They looked everywhere, they found nothing. They weren't looking for a meaning, just a correlation. The correlation they found accounted for about half an IQ point, which is insignificant in the grander scheme of things. Perhaps there are genetic markers that predispose you to intelligence, but the point is that our society does not favour those with them, and in fact renders any such factors null. The assumption that people of higher social status often make, that their family has been successful because they are somehow "better" than the lesser mortals they employ, is proven fallacious.

It isn't the known action of the identified genes that is important, it is the fact that they only account for +/- 0.5 IQ points. Considering the wide variation in human IQs, that really is nothing. Right now, privileged people in ignorance of genetics justify the inequalities in education by appeal to unknown genetic factors -- "we do well because of our genes, they do badly because of theirs." In effect, it's racism and eugenics anew. White kids still do better at school than black kids, therefore black people must be genetically inferior. This blows their argument out of the water. Genetics may have a more marked effect on intelligence than this study shows, but those differences in "nature", if they exist, are being masked behind a heck of a lot of "nurture", and we need to stop using undefined "individual differences" as an excuse for the failings of our education systems and society in general.

You may consider it the best result, but it is not there because it is objectively the best result -- it is there because Google chose to put it there. Furthermore, it is now pretty much impossible to determine how much of Google Maps's popularity is down to being liked, and how much is down to the visibility it got from Google.

[Image of panicking missile controllers attempting to abort an erroneous launch by frantically typing PEN UP repeatedly.]

Except this is not just an ad. It's not a few lines inside a beige box marked "sponsored results". Go to Google and type in "map of Europe" or "map of China" or whatever place on Earth you want. Before any traditional search results, you will see a big box showing the Google Maps map of your chosen location. The complaint is that they've embedded their webapps inside the search engine, leveraging their monopolistic position in search to get users onto Google apps instead of competitors' offerings.

Right. Go to Google and search for the phrase "map of Europe". The first thing you will see is a link to the Google Maps map of Europe. This is integration of Google Maps with the Google Search. Google Maps isn't brought up as a standard search result, worked into the list by pagerank, it is a specific Google App being placed at the top, before your search results (which incidentally do not include Google Maps.

If I was wanting a Google map, I could have gone to Google Maps and searched for Europe, but I didn't. I went to Google's search engine and asked for a map -- they chose to promote Google Maps over worldatlas.com, mapsofworld.com, yourchildlearns.com etc etc -- all the real, algorithmic search results. That's what people are objecting to -- Google inserting their webapps into the search engine.

Here we hit the problem of trust, and they won't publish the algorithm, so we can't know either way.

The result is to fall back on the "congenial host principle": no guest in your house should receive lesser treatment than a member of your household. It is completely acceptable to treat your own household worse than the guest (smaller steak, non-silver cutlery etc) but the guest must receive good treatment.

Perhaps Google have to be unfair to themselves in order to prove that they're not being unfair to their guests -- that's the way of the world.

Yes, but Google's first server farm would not compete with Google's current server farm, as it would be incapable of indexing enough of the internet.

Have you tried Ring the Fing A? Or just the summary? They insert ads for their own services above your search results, leading us into using them rather than a rival who may or may not be just as good.

That's sort of my point. History has traditionally been taught as though it's all about people and thought, whereas in reality it is a reaction to many more physical processes.

Actually, the problem is indeed the downstream trip, but not like that. A fish heading downstream naturally navigates towards the fastest flowing water channel... which in this case is the turbine intake.

Yes, but: why did the current border end up where it was? Traditionally the Rhine (sorry, we use the French spelling in English) would have been the centre of a territory, as it was the best means of transport available, hence the similarities between Alsacien in France and the extremely closely related dialects just across the river. Yet technology meant that the Rhine became more useful as a defensible border, and the people were split. Why do I feel like I'm repeating myself?

True. However, once you know the linking factors, they often make the timing much easier to remember. For example, if you understand that Kaiser Wilhelm's subjects bought into the propaganda about Germany being the most powerful country on the planet, and that they therefore believed that the only way that they could have been defeated was by internal sabotage, you can start to understand why the Nazi party managed to successfully scapegoat so many different groups, and the public bought it. But if you also know that a teenaged message runner by the name of Adolf Hitler served in the Kaiser's army as a message runner in the trenches, you can conceptualise the time between wars as the time it took him to climb up the social ladder to the point where he could take power (his mid-forties). It took me many, many years before I could remember 1914-1918 and 1938-1945, and even once I did, I never fully understood how short a period of time there was in between then, until I saw it in terms of the lifetime of one man.

As an alternative example, another key thing in history lessons is the line of succession of kings, or presidents in the case of the US, and there dates. I can quote you four US presidents in order: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford. Now I can't tell you the dates, but I can tell you why it would be easy to remember them. First up, history says Kennedy beat Nixon thanks to TV, so Kennedy must be the first of the four. Kennedy was shot, and Johnson was his VP. Johnson got re-elected on the back of popular grief for the death of Kennedy. Nixon was impeached, and his VP took over -- Ford. Due to Nixon's unpopularity, Ford was not voted back in at the next election. So now we've got a cause-and-effect that puts everything into perspective. Adding the details to this "bigger picture" would be very simple indeed,

No it's not. The traditional rule is not about euphony (look it up), but about grammar. Traditionally, S-apostrophe was used for plural possessive and plural possessive only, and names ending in S were considered singular, and took the full apostrophe-S ending. The modern variant on this that sees forms such as Gates' house permitted may be what's called a "hypercorrection" -- kids getting told off for saying or writing "the dogs's bones" overapply their teachers' corrections to situations where it is not applicable. But even this modern variant isn't even euphonic, because we still say "the fox's den", "the boss's temper", etc. for any common noun ending in an /s/ phoneme.

The alternative source of this change may be in confusion of the classifier noun with the possessive: in "Edinburgh Airport", Edinburgh functions as a classifier noun. The possessive would be "Edinburgh's airport" (note though that airport is no longer capitalised as it is not part of a compound proper noun here). If we apply that to Paris, we see "Paris Airport" vs "Paris's airport". If the former is heard as the latter, it's actually "Paris' airport" in the listener's head. How would this affect surnames? Simple. The current President of the USA is from "the Obama family", Bill Gates is from "the Gates family" -- surname as classifier noun.

So that's language change in action, but the thing with language change is that it's never immediate and it's never absolute. The old rule and the new rule coexist, and will do for quite some time.

Yes, but why did they get split? In Europe it tended to be because of the interplay of technological change with geographical factors, whereas in Africa and the Middle East, if was often largely political, and down to the whims of the colonial powers.