I question whether the distribution of /dev/urandom provides the distribution necessary to ensure the desired outcome.

Most of my markers track my diet and weight, but not HDL, and it seems, less anecdotally, that while there are things you can do to improve your HDL (Niacin in medically significant quantities) those things aren't being shown to reduce your rate of heart disease.

I'm not going to argue that eating a healthy diet hurts, but it does not necessarily help if you're born under a bad sign. And this IS an anecdote, but people in my family tend to drop dead of heart attacks in their late 30s and early 40s and are physically fit (or else live into their late 90s, early 100s and not necessarily fit). I do not think the hard data exists to entirely be certain what effects diet is having on health issues, only correlations that may not be easily understood.

I agree with some, for example, why aren't more men in elementary education? In some cases there is true sexism at play: some people think men who teach little kids are either gay or perverts (and some think those are the same thing...). But for the most part I don't know many men who'd want to do these things.

To be blunt, the USA views STEM as low class.

... Really? Since when? What fucked up part of the world do you live in that believes such a silly statement? Who are the 'upper class' then? Blue collar workers perhaps?

I think he's right on this one. The US is entirely about idolizing business and management, in spite of how very bad most of our businesses are managed. If you're in STEM, you are always going to be on the bottom rung. You will be paid much less, you will work longer hours, you will not have nearly as much control or options. You're the one that gets axed when the boss makes a mistake, you're the one that has to stay in the office late when the customer wants a new feature, you're the one that has to take the fall when a very public mistake is caught that probably was the result of some bean counter elsewhere.

Yes, the company comes to a grinding halt if we were to all band together and fight, but that's unlikely. Hell we can't even VOTE together to stop H1B nonsense, never mind do something that might draw attention personally to us.

If you actually want to find out, instead of 'believing,' then go read the actual studies, for that is where knowledge is to be found.

I am not a psychologist, where do I find such things? Even the responses to my post are all over the place. I'm not doing a "citation please" troll, but all I have found in my searches is very contradictory evidence and in PRACTICE IQ is the gating factor in most texas school districts, and several others I've looked at. IQ continues to be seen as the gold standard practice, or metrics that amount to the same. Innate ability is preferred over achievement. Yet any time you look at IQ results you see it strongly correlated with things that clearly have nothing to do with intelligence (race, upbringing, background, flynn effect, etc.). If psychologists have deprecated IQ or related metrics (i.e. g, and others), why do they still exist? My opinion is it has more to do with money than actual science, but it remains in belief until I can justify it to myself.

I disagree about what companies want, at any given time I am usually employed by one of the top end tech companies, they're all relatively similar. Companies still being seen in a growth phase (which are companies I try to be at, because $$$) tends to want to hire geniuses, we set the bar extremely high and effectively administer an IQ test (granted a very narrowly focused one). We don't make you demonstrate experience, we make you solve problems on the fly, under pressure in a test-taker format. Companies that have peaked want to hire the cheapest person they can find who is fit to do the job, but give them a way to quantify that and I assure you they'd be all over it and make spreadsheets with a red line on it.

Dogs are cute cats that are also dumb. Encourage your dog with a growth mindset and one day he may be a cat.

If this is true, why do psychologists continue to focus so much on IQ? Why do they insist there is a strong, undeniable link between IQ and success that must be catered to? Why has funding for students who, as they say, "are merely bright, but not gifted" entirely disappeared in favor of a fully mainstream approach? Why are the hard working students who achieve but who are not obvious savants lumped in with the merely average, and worst, the probably hopeless (whatever the reason)?

Is this real science, or feel good "also-ran" science for the ignorant and unspecial, as one might be led to believe if one actually believed psychology was anything like actual science? We all want to believe articles like this are true, IQ is a bitter pill to swallow and one that seems even murkier the more one reads about it, however it represents our cultures mindset towards success. No company wants a merely bright hard-working person, they want a genius, they worship that genius. Give an academic institution a test, and they will run off with the truly exceptional students (the SATs allegedly correlate to IQ at 0.82, so they actually DO this). Give a corporation that test and they'll probably rather do without than hire anyone with an IQ below 120, which of course, represents the majority of people.

I prefer to believe what is in this article in the same way that I prefer to believe in Free Will, but, however disappointing this may be, this does not reflect the prevailing attitudes of people that matter. Nothing in this article is substantial enough to use as a weapon to change education, and ultimately it's just feel good drivel, much like I think the IQ studies to date are, although sadly they represent the established convention. From a magazine like Scientific American I want something I can USE to make change.

I agree, it's cheaper and does not encourage prison corporations to side with the copyright lobbies.

Also I think his moderation is unfair, it's clearly sarcasm. Either that or we've finally found Paris Hilton's slashdot ID.

You couldn't find anything about fashion online

This pretty much makes my point in 7 words. Thanks.

You know, there was a day, not so long ago, when the internet worked just fine and had very few ads. The ads aren't paying for "the internet". They're paying for people to "work the internet" full time, and it's not very clear how much value they're adding. I'm sure there'd be a loss if we found an effective way of stopping ads, but I don't think it'd be that great for the parts of the internet that make the ISP fee worthwhile. Every loser with a blog and a webcam now loads his page with as many ads as he thinks he can shove down at you, ideally before you see that hte content wasn't what you thought it was, was inane, or was otherwise useless.

20 years ago you could come online and find useful information. Now even the mighty google takes some working over to get through the corporate cruft, click baiting and paid advertisements to get what you came looking for. Even if you could pay to have the ads shut off, you're basically paying ransom to a criminal who holds all the cards.

I think it's because I have my ebook with me wherever I am and tend to read in line somewhere, or while my wife runs in to the store, while on a treadmill or stationary bike at the gym. In short bursts, while I don't feel I get any less enjoyment of the book (trivial fiction usually), I do have a harder time placing each of the little bits I read together properly.

But I don't think it has to do with the medium at all, I think it has to do with how the medium was consumed and what sort of behaviors it enables.

St. Peter: So, what brings you here?
Ex-Parrot: UK firmware update pushed to my car in New York.
St. Peter: Bummer. We haven't seen so many show up at once since Hiroshima. Well, go stand in line.

Since lots of businessmen are macho, domineering types

Who usually make decisions based on "gut feelings" and aren't used to people calling them on it because they're making such decisions on things that can't be weighed and measured very well. They don't know what to make of people who make decisions on things that have some absolutism involved, and frequently will not make "gut decisions" when the data is missing and they are asked to.

The message that indicates that MS hasn't learned anything and IE is worth ignoring is that they're trying to get DEVELOPERS to give the browser another look. That whole "design for me, lock out the competition" mentality that sensible people ignore. If IE11 is that good, people should willingly use it, not be coerced...

But would you have realized it as a child?

Yup. Back in the day I had a fist fight or two, and learned young that even if you win the fight you still get hurt. It really doesn't take being exposed to horror to figure out what happens when you let people go all out with the most destructive forces at our disposal.

Kids are way smarter than you think. Even my 6 yo sees an explosion on TV and tells me "But dad, this is fiction, but they really made that explosion right? Couldn't someone get hurt?".