What is intelligence?

A few months ago, I collected many definitions of "intelligence." One version of intelligence measures the ability to use language well. It turns out that using language well can be affected greatly by practice. David Shenk reports on this topic in an Atlantic article titled, "The 32-Million Word Gap":

The differences were astounding. Children in professionals' homes were exposed to an average of more than fifteen hundred more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes. Over one year, that amounted to a difference of nearly 8 million words, which, by age four, amounted to a total gap of 32 million words. They also found a substantial gap in tone and in the complexity of words being used. As they crunched the numbers, they discovered a direct correlation between the intensity of these early verbal experiences and later achievement. "We were astonished at the differences the data revealed," Hart and Risley wrote in their book Meaningful Differences. "The most impressive aspects [are] how different individual families and children are and how much and how important is children's cumulative experience before age 3."

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Are you ready for prices (of everything) to rise?

If you were looking for a quick, 4-paragraph introduction on the subject of Peak Oil, Bloomberg News has you covered:

Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and Total SA are investing in assets that previously weren’t worth their time or money after oil-rich nations reduced access to reserves and exploration drilling faltered. Efforts to find new sources of crude and natural gas are failing more often, with San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp.’s exploration failure rate jumping to 35 percent last year from 10 percent in 2008. Countries such as Venezuela are making it more expensive for companies to develop their resources, if they’re allowed in at all. And previously developed fields are drying up, reducing oil companies’ future supplies, or reserves. “Their No. 1 problem is reserves replacement,” said Nansen Saleri, chief executive officer at Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston and former reservoir-management chief at Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. “That’s the elephant in the room, so that’s what they have to address.” To compensate, major producers are investing in projects they once eschewed, including geologically complex oil and gas fields, called “unconventional” by the industry to distinguish them from the easy-to-get oil and gas of earlier years.
And that is Peak Oil in a nutshell. It is real, it is here. All the cheap, easily accessible oil has been used up; the low-hanging fruit is gone. The remainder of the planet's oil, of which we still have plenty, is going to cost a great deal more to extract and refine, leading to higher prices at the pump, at the grocery store, or anywhere else that requires oil to function.

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City of frozen people

This article from Discover News reminded me that there is a big community of frozen people in the U.S. Apparently not alive nor dead; more than 90 people are cryogenically frozen. Fascinating FAQ at the freezing company's website. I wonder whether any of the frozen people has ever asserted the right to vote by proxy or by absentee ballot. [Question] "Please explain why you are unable to vote in person in this election." [Answer] "Because I am frozen."

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The crassness of a public abortion

Today, I spotted a link to Mary Ann Sorrentino's Blog on Salon.com. Sorrentino reports about a woman who decided to Twitter her RU486 abortion in real-time.

27-year-old Angie Jackson decided to use Twitter as a public stage for her private decision to terminate a pregnancy using RU486, the miscarriage-inducing drug legally available in the US for a decade. Jackson, who has a 4-year-old son with special needs, says that that difficult pregnancy and outcome made her decide long ago not to have another child. She was committed to aborting future pregnancies that might occur.
Sorrentino strongly disapproves of Jackson's public display of abortion. She considers it "self-serving, exhibitionistic, and selfish: at best, it has "Bad Judgment" written all over it." I agree with Sorrentino's characterization of Jackson's craving for the limelight. Before going further, however, I should make clear that I fully support a woman's right to abort a pregnancy in the early months of the pregnancy. Although I consider an early term embryo/fetus to to be both human and alive, I don't consider a human organism lacking a reasonably-developed brain to be entitled to the legal rights of personhood. As the pregnancy gets to be further along, the argument gets correspondingly stronger (in my mind) that the fetus is a person--I thus consider the idea of an elective abortion of a healthy fetus at 8 or 9 months (e.g., for sex selection) to be the ghastly equivalent of murder. Here's more on my analysis of abortion and my rejection of the religious concept of the "soul," an ancient concept that inspires many people who are anti-abortion. As I read Sorrentino's post, I thought about a question posed to me by a good friend who is anti-abortion. I mentioned to him that I believe in a woman's right to abort for any reason in the early months of pregnancy. As we discussed the issue further, I indicated that it was too bad that some women had multiple abortions--too bad there isn't fool-proof birth control--shouldn't the invention of 100% reliable birth control be a priority for our government, so that there would be fewer accidental pregnancies, and hence, abortions? My friend stopped me and asked me why I would care about large numbers of early term abortions, given my position that an early term abortion is not tantamount to murder. He asked, "If it's not murder, why do you care that a woman uses abortion repeatedly - - 10 or 12 times in her life, to end pregnancies? You're claiming that an early term abortion is only as morally significant as trapping a mouse in a mousetrap, right? . . ." [More . . . ]

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