Oil of Olay now comes with added liquid light complex to give your skin a warm glow.

Maybe it's the photons that bounce off the photons that you see? And maybe the force-field is there to stop those photons getting knocked out of place by every stray photon? Or maybe the Star Trek series is just cheap pulp that doesn't deserve the huge cult-like following it has....

Well given it had a 10 millisecond headstart, he'll be catching up for a fair wee while....

You don't even need an analogy -- if you can't detect an increase in intelligence, then there really is no increase in intelligence.

In fact, pig farmers can already manipulate their livestock in utero, feeding expectant mothers more when it will encourage physical development in the litter (big pigs give more meat) and reducing food when supply would result in mental development (thinking wastes precious calories). Attempts to replicate these findings in humans would rightly be considered unethical.

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.