead, he devoted his intellect almost exclusively to the collection of streetcar transfers, and to the study of the history of his native Boston. He worked hard at becoming a normal human being, but never entirely succeeded. He found the concept of beauty, for example, to be completely incomprehensible, and the idea of sex repelled him. At fifteen he took a vow of celibacy, which he apparently kept for the remainder of his life, dying a virgin at the age of 46. He wore a vest summer and winter, and never learned to bathe regularly. A comment that Aldous Huxley once made about Sir Isaac Newton might equally have been said of Sidis.

For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb [5, p. 2222].

There was a time when all precocious children were thought to burn out the same way that Sidis did. The man most responsible for changing this belief was Lewis M. Terman. Between 1900 and 1920 he was able to carry out a study of about a hundred gifted children, and his observations convinced him that many of the traditional beliefs about the gifted were little more than superstitions. To confirm these observations, he obtained a grant from the Commonwealth Fund in 1922, and used it to sift a population of more than a quarter of a million children, selecting out all those with IQs above 140 for further study. That group has been monitored continuously ever since. Many of the previously held beliefs about the gifted did indeed turn out to be false. The gifted are not weak or sickly, and although the incidence of myopia is greater among them, they are generally thought to be better looking than their contemporaries: They are not nerds.

Nevertheless, in his rush to dispel the erroneous beliefs about the gifted, Terman sometimes made claims not supported by his own data. In fact, in some cases, the data suggests that exactly the opposite conclusion should have been drawn. Terman's own data shows that there is a definite connection between measured intelligence and mental and social maladjustment. The consequences of misinterpreting these data are so grave that it will pay to re-examine them in some detail.

Terman's longitudinal research on the gifted included a constant assessment of mental health and social adjustment. Subjects were classified into three categories: satisfactory adjustment, some maladjustment, and serious maladjustment. Terman defined these categories in the following way.

1. Satisfactory. Subjects classified in this category were essentially normal; i.e., their "desires, emotions, and interests were compatible with the social standards and pressures" of their group. Everyone, of course, has adjustment problems of one kind or another. Satisfactory adjustment as here defined does not mean perfect contentment and complete absence of problems, but rather the ability to cope adequately with difficulties in the personal make-up or in the subject's environment. Worry and anxiety when warranted by the circumstances, or a tendency to be somewhat high strung or nervous--provided such a tendency did not constitute a definite personality problem--were allowed in this category. 2. Some maladjustment. Classified here were subjects with excessive feelings of inadequacy or inferiority, nervous fatigue, mild anxiety neurosis, and the like. The emotional conflicts, nervous tendencies and social maladjustments of these individuals, while they presented definite problems, were not beyond the ability of the individual to handle, and there was no marked interference with social or personal life or with achievement. Subjects whose behavior was noticeably odd or freakish, but without evidence of serious neurotic tendencies, were also classified in this category. 3. Serious maladjustment. a.) Classified as 3a were subjects who had shown marked symptoms of anxiety, mental depression, personality maladjustment, or psychopathic personality. This classification also includes subjects who had suffered a "nervous breakdown," provided the condition was not severe enough to constitute a psychosis. Subjects with a previous history of serious maladjustment or nervous breakdown (without psychosis) were included here even though their adjustment at the time of rating may have been entirely satisfactory. b.) Classified as 3b were those subjects who had at any time suffered a complete mental breakdown requiring hospitalization, whatever their condition at the time of rating. In the majority of cases the subjects were restored to reasonably good mental health after a brief period of hospital care [6, pp. 99-101].

In 1940, when the group was about 29 years of age, a large scale examination was carried out. Included in that examination was a high level test of verbal intelligence, designated at that time the Concept Mastery, but later re-named the Concept Mastery test form A. Terman found the following relationship between adjustment and verbal intelligence. (These are raw scores, not IQs.)

CMT-A [6, p. 115]

Men Women N Mean S.D. N Mean S.D. Satisfactory adjustment 407 95.2 30.9 344 92.4 28.7 Some maladjustment 91 108.0 31.2 59 98.6 25.4 Serious maladjustment 18 119.5 23.6 17 108.6 27.1

The data show three things. First, that there is a definite trend for the maladjusted to make higher scores on the Concept Mastery test. Second, that women show symptoms of maladjustment at lower scores than men. And third, that 21 percent of the men and 18 percent of the women showed at least some form of maladjustment.

During 1950-52, when the group was approximately 41 years old, another examination was made using a new test, the Concept Mastery test form T. Test scores were again compared to assessments of adjustment. (CMT-T scores are not interchangeable with CMT-A scores. They have different means and standard deviations.)

CMT-T [7, p. 50]

Men Women N Mean S.D. N Mean S.D. Satisfactory adjustment 391 136.4 26.2 303 130.8 27.7 Some maladjustment 120 145.6 26.1 117 138.1 26.4 Serious maladjustment 40 152.8 23.8 33 140.0 29.6

Similar conclusions can be drawn from these data as well. Again, there is a definite trend shown for the maladjusted to make higher scores than the satisfactorily adjusted. Again, women show symptoms of maladjustment at lower scores than men. But the most alarming thing of all is that the percentage of maladjustment shown for both sexes rose in the 12 years since the previous examination. The percentage of men showing maladjustment having risen from 21 percent to 29 percent, and the figure for women having risen from 18 percent to 33 percent! Nearly double what it was before!

How did Terman interpret these data? Terman states:

Although severe mental maladjustment is in general somewhat more common among subjects who score high on the Concept Mastery test, many of the most successful men of the entire group also scored high on this test [7, p. 50].

