Phone MMS Blogging

One more test...

Update (using my PC): the above picture, caption and title were sent from my Treo 650 as an MMS message. This uses Blogger's new Blogger Mobile service. Cool, isn't it?

A Dye Job is Cheaper

One of the books I'm currently reading is Freakonomics by Steven Levitt with Stephen Dubner (I always read a couple of books in parallel, it's more confusing hence more fun). I have seen Levitt on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and I'm not really surprised by anything in the book, still it is indeed very entertaining.

Here's an example (page 83):

In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree--and, with a $100 dye job versus a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.

No More Middlebrow Culture

David Brooks, The NY Times OpEd's token conservative, writes today about middlebrow culture in the late 1950's and early 1960's:

... an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one...

Brooks claims that middlebrow culture received mortal blows that came from opposite directions:

Intellectuals objected to the earnest and optimistic middle-class arrivistes who were tromping over everything and dumbing down their turf... Readers felt less of a need to go outside themselves to absorb works of art as a means of self-improvement... Less Rembrandt, more Me. Fewer theologians, more dietitians.

Ashkenazic Mutation?!

Here's a feel-good paragraph from an otherwise controversial, non-PC, and quite depressing New York Times article titled Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions.

They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

Update (6/27): Permanent link to the NYT article