Your goal should be to achieve a score as close to mine as possible

This is irrational, an intrusion into my privacy, rude, and beneath me, but I have been tagged with another meme by the behavioral ecology blog. I am to take this test of my personality defects, post the results, and pass it on.

These are not personality defects. How can you call perfection “defective”?

Haughty Intellectual
You are 100% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 57% Arrogant.

You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an intellectual, and you would like everyone to know it. Not only that, but you also tend to look down on others, thinking yourself better than them. You could possibly have an unhealthy obsession with yourself as well, thus causing everyone to hate you for being such an elitist twat. On top of all that, you are also introverted and gentle. This means that you are just a quiet thinker who wants fame and recognition, in all likelihood. Like so many countless pseudo-intellectuals swarming around vacuous internet forums to discuss worthless political issues, your kind is a scourge upon humanity, blathering and blathering on and on about all kinds of boring crap. If your personality could be sculpted, the resulting piece would be Rodin’s “The Thinker”–although I am absolutely positive that you are not nearly as muscular or naked as that statue. Rather lacking in emotion, introspective, gentle, and arrogant, you are most certainly a Haughty Intellectual! And, most likely, you will never achieve the recognition or fame you so desire! But no worries!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.
3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.
4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Schoolyard Bully. (Bullies like to beat up nerds, after all.)

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Braggart, the Hand-Raiser, and the Robot.

Although the “brutal” score is a filthy lie. Just to prove it, I will gladly torment others with this pointless exercise.

Tinny Words

Tiny Frog

Random Intelligence

Salad Is Slaughter

Lacrimae Rerum

CultureCat – Rhetoric and Feminism

The 19th Floor

The Squid Zone

We all seem to be in an arithmetical mood today

I may have just used the old 2+2=5 analogy, but I also like this example from the Primate Diaries:

Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.

“Moderate” believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.

“Moderate” atheists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.

“Militant” atheists: “Oh for pity’s sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?”

(props to Stephen Wells.)

All the mistakes of the godly are merely metaphor

Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we’d all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they were misled, misinformed, and miseducated; c) that they were ignorant of arithmetic; or d) might very well have been maliciously deceived by someone in their midst. Somehow, though, if the ridiculous error involves God, some people take a big step backwards and are appalled that anyone might criticize them. Those “revered traditions” become more than mere excuses, they are inviolate.

You guessed it, once again someone was aggravated that I have dared to call adherence to religious belief a case of being “ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed.” This time our indignant contestant is Mark A. R. Kleiman, who considers it atheistic bigotry to enumerate the reasons why people might come to absurd and erroneous conclusions. That 80-90% of this population, which is not hypothetical at all but is the entire US, believes that chanting their wishes into the sky might get them granted by a magic being, or that over half use the excuse of their religious dogma to reject the basic facts of modern biology, is something we must not question and especially must not criticize. Because it is religion, it must be respected.

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A little more on Lifecode

One other thing about Stuart Pivar’s book: he has collected a few endorsements. They are a little strange. One is by Robert Hazen, a chemist, and if you read it, it’s more like a review of a paper in which the reviewer is trying to state some things he finds plausible about the work. In this case, he likes the idea of the fluid-filled plastic models for making “a more rigorous mathematical exploration of the relationships among such variables as length, width, viscosity, forces, and resultant segmented morphology”, which is fair enough. I don’t think Pivar has demonstrated the competence to carry out such a study, and the fundamental flaws in the rest of the work do not justify any confidence in him.

Another endorsement is by Neil deGrasse Tyson. A funny thing…I’ve written to several of the people Pivar cites as supporting his work. Tyson replied, and has said that part of the quote is an out of context reference to a completely different subject, and that another part is a fabrication. He has asked that Pivar remove his name from his website, which he has not done. Tyson’s name is also prominently used on the back cover of his book—I don’t see that going away, either.

Almost two thirds of the book is taken up with copies of articles and book chapters by other authors. I wonder if Pivar got permission from the authors and publishers before using their work wholesale like that?

I get email

Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself “Concerned American-Christian” <[email protected]>, and I have a suspicion that it’s Krazy Korn himself, since he’s so obsessed with the subject.

And of course Korn is free and able to fire off these crazy diatribes—the police aren’t sure he constitutes an official threat. I bet the Boulder biology faculty are especially careful to lock their doors at night, and are feeling a little jumpy about sudden loud noises, too.

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Those are not useful study materials

A Yale student, David Light, was arrested after firing a gun a few times inside his fraternity house. The reaction of some students was noteworthy.

“He’s a perfectly normal person,” he said. “He’s not a crazy guy. To be honest … things always get blown out of proportion when it comes to arrests with firearms.”

Not a crazy guy?

The New Haven Register reported Tuesday on its Web site that the weapons seized from Light’s residence included a .50-caliber rifle, AR-15 assault weapon, a Russian M-91 infantry rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, various pistols and bomb-making materials, including a large bottle of mercury. Light reportedly did not have permits for any of his weapons.

Can we all just agree right up front that keeping an arsenal of lethal weapons in your room at college is not normal? It might be normal in Baghdad, but not New Haven, Connecticut.

(via IvyGate)