In other words, Terman deliberately tried to give the impression that the relationship between verbal intelligence and mental and social maladjustment was weak and unreliable. He did this by misdirection. He gave a truthful answer to an irrelevant question. Terman failed to realize that a small difference in means between two or more distributions can have a dramatic effect on the percentage of each group found at the tails of the distribution. The relevant questions should have been "what is the percentage of maladjustment found at different levels of ability, and does this show a trend?" Terman's data can be used to find answers to these questions.

The method used to solve this problem is a relatively simple one but tedious in detail. (See appendix.) The results, however, are easy to understand. Using CMT-T scores for men as an illustration, and pooling the data for some maladjustment and serious maladjustment, the following percentages can be obtained.

PERCENTAGE OF MEN SHOWING SOME OR SERIOUS MALADJUSTMENT AT SIX LEVELS OF ABILITY

CMT-T Percent Maladjusted < 97.8 13 97.8 - 117.1 18 117.1 - 136.4 25 136.4 - 155.7 31 155.7 - 175 38 > 175 45

By comparison, the Triple Nine Society averages 155.16 on the CMT-T, and the average score for Prometheus Society members is 169.95 [1, 2]. The implications are staggering, especially when it is realized that these percentages do not include women, who show more maladjustment at lower CMT-T scores than men do. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why super high IQ societies suffer so much from schisms and a tendency towards disintegration. In any event, one thing is certain. The currently accepted belief that verbal intelligence is unrelated to maladjustment is clearly a myth.

Nevertheless, while Terman's data do provide a prima facie case for a connection between verbal intelligence and maladjustment, they fail to explain the causal mechanism involved. To obtain such insight requires close observation by a gifted observer. Fortunately, those insights are available to us in Leta S. Hollingworth's book, Children above 180 IQ. Hollingworth not only observed her subjects as children, she also continued to maintain some contact with them after they had reached maturity. So although her book is ostensibly about children, it is in fact laced throughout by her observations on exceptionally gifted adults as well.

Before examining Hollingworth's findings, however, it is necessary to explain how childhood IQs are related to adult mental ability. As a child ages, his IQ tends to regress to the mean of the population of which he is a member. This is partly due to the imperfect reliability of the test, and partly due to the uneven rate of maturation. The earlier the IQ is obtained, and the higher the score, the more the IQ can be expected to regress by the time the child becomes an adult. So although Hollingworth's children were all selected to have IQs above 180, their adult status was not nearly so high. In fact, as adults, there's good reason to believe that their abilities averaged only slightly above that of the average Triple Nine member. Evidence for this conjecture comes from the Terman research data. Terman observed the following relationship between childhood IQs on the Stanford-Binet and adult status on the Concept Mastery test form T.

CONCEPT MASTERY SCORES ACCORDING TO CHILDHOOD STANFORD-BINET IQ [7, p. 58]

IQ N CMT-T 135-139 41 114.2 140-149 344 131.8 150-159 200 136.5 160-169 70 146.2 > 170 48 155.8

The average childhood IQ score for those with childhood IQs above 170 was 177.7 for men, and 177.6 for women. That's quite close to the 180 cutoff used by Leta Hollingworth in selecting her subjects. Note that Terman's subjects who scored above 170 IQ as children averaged 155.8 on the CMT-T at age 41, a score quite close to the 155.16 made by the average Triple Nine member. Such a close match makes it reasonable to generalize Hollingworth's findings to members of both the Triple Nine Society and the Prometheus Society.

Hollingworth identified a number of adjustment problems caused by school acceleration. As this is rarely practiced in today's educational system, these are no longer problems and will not be discussed. There still remain, however, four adjustment problems that continue to perplex the gifted throughout their lives, two applying to all levels of giftedness, and two applying almost exclusively to the exceptionally gifted--i.e. those with childhood IQs above 170, or adult Concept Mastery test (T) scores above 155.

One of the problems faced by all gifted persons is learning to focus their efforts for prolonged periods of time. Since so much comes easily to them, they may never acquire the self-discipline necessary to use their gifts to the fullest. Hollingworth describes how the habit begins.

Where the gifted child drifts in the school unrecognized, working chronically below his capacity (even though young for his grade), he receives daily practice in habits of idleness and daydreaming. His abilities never receive the stimulus of genuine challenge, and the situation tends to form in him the expectation of an effortless existence [3, p. 258].

But if the "average" gifted child tends to acquire bad adjustment habits in the ordinary schoolroom, the exceptionally gifted have even more problems. Hollingworth continues:

Children with IQs up to 150 get along in the ordinary course of school life quite well, achieving excellent marks without serious effort. But children above this mental status become almost intolerably bored with school work if kept in lockstep with unselected pupils of their own age. Children who rise above 170 IQ are liable to regard school with indifference or with positive dislike, for they find nothing in the work to absorb their interest. This condition of affairs, coupled with the supervision of unseeing and unsympathetic teachers, has sometimes led even to truancy on the part of gifted children [3, p. 258].

A second adjustment problem faced by all gifted persons is due to their uncommon versatility. Hollingworth says:

Another problem of development with reference to occupation grows out of the versatility of these children. So far from being one-sided in ability and interest, they are typically capable of so many different kinds of success that they may have difficulty in confining themselves to a reasonable number of enterprises. Some of them are lost to usefulness through spreading their available time and energy over such a wide array of projects that nothing can be finished or done perfectly. After all, time and space are limited for the gifted as for others, and the life-span is probably not much longer for them than for others. A choice must be made among the numerous possibilities, since modern life calls for specialization [3, p. 259].

