June 28, 2004

• On weather:

  quiltnmomi commented:
  

  I
  haven’t stopped to catalog the changes that I’ve observed in the
  weather over the past fifteen years, but I know they have been
  occurring.  Thunder and lightning are amazing phenomena … and now I’m
  realizing that the snow “storm” I witnessed in Minnesota was even more
  unusual than I was aware at the time.  Massive thunder and lightning,
  with big fluffy snowflakes falling.

   
  This reminds me of an anomalous snowstorm last year that I’d almost
  forgotten.  I had seen a flash of lightning and heard the thunder,
  but no one else in the household noticed it.  They thought I was
  imagining things.  Thanks for the validation.

  Regarding the changes in our weather, Greyfox likes to say that climate
  is what you expect and weather is what you get, and we don’t have a
  climate any more, just weather.

  ---

  On IQ:

  morriganshadow commented:
  

  little
  blurb on MENSA…did you know that they wont even test you if you’re
  outside the US and haven’t gone to University?  heh…I’ve met a lot of
  people who’ve been to university.  I can count on one hand those who I
  consider intelligent that came from the first crowd.

  I
  hadn’t known that, and it just confirms my opinions of Mensa.  I
  was a member briefly in the mid-1970s.  Watching a pack of
  self-important lawyers and computer geeks get drunk wasn’t my idea of
  fun, so when they raised the annual dues, I quit.  When I joined,
  and during my
  childhood when I was first approached about joining Mensa, acceptance
  was based on a score in the top two percent on IQ tests. 

  By the time Greyfox joined (on the opposite Coast from where I was, and
  under new standard Mensa rules) in the late 1970s, they had begun
  accepting members based not only on intelligence test scores but on
  achievement tests such as the SATs. 

  This changes the basic nature of the organization, in my opinion, from
  one based on measurable intelligence, to one based on test
  scores.  What Shadow reports suggests that they’ve gone from
  regarding achievement in school to simply regarding attendance. 
  Academic achievement (or attendance) and intelligence are largely
  independent of each other.  If that trend continues, they may
  begin accepting Trivial Pursuit champions and the winners of chili
  cook-offs.  Not that there’s anything wrong with either: 
  Greyfox is great at TP, and I’m a competitive cook.  Those are
  simply skills not directly related to IQ, and Mensa was, at its start,
  the “high-IQ society.”

  sobasysta
  had some consoling words for me regarding my conversational gaffes
  yesterday, and mentioned some IQ numbers and norms.  The main
  problem with such numbers (a fact I temporarily forgot yesterday) is
  that the norms vary from one scale to another.  Each test has its
  own scoring system. 

  IQ, or intelligence quotient, was originally seen as one’s test score
  converted to a “mental age” based on norms, divided by one’s
  chronological age, expressed as a percentage.  Thus 100 is the
  norm, any two-digit number is sub-normal, and there is theoretically no
  top limit although de facto limits are imposed by the scoring
  systems.  Single-digit numbers are not just sub-normal but
  severely-handicapped aberrations.

  I was tested using one of those old-style tests when I was seven years
  old.  My mother was told that I had the mental age of “a high
  school senior”.  If you assume that a senior is about sixteen or
  seventeen, then my IQ was sixteen or seventeen divided by seven, or
  something around 230 to 240.  On the same test, seven years later,
  my score had dropped to 187.  I hadn’t really grown significantly
  stupider, I don’t think, unless being boy-crazy had addled my
  brains.  It was just a demonstration of the weaknesses of that
  testing system.

  The early generations of IQ tests have been discredited because of
  cultural and gender bias.  The old “mental age” scoring system has
  also fallen into disuse, generally replaced by a percentile score that
  simply places the testee somewhere within the ranks of the general
  population based on how a supposedly representative sample have scored
  on the same test.  In that system, Mensans are in the
  ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth percentiles, and members of Intertel are
  all in the ninety-ninth.  Four-Sigma society and other
  ultra-brainy groups cut the requirements for membership even finer.

  In my thirties, after I dropped out of Mensa, I took Four-Sigma’s
  “World’s Hardest IQ Test” and failed to qualify for membership, at
  99.94%.  I will not try to pretend that all of this is meaningless
  to me, because the fact I’m writing about it would put the lie to
  that.  I recognized how competitive I was when, in my twenties, I
  concentrated on getting good at shooting pool (a game I never enjoyed
  and no longer play) only so I could beat the pack of drunken blowhards
  who hung out in the bar where I worked.  I’d always been told I
  was awfully competitive, “for a girl,” as if that’s supposed to make a
  difference.  The whole point for me in playing pool was to win.

  One of the trivial uses to which I enjoy putting this amazing
  cybernetic technology with which I’m playing here is figuring out how
  many people on the planet are “smarter” than I am today.  Assuming
  that the Four-Sigma test is not significantly biased and/or outdated,
  and that my intelligence has not changed significantly since I took it,
  and that the population clock I use for my calculation is reasonably
  accurate, out of the more than six billion humans on the planet today,
  less than four million of them might be expected to score above me on
  that test.  **and she signs off, laughing at herself, and
  wondering where she might find a congenial few of those millions from
  whom to learn a thing or three**
  

  • 3:58 pm
  • 9 Comments