Absolutely - I don't think they measure much else other than pattern matching and a specific subset of abstract reasoning. I think they're reasonably effective at measuring those skills and those skills are reasonably correlated to fitness to certain types of tasks. But that's true of any decently designed test - a test of leaping ability is useful to some degree for athletics but it'd be ridiculous to think it was the only or even the most important criteria.

There's some thought that assortative mating of 'geeks' is one cause of the rise in autism rates. High IQs tend to correlate with a better than average ability for pattern matching and focus. Combine two people with those abilities and maybe you get kids who are laser focused on patterns all the time.

It's an interesting theory (I'm the father of an autistic son so I do a lot of reading on the subject) but there's not much more than circumstantial evidence behind it. But probably as much as evidence as "the kid will be an asshole" theory...

If I had to guess, I'd say nearly all the Mensans I've ever bumped into have been liberal Democrats. The idea that "the sheeple" need to be lead by smart people who will make the best decisions for them is sort of endemic to that side of the aisle. Not that Republicans are anything to write home about, but the idea of "rule by smart people" is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the GOP...

The Democrats tend to draw the wonkiest of the wonks and the elite professional class into their orbit. Identify a problem (or "problem") in society and bring together a small group of experts who will make the best decision for each of the 330 million people living in the US is the operating assumption for them. The Mensans I've run into fit into that mindset pretty well.

It's only when you accept your own limitations and appreciate the different gifts that everybody has that you realize that no group of people, no matter how intelligent and well meaning, can possibly understand, let alone fulfill, the competing needs and desires of our diverse human family. Lay down some broadly accepted rules and provide a focused and best-in-class set of services, but otherwise, get out of the way.

When I was eight, I thought that Mensa must be the coolest thing in the world - a Club for Geniuses! When I got a bit older, I ended up going to a few meetings (I had had a school administered IQ test done when I was skipping a grade and that was good enough for the local chapter). Between the painfully shy, the weirdos and the snobs, even my 12 year old self figured out this wasn't the club for me.

I had hopes that maybe it was just the local chapter that was nuts but every time I hear anything about Mensa, it generally confirms my original impression...

I'd think one good use for such biological machines would be as super-filters - organs that could scrub the blood of excess cholesterol and other lipids as well as various toxins we haven't evolved to efficiently process.

I, for one, welcome our new bioprinted organs that keep my arteries clean as a whistle...

And why wouldn't Jiffy Lube itself get in this business? Seems like a pretty natural extension, especially if the tooling costs are reasonable.

D'oh! I meant MWh... That's what you get when you're trying to normalize between TWhs, MWhs and kWhs. Stupid IEEE case inconsistency....

The Hoover Dam cost $824 million in 2013 dollars to build and averages 4,200,000 mWhs of electricity per year.

The Ivanpah Solar Plant cost $2,200 million and may generate 493,110 mWhs of electricity per year.

So, this plant cost nearly three times as much in constant dollars while generating one tenth as much energy. To get to Hoover Dam scales, we need to build another 29 Ivanpahs at a cost of $63.8 billion dollars. Which gives us one more Hoover Dam worth of energy, which is 1/1000th of total US energy use (Hoover Dam is about 4.2 billion kWhs while the US used about 4,095 billion kWhs last year.)

So, for the low, low price of $68.8 trillion , we can supply the electricity for the US via Ivanpah style power. That just might hamstring our economy...

There's a certain ahistoric view of energy development that drives me nuts (not necessarily your comment, but it triggers my rant...)

We have switched energy resources over the years not just because it was cheaper but because it was cleaner and more sustainable. We went from burning trees (deforesting entire countries and enveloping the land in smoke and soot), using animal power (leaving billions of metric tons of shit strewn throughout our cities, towns and villages) and using animal fat (nearly wiping out all cetaceans in under a century) to burning coal (land destruction was minimized vs trees), then petroleum (getting rid of the shit and the soot), then natural gas (lowering our CO2 emissions).

At every point since technology became an important part of human existence, we've ramped up the existing technology to pull as many people as possible out of abject poverty (mainly as a side-effect of economic development, but nonetheless). Then, when we realize that that technology is unsustainable (prices shoot up), we develop the next technology and ramp that one up - using the new-found wealth to clean up the old messes and finding new side-effects that are generally more benign than the last but that become bad due to the increased scale. Rinse, lather, repeat...

This is a nerd site - we'll figure out the next step eventually and use our expanded wealth and energy to clean up the bad effects of the previous technology. Our focus should be on accelerating that process - using price pressures (like carbon taxes) to encourage research and deployment of cleaner technologies. We also need to be ready to remediate the damage we've done so we can use some of our next tranche of new wealth to restore ecologies and species as best we can.

You have 15 seconds to comply. You are in direct violation of penal code 113, section 9...

That should be 1973 - before the EPA was the big deal it is today.

If Mises counts as a libertarian, he'd say that the problem is that the government has specifically foreclosed a solution to the problem - class action lawsuits on pollution. When written in 1983, the Libertarian Manifesto claimed that class action lawsuits over pollution were impossible to file. I think that's changed since - EPA rules and whatnot - but that's probably the libertarian basis for negotiated pollution rates.

I'm pretty sure the CFL gods hate me, because after I wrote that, my wife knocked over a lamp and shattered a CFL. Time to trot out another downside to CFLs - the hazmat nature of cleaning up after one breaks. I don't got to the extremes (I'm not driving to a recycling center for one broken bulb) but the recommended way to clean up a broken CFL is almost comically fear inducing - open windows for 5-10 minutes, use gloves, sticky tape, a glass jar with a sealable lid, avoid vacuums at all cost, make sure to keep children and pets away from "breathing distance", check your local jurisdiction for approved disposal methods...

I'm not insane enough to do more than the basic safety steps but I can imagine what someone who is slightly paranoid about life in general would do...

I use CFLs exclusively (sitting under one right now), but the CFL side repeatedly lies about how long CFLs last. In my experience using CFLs in two different residences (condo and house) over 15 years, CFLs last no longer than incandescent bulbs - they're good for about a year, tops.

And I've used every brand out there - they all die pretty quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I'm not sure that the carbon lifecycle is significantly different between the two types. Sure, CFLs use less energy to light up a room, but they're pretty complex to manufacture and have a lot of embedded energy within them. Plus, you have to recycle them afterward.

Incandescents, on the other hand, are pretty simple - a little glass, a filament and some brass. The embedded energy is probably mostly in making the tungsten filament. Recycling is optional (lots of inert material) but pretty straighforward (only three main bits).

I try to convince myself that the CFLs are still a good thing, but I'm probably deluding myself.

Can't wait to delude myself about LEDs...

Of course, wind power only provides about 4% of the US electricity supply. And the eagle deaths are only the industry-reported ones. The study also excluded the well known eagle death trap - Altamont Pass in California - because its 60 eagle deaths per year swamp the rest.

The takeaway here is probably "be careful about siting". I doubt the massive wind farms in flat, rural Indiana kill many eagles.