A third problem faced by the gifted is learning to suffer fools gladly. Hollingworth notes:

A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered. Failure to learn how to tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness, disillusionment, and misanthropy [3, p. 259].

The single greatest adjustment problem faced by the gifted, however, is their tendency to become isolated from the rest of humanity. This problem is especially acute among the exceptionally gifted. Hollingworth says:

This tendency to become isolated is one of the most important factors to be considered in guiding the development of personality in highly intelligent children, but it does not become a serious problem except at the very extreme degrees of intelligence. The majority of children between 130 and 150 find fairly easy adjustment, because neighborhoods and schools are selective, so that like-minded children tend to be located in the same schools and districts. Furthermore, the gifted child, being large and strong for his age, is acceptable to playmates a year or two older. Great difficulty arises only when a young child is above 160 IQ. At the extremely high levels of 180 or 190 IQ, the problem of friendships is difficult indeed, and the younger the person the more difficult it is. The trouble decreases with age because as persons become adult, they naturally seek and find on their own initiative groups who are like-minded, such as learned societies [3, p. 264].

Hollingworth points out that the exceptionally gifted do not deliberately choose isolation, but are forced into it against their wills.

These superior children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case... Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone, since older children regard them as "babies," and adults seldom play during hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse [3, p. 262].

But if the exceptionally gifted is isolated from his contemporaries, the gulf between him and the adult authorities in his life is even deeper.

The very gifted child or adolescent, perceiving the illogical conduct of those in charge of his affairs, may turn rebellious against all authority and fall into a condition of negative suggestibility--a most unfortunate trend of personality, since the person is then unable to take a cooperative attitude toward authority. A person who is highly suggestible in a negative direction is as much in bondage to others around him as is the person who is positively suggestible. The social value of the person is seriously impaired in either case. The gifted are not likely to fall victims to positive suggestion but many of them develop negativism to a conspicuous degree [3, p 260].

Anyone reading the super high IQ journals is aware of the truth of this statement. Negative individuals abound in every high IQ society.

Hollingworth distilled her observations into two ideas that are among the most important ever discovered for the understanding of gifted behavior. The first is the concept of an optimum adjustment range. She says:

All things considered, the psychologist who has observed the development of gifted children over a long period of time from early childhood to maturity, evolves the idea that there is a certain restricted portion of the total range of intelligence which is most favorable to the development of successful and well-rounded personality in the world as it now exists. This limited range appears to be somewhere between 125 and 155 IQ. Children and adolescents in this area are enough more intelligent than the average to win the confidence of large numbers of their fellows, which brings about leadership, and to manage their own lives with superior efficiency. Moreover, there are enough of them to afford mutual esteem and understanding. But those of 170 IQ and beyond are too intelligent to be understood by the general run of persons with whom they make contact. They are too infrequent to find congenial companions. They have to contend with loneliness and personal isolation from their contemporaries throughout the period of their immaturity. To what extent these patterns become fixed, we cannot yet tell [3, p. 264].

Hollingworth's second seminal idea is that of a "communication range." She does not state this explicitly, but it can be inferred from some of her comments on leadership.

Observation shows that there is a direct ratio between the intelligence of the leader and that of the led. To be a leader of his contemporaries a child must be more intelligent but not too much more intelligent than those to be led... But generally speaking, a leadership pattern will not form--or it will break up--when a discrepancy of more than about 30 points of IQ comes to exist between leader and led [3, p. 287].

The implication is that there is a limit beyond which genuine communication between different levels of intelligence becomes impossible. To say that a child or an adult is intellectually isolated from his contemporaries is to say that everyone in his environment has an IQ at least 30 points different from his own. Knowing only a person's IQ, then, is not enough to tell how well he's likely to cope with his environment. Some knowledge of the intellectual level of his environment is also necessary.

If the optimum range of intelligence lies between 125 and 155 IQ, as Hollingworth suggests, then it follows that 155 can be thought of as a threshold separating an optimum adjustment zone below it from a suboptimum range above it. Other psychologists have also noticed how this score tends to divide people into two naturally occurring categories. Among these is one of the doyens of psychometrics, David Wechsler. He comments:

The topics of genius and degeneration are only special cases of the more general problem involved in the evaluation of human capacities, namely the quantitative versus qualitative. There are those who insist that all differences are qualitative, and those who with equal conviction maintain that they are exclusively quantitative. The true answer is that they are both. General intelligence, for example, is undoubtedly quantitative in the sense that it consists of varying amounts of the same basic stuff (e.g., mental energy) which can be expressed by continuous numerical measures like intelligence Quotients or Mental-Age scores, and these are as real as any physical measurements are. But it is equally certain that our description of the difference between a genius and an average person by a statement to the effect that he has an IQ greater by this or that amount, does not describe the difference between them as completely or in the same way as when we say that a mile is much longer than an inch. The genius (as regards intellectual ability) not only has an IQ of say 50 points more than the average person, but in virtue of this difference acquires seemingly new aspects (potentialities) or characteristics. These seemingly new aspects or characteristics, in their totality, are what go to make up the "qualitative" difference between them [9, p. 134].

Wechsler is saying quite plainly that those with IQs above 150 are different in kind from those below that level. He is saying that they are a different kind of mind, a different kind of human being.

This subjective impression of a difference in kind also appears to be fairly common among members of the super high IQ societies themselves. When Prometheus and Triple Nine members were asked if they perceived a categorical difference between those above this level and others, most said that they did, although they also said that they were reluctant to call the difference genius. When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar. But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.

