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I'm re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in 16 years or so. I should perhaps make a joke about how many times it's mentioned that certain hobbits are queer and gay, but I won't. It's a good book, despite how overrated it is by its most fanatical followers. That's what sets it apart from some other major pop culture cult phenomena, like Star Wars, or worse: Serenity, which frankly are garbage if you try to take them seriously (OK, here I'm being far too kind to Serenity, since it's garbage also if you take it as pure entertainment).

No, what I wanted to say is just what a masterstroke it was to write Tom Bombadil out of the movie. That's one redundant character if I ever saw one. Hell, it's Tolkien's very own Jar-Jar Binks. It really was worth destroying the ambivalent tone and the entire hobbit character development in the beginning of the book just to get rid of him as well. The movie started out extremely rushed, though. Perhaps it would be better to follow the book until Bombadil showed up, and then do some Braindead style lawnmower action on him, just to make sure he never turns up again.

Also, Tolkien should have recognised the fact that he was no poet.

I just had my first attempt at a Slashdot story submission rejected. It was about OpenOffice.org 2.1 being released. No, it's not a big deal for me; I even included a flamebaitish remark about OOo's speed. Still, interesting to see how godawfully slow this site is to get the so-called "news" to the front page. Now I know they knew the news some time ago. Perhaps they publish with OpenOffice.

Just look at the discussion in the OS X for cheap wind-up powered third world 128 MB laptop declined article. Slashdot has finally become even worse than OSNews! Even worse than the BBS discussions between Amiga fanbois and PC apologists!

Half of the commenters are rabid fanboys of one OS or the other, and so are most of the moderators. Where's the technical discussion? How the fuck can someone seriously think that OS X would be easy to use and come with the iApps suite at 1 GB of storage, when OS X demands 3 GB just for the default install? And how the fuck can someone think KDE would be much easier on the RAM requirements?

I refuse to contribute to such a discussion. Fuck them. This site used to be technical. These days, it's just moronic.

And I knew it before it hit the /. frontpage. At the moment I'm writing this, it's still not there. But of course, when Apple has a widely-published PR campaign, it's up there soon enough. Is this irrefutable proof that /. is fucking shit these days?

News that's old, trolls that hardly matter.

And I mean this, you notice the advantage of reading Slashdot with a +6 troll and flamebait modifier.

Oh, and my opinion: IQ testing is an interesting subject. The method of developing a test actually depends on the predictability of its result, in a way: You have a bunch of people with "known" and different levels of "intelligence", and develop the tests from how well they are able to sort the participants out. Do a search for Alfred Binet if you want to know more.

There may be many reasons for why women are found to be less intelligent than men. One thing is that the tests necessarily are skewed, since they are supposed to measure something we don't know what is, can't define, but still somehow believe we can recognize. If IQ tests show that men are more intelligent than women, then it's also caused by men being perceived as more intelligent than women, and the tests being created with a bias to show this. The science behind IQ tests is rather good, but never objective, since there's no object to measure.

Anyway. If some dork thinks he can be proud of himself, as a man, because the tests show men to be more intelligent than women, or whites more than black, or whatever, he should remind himself that there's probably some black women out there who are more intelligent, and bigger and stronger, than him.

And that's really all there is to say about this.