zifnab25

Cigarettes are better for performance than checking if your QB is on top of his game and can actually throw ball good under pressure.

I mean, they are technically a stimulant. Idk if I'd trade the best coach in college football for a fatty at halftime, but there's definitely some kind of impact on your performance.

before you would only sub a QB if he's already fucking up instead of checking to do it before he fucks up

A big part of the coaching game is distinguishing between when your game plan failed and when your players did. Talking to the QB afterwards and figuring out what went wrong is kinda vital to that process.

Of course, you could always just jam a needle full of adrenaline into the guy's chest and send him back out there. Some people just coach different.

I think if you introduced another layer of complexity with the sun oscillating in the r-direction (closer to the arctic during the north hemisphere summer and closer to the antarctic during the south hemisphere summer) it would make physical sense in that regard

I mean, you'd make it closer to the real model, sure. But this is just "epicycles" for Flat-Earthers. Yeah, it solves the immediate math problem, but now you're left asking "Why does the sun wiggle like that?"

the fact that we have discrete sunsets/rises instead of the sun just gradually fading into darkness, and also the fact that the sun's path is an arc (these are actually the same point kinda)

Even bigger than that, you gotta start asking what the Sun is made of and why this burning mass is hanging at the proper distance from the earth's surface? The nice thing about modern physical models is that you can not only perfectly chart the sun's changes, but apply the physics behind the Sun's existence to the problems of terrestrial energy production. The only time the Bible has ever been used to meet domestic energy needs is during a book burning.

If you're 12 years old and have an IQ in the 150s

Then you're ahead of the curve. But IQs over 100 simply aren't that interesting, outside of the handful of savants (and even those are heavily overstated). The sociological purpose of studying IQ goes back to the idea of eye and ear exams and general physical fitness tests. The point is to find kids who are suffering some kind of physical impairment and alleviate it, not to pick a few mega-minds out of the crowd and put them on pedestals. Are you underperforming the crowd because of your diet? We need to get you more food. Are you underperforming because of an injury? We need to get you medical relief and rehabilitative therapy. Are you suffering from a congenital disease? We need to provide you with care to accommodate your needs. Can you not read the blackboard? We'll get you some glasses.

Are you batting 140 in a field of 100? Good for you. Now piss off, you're not important.

The difference between an average IQ 14 year old and a 140 IQ 14 year old is extremely stark

By the nature of statistical analysis, sure. Even then, the action you take in this case is to simply provide the kid with the next rung of activities, consistent with someone more fully developed. That's easy to the point of being trivial and not terribly interesting from a policy perspective.

The difference between an average IQ 40 year old and a 140 IQ 40 year old is much, much less significant.

At the "mean standard" of adulthood, you should be able to operate independently as a fully mature adult. The ability to operate a little faster and more nimbly doesn't change anything for you. Its the folks who fall under the normative threshold that need attention, because they're the ones struggling with the existing societal layout.

If everyone needs to climb a staircase to come and go from the city center, and the stairs are 10 steps high, the guy who can comfortably climb 12 steps isn't any more interest than the guy who can do 10. Its the guy that can only do 8 that needs support. And the degree of the disparity is less important than clearing the base threshold, because tripping over the hurdle is more of a general social problem than clearly it by a little or a lot.

There are real policy implications to the "everyone in this cohort operates at an 80 IQ". But the folks making these claims more often than not don't actually want to implement public policy friendly to this cohort. What they want is to segregate them and exploit their perceived weaknesses. In the same way that we target the elderly with phone scams and spam quack medical cures at folks with chronic conditions, the conversation around IQ inevitably departs from "how can we make a more equitable and functional society" into "how can I benefit from others' disadvantage".

Implicitly assigning IQ by race, gender, and other phenotypic characteristics tends to be about justifying the degradation of conditions of exploitation. It has nothing to do with their actual intelligence, save perhaps that the more predatory and gullible will aggressively target this group.

very very high IQ children almost never become brilliant, world-changing adult thinkers.

We like to apply the IQ metric after the fact. So everyone in the top income brackets and the highest positions within public and private bureaucracies get to receive some "High IQ" or equivalent merit badge. Nobody is actually out there sitting Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Magnus Carlsen, and Ken Jennings down to confirm whether or not they're in the top 1% of pattern recognition solvers. (Carlsen pretty explicitly refused to take one, leading to endless internet speculation) That's in no small part because scoring high on pattern recognition tests doesn't tend to track well with social aptitude, and so "High IQ" doesn't actually lead to rapid climbs in bureaucracies.