The feeling of estrangement, or at least detachment, from society at large is not merely subjective illusion. Society is not geared to deal effectively with the exceptionally gifted adult because almost nothing objective is known about him. It is a commonplace observation that no psychometric instrument can be validly used to evaluate a person unless others like him were included in the test's norming sample. Yet those with IQs above 150 are so rare that few if any were ever included in the norming sample of any of the most commonly used tests, tests like the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory, the Kuder Vocational Preference Record, the MMPI and so on. As a consequence, objective self- knowledge for the exceptionally gifted is nearly impossible to obtain. What he most needs to know is not how he differs from ordinary people--he is acutely aware of that--but how he is both like and unlike those of his own kind. The most commonly used tests can't provide that knowledge, so he is forced to find out in more roundabout ways. It is his attempts to find answers to these questions that may explain the emergence of the super high IQ societies. Where else can he find peers against which to measure himself?

There appear to be three sorts of childhoods and three sorts of adult social adaptations made by the gifted. The first of these may be called the committed strategy. These individuals were born into upper middle class families, with gifted and well educated parents, and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally gifted can have serious adjustment problems.

The second kind of social adaptation may be called the marginal strategy. These individuals were typically born into a lower socio-economic class, without gifted parents, gifted siblings, or gifted friends. Often they did not go to college at all, but instead went right to work immediately after high school, or even before. And although they may superficially appear to have made a good adjustment to their work and friends, neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention. They hunger for more intellectual challenge and more real companionship than their social environment can supply. So they resort to leading a double life. They compartmentalize their life into a public sphere and a private sphere. In public they go through the motions of fulfilling their social roles, whatever they are, but in private they pursue goals of their own. They are often omnivorous readers, and sometimes unusually expert amateurs in specialized subjects. The double life strategy might even be called the genius ploy, as many geniuses in history have worked at menial tasks in order to free themselves for more important work. Socrates, you will remember was a stone mason, Spinoza was a lens grinder, and even Jesus was a carpenter. The exceptionally gifted adult who works as a parking lot attendant while creating new mathematics has adopted an honored way of life and deserves respect for his courage, not criticism for failing to live up to his abilities. Those conformists who adopt the committed strategy may be pillars of their community and make the world go around, but historically, those with truly original minds have more often adopted the double life tactic. They are ones among the gifted who are most likely to make the world go forward.

And finally there are the dropouts. These sometimes bizarre individuals were often born into families in which one or more of the parents were not only exceptionally gifted, but exceptionally maladjusted themselves. This is the worst possible social environment that a gifted child can be thrust into. His parents, often driven by egocentric ambitions of their own, may use him to gratify their own needs for accomplishment. He is, to all intents and purposes, not a living human being to them, but a performing animal, or even an experiment. That is what happened to Sidis, and may be the explanation for all those gifted who "burn out" as he did. (Readers familiar with the Terman study will recognize the committed strategy and the marginal strategy as roughly similar to the adjustment patterns of Terman's A and C groups.)

If the exceptionally gifted adult with an IQ of 150, or 160, or 170 has problems in adapting to his world, what must it have been like for William James Sidis, whose IQ was 250 or more?

Aldous Huxley once wrote:

Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them [4, p. 2242].

And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy is simple. Sidis was a feral child; a true man born into a world filled with animals--a world filled with us.

Extracted from the article by Grady M. Towers, http://www.prometheussociety.org/articles/ Outsiders.html

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I sat, once more in the late hours of darkness, in the airport of a foreign city. I was tired as only both the sufferer from insomnia and the traveler can be tired. I had missed a plane and had almost a whole night's wait before me. I could not sleep. The long corridor was deserted. Even the cleaning women had passed by. In that white efficient glare I grew ever more depressed and weary. I was tired of the endless comings and goings of my profession; I was tired of customs officers and police. I was lonely for home. My eyes hurt. I was, unconsciously perhaps, looking for that warm stone, that hawthorn leaf, where, in the words of the poet, man trades in at last his wife and friend. I had an ocean to cross; the effort seemed unbearable. I rested my aching head upon my hand. Later, beginning at the far end of that desolate corridor, I saw a man moving slowly toward me. In a small corner of my eye I merely noted him. He limped, painfully and grotesquely, upon a heavy cane. He was far away, and it was no matter to me. I shifted the unpleasant mote out of my eye. But, after a time, I could still feel him approaching, and in one of those white moments of penetration which are so dreadful, my eyes were drawn back to him as he came on. With an anatomist's eye I saw this amazing conglomeration of sticks and broken, misshapen pulleys which make up the body of man. Here was an apt subject, and I flew to a raging mental dissection. How could anyone, I contended, trapped in this mechanical thing of joints and sliding wires expect the acts it performed to go other than awry? The man limped on, relentlessly. How, oh God, I entreated, did we become trapped within this substance out of which we stare so hopelessly upon our own eventual dissolution? How for a single minute could we dream or imagine that thought would save us, children deliver us, from the body of this death? Not in time, my mind rang with my despair; not in mortal time, not in this place, not anywhere in the world would blood be staunched, or the dark wrong be forever righted, or the parted be rejoined. Not in this time, not mortal time. The substance was too gross, our utopias bought with too much pain." --Loren Eisley, "The Night Country"

1953. US. Death row. A bad poem, but elevated by its monumental context and constrained by a simple encipherment revealing the authors. Even so, we did what we believed in: Treason, yes, perhaps, but with good cause. History will judge by its own laws, Each act within the sunlight of the season. Love was what inspired us, a reason As pure as any saint in Satan's jaws. Nor was the god we worshipped through those wars Demonized, as later all would see him. Justice would not just sustain our guilt, Undoing those who would undo a wrong, Leaving us in lucid infamy. Instead, it would remember what we willed Under the illusion of a song So beautiful it would the chained earth free.

http://iq.org/ rhetoric/rhetoric-0.2.0/doc/

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"I feel the deepest pleasure, dear friend, in a tete-a-tete with you. You can't imagine how much I have suffered from this squabble I have had with the masses, with the anonymous herd... Pretend for a moment that we are alone together in some remote place, far away from the hurly burly of life and that we are talking like old friends, who know each other's very soul, and understand each other just by a glance...

