No-no. December 2012 is still a few steps down the road.

I did not check "Post Anonymously"?

When comparing cultures, you must compare on the same level. That is, you cannot put the philosophers of the East against the drug abusers of the West (or vice versa). Popular culture against popular, high culture against high culture. If you do it that way, it will mostly come down to your personal preferences, at least if you compare the higher expressions. Besides, cultures are not monolithic and interact and intersect in a multitude of ways.

But would you not say that good knowledge of language and math helps a person to develop his intelligence towards its optimum (assuming there is any such thing)? I'd consider both language and math kinds of knowledge management, making thinking processes â" if they are essentially non-verbal and non-mathematical â" more efficient. And is not that what intelligence IS; thinking efficiently?

Do I sum you up correctly by saying that what is intelligent varies with circumstance?

I have no source, but I think it has been shown that when humans select for mating, a decently intelligent partner is one of the most important criteria, which is why the IQ gets higher and higher with every generation.

I think autism, ADHD and diagnoses like that are proving your point. These people would only have survived in VERY sheltered surroundings earlier on, being propagated only in very narrow (and probably affluent) circles. Nowadays, the traits of people who are untypical neurologically compared to the rest of the population probably rises when "natural selection" does not work against them. Note also that these traits may very well be valuable in various ways to the general population, it's just that in the bad old days, those who had them never lived long enough to show them. This, in turn, means that the human race gets more diversified genetically, which is in itself a good thing.

How did they make you pay for this ant study? They never approached me!

It's even more efficient if you make that line a continuous one turning now and then; that is, a pentagram. They HATE pentagrams.

But it doesn't matter for the purpose of the study. The wrongs in the top of the scale and the wrongs in the bottom even out. That is statistics.

I think.

Read a lot of Nietzsche, do you?

So the next thing would be an area of knowledge which deals with precisely this. Not philosophically, but more in terms of optimizing knowledge acquisition and management - or something like that. Or, speaking of reinventing the wheel, perhaps there already is?

I read "SPACE" by Stephen Baxter (from 2000) a couple of days ago, and was also built on the idea of periodical mass extinctions allover the galaxy (with a happy ending though). He proposed it as an explanation of Fermi's Paradox. Shortly put: "If they existed, they would be here."

Us living in a galaxy with periodic mass extinctions might explain why we have not been encountered by the alien species yet, even though they should, theoretically, be allover the place. No mention of Atlantis though.

Not in old printers, it wasn't.

Global warming means there is too much energy in the atmosphere. Removing some is not bad.

We already have global warming. Global warming resides, so to speak, mainly in the atmoshpere. Taking energy OUT OF the atmosphere wont do any harm at all, on the contrary.