I mean by 1944 germany was done for.

By June of '44, they were proper fucked.

But the US was officially in the war from '41 and was sending troops into North Africa in '42, which cut into the supply lines of German industry. It isn't impossible to see the Germans securing a peace deal before their Russian invasion went sideways, and there were certainly no small number of American Fascists who would have liked to see a DC/Berlin alliance.

Had the US entered the war on the side of the Germans, rather than the British, that definitely would have been it for the Western facing Allies. So, from an entirely Atlantic perspective, the US saved the British from Germany in the aftermath of 1940. And if all you're talking to are Angloids glued to the History Channel, I guess its fair to say America won the war for Churchill and de Gaulle. The Nazis might still be a thing (at least as far as Fransisco Franco remained a thing) well into the 1970s and 80s, had Americans not backed the English and French up.

If Americans hadn't firebombed Dresden, Hitler would have won the war.

Drawing a clock has nothing to do with intelligence.

Drawing a clock is a classic test for the mental disease Alzheimer's. And the relative ability to perform this task illustrates a strict, measurable change in cognitive function. The disease physically destroys your capacity to perform these mental tasks. The ability to recognize shapes, decompose images into their component parts, and manipulate instruments for the purpose of reproducing mental images are all absolutely applications of human intelligence. And they can be improved, degraded, or destroyed through physical changes to the brain.

Incidentally, as small children develop increasing cognitive capacity and improved fine motor skills, we can see this ability improve over time. Babies quite literally get smarter as they get older and develop more complex brain functions. That's one reason why things like infant malnutrition, disease, and extreme stress can cause long term cognitive damage. If you're harmed during the critical period of mental development, it quite literally r-slur's your cognitive ability (the strict medical origin of the term) and forces you to dedicate significantly more effort later in life to catch up (assuming you aren't permanently harmed).

Recognizing the symptoms of this damage early can let a physician know a problem exists and present treatment before the damage becomes too difficult to heal. It also helps to remove the moral component of misbehavior, by tying it back to a material condition rather than some ethical or spiritual deviancy. Your kid isn't acting out in class because the kid is "bad", its because the kid missed a milestone and needs help to repair/compensate for the difficulty. In that sense, measures like IQ are extremely useful in the same way that eye-exams and hearing tests are useful when diagnosing other physiological conditions that impact quality of life.

the light spot is spinning around the center throughout the day

Still shines disproportionately on the center, because of the energy/area. The outer ice wall makes a degree of sense, because the volume of area is so much larger than the radiation it receives. But the compressed interior space is getting far more energy by area, even if it exists at the edge of the spotlight. Areas closer to the center of the map should be, on average, much warmer than at the periphery.

I fucking love science btw

Definitely fun for thought experiments like this, even if they are fucking bonkers on their face.

Are they going to nuke Gaza?

They want the land, so that's unlikely. Not that the more traditional bombing methods are going to leave Gaza much less uninhabitable, but at the very least I'm assuming they don't want fallout spilling into Tel Aviv every time the wind blows the wrong way.

I assume they're going back to the "drone patrols that kill anyone still moving" strategy, to effectively deter anyone from migrating back up north. Also, they'll likely be constricting food, water, and fuel into south Gaza in order to force more and more people into Egypt. Then they'll be pivoting troops and artillery to the West Bank and Lebanon, presumably to extend their proxy war with Iran.

~320 km

That's 1/12th the actual distance on a map that makes it look longer!

yes

sun is like a big flashlight swinging around in circles. The center doesn't get much light

But it would get the light continuously, 24 hours a day, rather than only during the daytime. Also, the sun would never set in the north pole. Or, maybe it would never rise? Argh! This is such bullshit.

Can you defeat The Cold?

Level 1: Rookie

Level 5: Legendary Warm-Master

Draw a clock. Get hit in the head. Try to draw a clock again. Ability to do this is degraded. We can apply a baseline "100" number to your original performance and quantify the difference after the head injury to describe a degradation in your mental capacity.

That's a normal, scientifically meaningful measurement of one's Intelligence Quotient.

Lining up a 1000 people, asking them to draw clocks (nevermind how many are totally unfamiliar with what a traditional clock face looks like), then ranking their clock drawing skills on a bell curve and using that to measure their individual mental capacities.

That's gibberish.