"For ten years we have been talking about art and literature...- and often dawn caught us still talking, searching the past, questioning the present, trying to discover truth, and to create for ourselves an infallible and comprehensive religion. We shuffled stacks of terrible ideas, we examined and rejected all ideologies, and after much arduous labour that outside one's personal life there exists only lies and one's stupidity."

-- from a letter to Cezanne from Emile Zola, ca. 1866

Close the door to world events and when one does not look they come in the window! Begin forwarded message: > Subject: thanks for your great book > > Hi ! > > I'm from Tehran / Iran. I know that you've heard lots of > news about Iran these days, but we have two Irans: > one is the ruling party and the second is the people ! :) > and I'm one of those people ! > > I've just downloaded your book (underground) and > read it all. it was a great work. I enjoyed a alot and > blogged about it (http://FreeKeyboard.net/node/47 ). > (oh man ! it is in Farsi !) > > And the second reason I'm writing you: I want to > inform you that your site (underground-book) is censored > in Iran !!! I'm also complained about it to my government > but with no luck > > Thank you again for your great book and also THANK you > for letting people download it and read it. We can not order > copies here so it was a delight to download and read it legally :)

Transparency in the cold light of Finland Therese Catanzariti Crikey's Scandinavian correspondent In Finland, all individual tax returns are public information which makes for some interesting number crunching from the local media, as our Scandinavian correspondent, Therese Catanzariti, writes: Have you ever wondered what your colleagues are earning? Have you ever wondered what your peer group are earning? Your next door neigbour? Your cousin? A guy you went to school with? Finland takes "nosy-ness" to new dizzying heights. Finland is the most transparent public sector in the world but for those who think everyone should follow their lead, think about this. Think about this very very carefully. All individual tax returns are public. Public. Yes. Public. No ATO secrecy and caring about your privacy for the Finnish Vero. What does this mean? Every year the main newspapers trawl through the Finnish tax office. They then prepare a list of the top 1000 income earners and the top 1000 capital income earners. Then they publish it. The list shows name, job, town and year of birth. It shows income (including stock options) and wealth. And then, the piece de resistance, how much tax paid as a proportion of salary. There is even a list of last year's rankings - who is shooting up the charts? Who has fallen on (relatively) hard times? Who is on the list? Lots of Nokia, partly because "income" includes stock options. Apparently last year when the stock was doing well, Nokia employees did a pretty clean sweep of the top places. Then there's Jaako Salovaara, the only person under 30 in the top 20. And the guys from Instrumentarium who just got bought out by GE and got options. And this being high-tech Finland, you can use the search machine on the website to tailor the list and rank the results. Who are your local millionaires? Insert a town in Finland in the box "Kunta". Who are the young guns making a fortune? Scroll down the box "Ika" Where are the women? Choose "naisen" from the box "Sukupuoli" Or just cut to the chase - insert a name in the box "Nimi" and find out how your boss is doing. In addition to the list, Finnish journalists highlight a few other interesting and anamalous tax returns. One box in the Finnish printed newspaper had a box of salaries of all the union bosses. Why does the head of the teacher's union earn over 200,000 euros a year? How can he empathise with his comrades struggling with low pay? And this being transparent Finland, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat did not hide that some of the wealthiest people on the capital list are involved with the Sanomat newspaper group. But this is just what the mainstream newspapers do. There are also boutique publications that publish guides of everyone who earns over around 40,000 euros. They put a few stories in so they can argue it's news. But other than that, it's just one long list of everyone you know. And when there are only 5 million people in the country, and very very few foreigners, you know a lot of people. If you want your own copy, here's the link (alas, Finnish only) - http://www.veroporssi.com/index.php But hang on. We're in Finland, super-connected super wireless Finland. If you think newspapers and websites are yesterday, try SMS. You can send an SMS to the following number 16400 (yes, it works outside Finland +358 16400) with the text "vero first name last name". And lo, it will send you back the taxable income of that person in the last financial year. So is this a good idea? Well it works in Finland because of the Finns. Finland is not a country of keeping up with the Jones's. In fact, Finland is more a country of shame about obvious wealth - they want to appear as if they are behind the Jones's. One of the statistics the Finns are most proud of is the relatively small difference between the top 10% and the bottom 10% of the society. Finnish taxes are high, and its tempting to avoid them. But people are shamed into paying tax. Do you really think it's a coincidence that Jorma Ollilla, Nokia CEO, knowing he will be published at the top of the list every year, pays the full whack of 60% tax? If you don't pay tax, not only will the tax office be after you. Everyone knows you haven't paid your fair share. Everyone knows. Your colleagues at work, your family, your neighbours, your kid's schoolteacher, the guy who serves you coffee in your favourite coffee shop. Try living with that.

