John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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(* Ma 5+)

Taking only the US for a moment, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics there about about 1.54 million college college faculty (excluding graduate students that teach). The entire US population is given as 318.9 million. So college faculty are about 0.048% of the population. If we forced everybody with a high IQ to teach college, we would have to take everybody with an IQ of 139 and above. Since we don't force everybody to do it, of course there are going to be some faculty who never go higher than "the 135th floor." If it were ever otherwise, it must have been when fewer people went to college. It's not clear its something we need to lament about.

However, I have heard complaints about the best and brightest being lured into hedge fund management, so we are probably losing some there, but they can't be large numbers.
 
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What I would assume depending on where you were in the country is the amount of Chlorine or Chloramines that would be contained in treated water. How much of that would dissipate in a 24 hour period would be the question and I would imagine it would depend on the room temperature that the water was sitting in. What other changes would happen to sitting water, it wasn't said if it was an open or closed container?
 
something we need to lament about

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?src=recg

Pick your poison

I was referring to universities, not college. I studied at more than one university, didn't see professors till the 3d year of a 4-year curriculum. 'Professors' in Europe are not ones teaching at colleges, but full PhD package with mandatory annual scientific publications* only.
(3/4th is still BS, next to none have the time available to make every required article count)
 
If one looks for evidence that there are bad apples, such evidence can be found. To what extent it represents a given population is not clear. I do see what you mean about the difference of definition in Europe.

In any case, IQ only means so much. High IQ does not confer immunity from cognitive biases: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/238511/papers/2012-west.pdf which unfortunately is the source of many problems in life and in the world. Much more so, I would say, than a lack of IQ.
 
Show me someone who says they have no bias's and you'll most likely be talking about a cult leader! I would say all humans develop biased opinions from an early age and continue throughout life as new experiences add to the total. An open mind just means you are willing to listen to another, not that you can stop your own bias's from affecting your opinions.
 
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What I would assume depending on where you were in the country is the amount of Chlorine or Chloramines that would be contained in treated water. How much of that would dissipate in a 24 hour period would be the question and I would imagine it would depend on the room temperature that the water was sitting in. What other changes would happen to sitting water, it wasn't said if it was an open or closed container?

I've never DBTd it, but a glass of water taken to bed tastes quite different in the morning - due to the dissolved gases escaping and mineral settlement, the water company told me when I asked.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?src=recg

Pick your poison

I was referring to universities, not college. I studied at more than one university, didn't see professors till the 3d year of a 4-year curriculum. 'Professors' in Europe are not ones teaching at colleges, but full PhD package with mandatory annual scientific publications* only.
(3/4th is still BS, next to none have the time available to make every required article count)

And the instruction quality went down then, didn't it? :(

Even the one's that count are more than likely to be found BS. Nature of science, triply so in our publish-or-perish milieu, is that small, poorly controlled studies (that's most of us), won't stick. Much of that in the form of, "well what we thought was going on isn't really going on. Shucks."
 
'Blood of the isles' is a very interesting read if you are interested in population genetics. Basically everyone invaded England at some point! The daughters have an actual family tree that dates back to the Norman conquest on the maternal side. Which is pretty cool. Paternal line my family have traced back to around 1150.

I find looking at family trees interesting. Tracing them is mind numbingly boring.... Injecting fresh unrelated DNA into the family tree is a lot more fun and my focus :)
When I worked at Alesis there was this tech named Woody. Through his mother he had a line going to the Dudley family. He carried around, in his backpack, lineages showing his descent from kings of England and even Constantine The Great! But he lived in a van and spent all his money on drugs and hookers.

I have tried to do genealogy on myself but can't back further than the late 1700's
 
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I would say all humans develop biased opinions from an early age

A pretty convincing case can be made that biases are a product of evolution, something that was needed much more before human level conscious awareness evolved. They are still needed today of course, because in evolutionary terms, human conscious awareness is only at about the beta test level, at least as compared to the level of evolutionary development of the other 95% of brain wetware processes.

That 95% evolved in a way that helped to optimize survival in a primitive world, but it still contains a few bugs. A long list of bugs actually, and they have great influence on what we end up believing and how we behave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Some of the ones on the list have only minor differences, but they have been shown to operate a little differently from each other. Only a small number of the biases seem to cause the most problems, with confirmation bias being up somewhere near the top of the list.

The big problem with biases is that we are blind to them. That is, we can't observe the wetware process running. Sometimes, if we know that a certain bias exists and we look for it, we may see. Typically, we are much better at seeing the faults and errors of other people than our own. So it's easier to start by learning to spot sightings of specific named biases in others. Applying that to oneself is much harder, in part because we are all very good at defending our self esteem, often by thinking up reasons why biases don't apply to us because our case is exceptional. Of course, everybody has a tendency to think their case is special (but mine really is!!!).
 
Is getting it wrong blind a problem?

It might be a problem if one believes each one in reality has a different taste. Someone else might come along and insist there can't be any difference between them other than looks. Same thing for amplifiers, except it is much more of a borderline case, in the sense that a smaller percentage of people believe there is a difference. Or, at least, there seems to be some tendency for the non-believers to shout down the believers, more than the other way around.
 
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It might be a problem if one believes each one in reality has a different taste. Someone else might come along and insist there can't be any difference between them other than looks.

Didn't say they tasted the same, just mis-identified blind. I must admit without a smell/taste impairment the inability to differentiate between strong dominant flavors like ginger vs vanilla and cinnamon is hard to contemplate. I've seen the beef/pork/lamb test done and many fail.

I had lunch with a native Chinese man during an art retreat the food was all vegetarian except one meal a week. He was not happy with this and commented that he was glad today they decided to have stir-fried beef, it was seitan.
 
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