This metric reflects the expected increase in universal entropy caused by the existence of an organism over the future course of the universe compared to the organism not existing (or being killed, if that is the question). Since this is usually uncomputable due to our inability to predict the deep future in this way, we might (a) do some sort of future discounting or modify the metric to (b) only include the entropy increase of the universe for the expected duration of the organisms life. This metric ("m") is natural in several ways: let A and B be individuals. Let everything else be equal between the individuals unless otherwise stated and let us use the (b) metric unless otherwise stated. Then the metric is natural is the sense that: 1) if A lives longer than B, then m(A)>m(B) 2) if A does more work / consumes more energy than B, without stealing it from a more efficient consumer then m(A)>m(B) 3) (if we're counting descendents too) if A has more offsping than B then m(A)>m(B) 4) if A is bigger than B then generally 2) is implied 5) if A does not kill capriciously, then m(A)>m(B) 6) if A recycles waste and uses the extra energy then m(A)>m(B) 7) if A does not "burn down the forests" without what most people consider good cause, then m(A)>m(B) 8) descendents set up solar panels on mars or otherwise tap new energy sources: then m(A)>m(B) 9) descendents spread out geographically, otherwise act the same: then m(A)>m(B)

Antony arrives from Sydney with girl in toe. A' Mid-length hair and beard, both carrot red. A' decked out in hippy attire. Strong contrast to previous 'tough man' image. Newage fruitiness is now all consuming. A' attempting to dominate J' [brother]. A' can see "dark matter", emit UV rays, is a 15th (3*5) plane yogi, 27th dan Kung Foo Spirit Master. A' casts a voodoo spell "of death" on Michael B. by "cutting the throat" of my ceramic goose. A' clearly suffering some type of schizophrenia. V. poor reality testing and is of unstable affect. Poor reality testing fuelled by reading of Calos Castenida, occult books, etc. Much worse compared to last observation circa 18 months ago, but perhaps madness (then) was concealed as hypochondria. Situation v. sad. Believe A' will be in mad house or dead within 5 years and tell him so... ...A' lucid but intensely verbalising his theories / religious wank. I try to snare A's delusions. He becomes aggressive and frightened, accusing me of "psychotronically raping" girl from last night. I push him further. He disavows my evil heart and flees into the night.

There are no unarguable axioms of value or worth, there are only inclinations and my inclinations have turned to an intense loathing of institutions, and most of the people in them; those spineless supplicants agape at the passing of other men's ideas, not drawn by desire, but driven by fear and ignorance, to the tepid hearth of institutionalism. One may argue as to the qualities of a passing man's wife, but as a life philosophy it can only appeal to self-loathing celibates. How much better the subjective stance which curls the mind around the lovely creature in one's embrace! This perception etched into me when I attended an Australian Institute of Physics conference at ANU with 900 career physicists, the body of which were snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character. For every Feynman or Lorentz, 100 pen pushing wretches scratching each others eyes out in academic committees or building better bombs for the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology Organisation), who had provided everyone with a bag, embossed with their logo, which most physicists pathetically lugged about with pride and ignorance. A year before, also at ANU, I represented my university at the Australian National Physics Competition. At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics, motioned to us and said, 'You are the cream of Australian physics'. I looked around, and thought, 'Christ Almighty, I hope he's wrong'.

There is a foundation (herein called "the Institute") which holds some of my copyrights and which I have used from time to time as a front, gently concealing my freedom from the social covenant. There are activities that the Institute should engage in that require substantial cash reserves. Normally NGOs beg, but I'm no good at that sort of thing, so the the Institute has created an offshore startup company ("thing2thing.com") to fund it. This little seed has pushed through into the light from the dark loam wherein ideas are born and now calls for gardeners and manure. To supply them the Institute will pool auction off 40% of the company over two months (i.e angel investors get their investment / total investment of the 40% auctioned) to anyone who will invest. There's no higher reason for this approach, it is a method of gaining initial funding. There are two dilemmas (di-lemma = "two truths". 2 dilemmas = 4 truths). The investment. It is a great blessing to have courage and foresight that results in wealth producing rather than wealth destroying acts. However foresight is limited and the connection between dividends and the intelligence of the original investment, assuming there ever was one, slowly dwindles to zero, whittled away by fate's unrelenting peturbations of man's activities; above this plunging donkey, dividend payments may soar exponentially till they yearn for the Islamic opprobrium on unearned wealth. Now this very possibility, this pleasant vision of pocketing of the dividend fatwa, increases investment without increasing investment discrimination unless some investments can be seen to exclude this eventuality. Dilemma#1 There is thought of engineering investments so that after a substantial return, dividends are transformed into a donation to the Institute or some other charity, but this will reduce total investment, perhaps resulting in a net evil, since we define the Institute's ability to act as a good. Examining the extremes, we see immediately that if the company makes nothing, the Institute makes less than nothing and the investors make less than nothing while if the investors receive substantial unearned wealth, then the Institute is well funded and able to act. But wealth flows from the ongoing daily labors of those running the startup. Here we see the disparity. Their labor is ongoing and connected to wealth production at all times. Individuals who start companies try to minimise share dilution while maximising investment. While larger companies will sell bonds or borrow at market rates, startups succeed in attracting investors to their roulette table by offering the carnal vision of l'amour without l'commitment. Can we reinvent the bordello? This brings me to the next dilemma. Dilemma#2 How should employees, if that word is not too psychologically confining, be compensated for their time and abilities? ''anyway they want to be'' for supply and demand works for novel compensation schemes just as it works for traditional wages. So my question becomes, 'given that the founders loathe paperwork & consensus and need to satisfy investors that their investment isn't going to be entirely returned in form of employee stock options, what is left to offer employees? How can their hearts be opened to the new?'

On Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:45:29 -0400, "Stephen Dewey" said: > Anyway, if any of you have worked through these issues before [GPL], I'd > appreciate your input. Thanks! It's a non-issue. Google, yahoo and many, many others use linux servers, built with linux tools. There's no clear definition as to where a program begins and ends. Is the configuration file part of a program? Its interface with system libraries? Information flows all around inorder for anything to have an affect on the world. 'program' is ill defined, since there is no way to decide what is in the set and what isn't other than the law courts, but the political and legal will is such that many giants must fall before you do. Technical people, good at stacking houses of abstract cards often look at the law and see rules, but this is a shadow, for law hangs from the boughs of politics, that branch of behavior involved with the societal control of freedom of action. Always consider the real politik of law; who will push for change and who will resist. Who will judges, in support of their own feelings, interests and concern for their family and friends, want to side with?

So I've asked the question "What is lightning?". Usually I get the older kids (who've learnt a few things at school) saying "Electricity", "static electricity", "electric current", "a flow of electric charges". And younger kids say things like "It's a bright light", "a bolt from the sky", "it happens in a storm", "it's a light that comes with a big bang". This time, I got emotive/experiential words - very unusual. I'd ask what lightning was, and they'd say "It's scary". "It's loud". "It's exciting". "It's noisy".

Do you need a witness? I am a witness. Do you need a lawyer? My father is a lawyer. The state does what it can get away with. The state does what we let it get away with. The state does what we let ourselves get away with, for we, in our interaction with others, form the state. The bureaucratat knows the average man, and especially men of the underclass are victims in waiting. The force of their action is in inverse proportion to the perception that the victim's father may be an influential lawyer or have contacts in the political classes that control them. The anonymisation of peoples through high population density strips state victims of retributive power; in small communities, "you beat my son" is soon followed by "your cousin shall not marry my daughter". The anonymous megaloposis denies this kind of retribution. Additional freedom is granted alone to the trikster, who through adopting the manner and dress of the establishment may fool the agents of the state into deference. In full circle, every so often a member of the establishment, foolish enough to believe that power was within, puts on their bathers, or their sweat suit and becomes a victim. The grunts protest... "we didn't think you were the man; you weren't dressed right. it's not our fault. you must play by the rules.". From Tiki Swain: On the scene - 1818, Wednesday 21 June 2006 As I walk out onto the platform at Newport Train Station, I hear a woman's voice, upset but calming. She's telling someone to let them do it, it'll be OK. I look over to the far platform, across two sets of tracks. In the open-front waiting room a man is seated on the bench having his arm twisted up over his shoulder and behind his back by two other men. He's resisting. The two men handling him are nondescript, in casual clothing - both beefy, both in clothes that show wear and use, but that's all they have in common visually. The woman speaking stands outside, pacing back and forth, talking constantly. "Love, it's all right. We'll work it out. It'll be ok. I don't know who they are. They haven't told us anything. It'll be OK, just let them handcuff you. They just want to ask you some questions. Just stay calm." Sure enough, the two men have somehow produced handcuffs from somewhere. They now have the first man facing the wall, held down, and are trying to handcuff his hands behind his back. A second woman stands outside, looking down the platform, glancing in every so often, talking steadily and inaudibly into a walkietalkie. She is also carrying no identifying marks or badges, wearing nondescript casual clothing - flared boot- topper jeans, a jacket with some random brand slogan. There is nothing to show that she has any association with the men other than her proximity and her walkietalkie - not a normal civilian carry item. "It'll be OK. Just let them do it. I don't know who they are. They're just going to find out what you know. It can't be much, maybe a $500 fine. You haven't done anything illegal or broken the law or anything. They'll take you down to the station. It'll take only two hours or so. Just two hours, and we'll come and get you. It's OK, we'll come and get you. Just sit down now." I wonder to myself how she knows how long a station visit takes, and how she knows they're going to "a station" if she still doesn't know who they are. I wonder if she comprehends the various levels of law involved in the conflicting statements "you haven't broken the law" and "only a $500 fine". I wonder what happened in the sixty seconds before I walked through the platform door. She asides (at the same volume) to the other woman "I'm just trying to keep him calm". Her voice is not angry, not shrill - but definitely upset and slightly panicky. She knows she doesn't know what's happening, and that none of the three are saying anything to her or giving any explanation. Inside the waiting room they've now moved to the other wall, and are now holding the man out of my sight. She looks back in at them and starts quickly saying "Give him some fresh air! You've got to let him come outside! He needs fresh air!". She gestures frantically but frustratedly with her arms, waving her lit cigarette across the entrance as she does so. It seems a pointless thing to say - they don't appear to be taking any notice of her as long as she's not hindering them. But then the two men bring out the first, handcuffed. He doesn't walk well. "What did you hit him with? Was it mace?" she says. "Was it pepper spray? Why did you have to do that? You didn't need to do that!" The two men lead the third into the male toilets, out of sight. The woman follows them partway, then comes back out, sobbing. "That's police brutality! All he did was jump onto the tracks!" She's making no attempt to be soothing now that she's not in front of them, letting her upset fully show, and it's not clear who she's talking to. Perhaps just all of us watching silently on both platforms. Walkie-talkie woman holds in place, walking a few steps up and down the platform, keeping the device horizontal to her ear and mouth, talking steadily, not watching the men. The upset woman dashes into the waiting room, to a corner out of sight, and comes out carrying a collection of bags and bits, their gear. She calls out to her partner in that same calming voice again "It'll be OK. I'll find out where they're taking you and we'll get you." She approaches the woman and says in the same clear medium volume as everything else she's said: "Excuse me, where are you taking him? I need to know because I need to ring his dad and tell him, he was going to pick us up at the station." The walkietalkie woman looks past her, eyes on space and ears on the walkie talkie. The first woman comes closer. "Excuse me, lady, I need to talk to you. Please." She says it calmly and straightforwardly, with no rudeness or aggression. She is ignored. She repeats herself, and continues to be ignored. Walkietalkie woman is following one of the simple rules of enforcing submission - do not engage. Do not give any action, speech or emotion power by acknowledging it exists. Do not act in any way which encourages them to think they can make a difference to your actions. It works. The first woman returns to her stuff, obviously waiting for a chance to speak with anyone. She intersperses her fretful pacing and cigarette waving with random callings out to her partner. "It'll be OK." "They'll just take you to the station." "It won't take long." One of the men returns from the toilets, carrying an open notebook, and asks her if she has any ID. She says "No, but my partner does." The two of them begin speaking more quietly. I overhear a lone phrase - "We were running to try and catch the train...". She goes into the toilets with him, and almost immediately dashes out again and grabs a lone shoe from the pile of stuff. "It's OK, love, I've got your shoe. Here's your shoe." She goes in again. The only one left visible is walkietalkie woman, listening intently to the far away voices. She begins to speak again, but puts an arm over her lower face, hiding her mouth. The Flinders St train pulls in in front of me, and I don't/can't see any more. Instead I catch the train onwards, wondering. Wondering if I'd feel trusting if I was being manhandled by two of three unmarked unknowns. Wondering at the logic of "let them put the handcuffs on you" combined with "We don't know who they are". Wondering what he did to elicit this response. I think about the people on the platforms, who in their behaviour assume that everything is meant to happen this way, this is all orderly and expected, who assume that these three unknowns are official and that they are responding to a fellow passenger this way because he did something that deserved it. And I think about the woman most of all. I wonder at the trust in our society that she's displaying by assuming he is being taken to a station, or is it hope? and her assuming that a station visit is something he will return from, unharmed, in a relatively short time. I consider the luxury of living in a society where people can make those assumptions, have those hopes. I wonder at her implicit belief in voice, in wording and in behaviour that playing the system and supporting it fully is the best method for survival, even when she's not sure which bit of the system they've fallen afoul of. Sort of an adult version of the child's belief in the sanctity of goodness - that bad things will not happen to you if you are good. I note that she never spoke angrily or aggressively to any of the three unknowns, or even unleashed the full extent of her feelings at them. And I wonder at this apparent belief/behaviour that intelligent reason will bring them through, eventually. I wonder at this latter because it's such a great belief of our society, yet I've never considered it true by fact, only true by mutual agreement. It only lasts until someone disagrees.

Moshe shuffled in the prisoner selection line with his daughter. When he came to the selection guard Moshe was told both father and daughter would be sent either to the extermination camp or the work camp. The guard found their numbers and said the daughter was go to the extermination camp. Moshe wailed, fell to the ground and threw his arms about the guard's legs, begging for his daugther to be spared. He kissed the guard's boots and offered his own life and the extraction of the last of his gold teeth. The guard smiled thinly and said, "Very well, but first you must pass my test. My eyes are completely indistinguishable from each other but are not the same. One is glass and was modeled on the other. Reichsmarshal Goering himself appointed the finest jewelers in Potsdam to craft it after I returned from the front. If you can find a way to distinguish the glass eye from the real one, I will trade your life for your daughter's". Moshe starred into the guard's eyes and slowly raised his hand, pointing to the left eye. The guard looked at Moshe and shouted, "What! How did you know?!". "I am sorry.. " trembled Moshe, "but the left eye looks at me with a kindly gleam".

Recently I've run across a couple of presentations on technological solutions to reverse global warming. The most interesting is to put stuff into the upper atmosphere to block UV light. Not only does this reduce warming due to sunlight, it has an immediate payoff in terms of reduction in skin cancer. Analyses suggests that it would actually pay for itself in terms of just that effect, independent of the benefits for climate change. Here is one presentation, a 7-minute audio interview with UCI physicist (and science fiction author) Greg Benford: http://www.desmogblog.com/gregory-benford-podcast (http://www.desmogblog.com/audio/download/310) And here is a paper by Dr. Edward Teller of Livermore Labs on the subject, which I think is the work Benford is referring to: http://www.llnl.gov/global-warm/ http://www.llnl.gov/global-warm/148012.pdf Teller's paper actually describes two mitigation schemes, one involving putting stuff in the stratosphere, and the other a more ambitious plan to station material at the Earth-Sun L1 point. This is a semi-stable orbital point approximately a million miles towards the Sun from the Earth. Teller et al calculate that only 3000 tons of smart material located at L1 would diffract away enough sunlight from Earth to eliminate global warming. Of course it will be some time before we can put or manipulate this much material in space. Benford suggests (in his interview) beginning a pilot scheme to put 100 micron particles into the arctic stratosphere during the summer, in order to try to reverse the loss of arctic sea ice and save the polar bears. By design (and in fact, it's hard to avoid) these would snow out every year so they have to be replaced each summer, at an annual cost of about $100 million, he estimates. The bottom line is, as Benford notes, "we're going to have to run this planet." Sooner or later the message will sink in that Kyoto and other conservation efforts are too little, too late (and too expensive). Geo-engineering will be forced on the human race, luddites and all, by the climate change threat of the 21st century.

The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus: Retribution: I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother. Anticipation: I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother. Diplomacy: I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.