Good pics, too: the beautiful young man morphing into a ruin.

Why so many addicts among that generation of jazz greats? It's almost existential, as if the music *has* to say 'I have suffered' and has to be authentic. The blues had words, but these guys used trumpets, horns, or sax to emulate the human voice ...

<MORE!!???? MORE??!!!>

was Mr Bumble..

A bonus point for anyone spotting the Pynchon reference -- "Dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahhh, more, more ..." -- from Gravity's Rainbow.

Well, not necessarily. The test type called Raven Advanced Matrices (or somesuch) is non-cultural anyway, and not very mathematical, although visualization (supposedly a "male" forte) IS required... but it's doable. ;)

<But I'm suspicious about IQ: the notion that all that complexity can be reduced to a single one-dimensional number. Of course smart people (as we define them?) tend to get higher scores, but nobody really knows what's being measured.>

As it seems is very often the case, we have a high percentage of agreement. :)

Speaking of those numbers, people who take more than one IQ test might just end up confused big time, as it's rare for somebody to hit the exact same score twice. Know the problem of the man with two watches?

<<<>> A man with a watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure. <<>>>

Having two IQ scores may be like that, only worse. :D

BTW, what is supposed to be measured in a "pure" (heh) test is simply pattern recognition ability, which is not a bad way to define intelligence I guess, although there is of course the flip side to it, that people who recognize patterns a lot, will every now and then "recognize" a pattern that isn't actually there. :s

<...*metrically unfaithful*...>

They are Americans, aren't they? Americans aren't metric AFAIK... That should probably be "Imperially unfaithful". Hmmm, now that sounds better actually... maybe they have a point?!

<It was also memorable for the line "Space is a province of Brazil".>

The line is familiar, but I don't recall reading that book. It mustabeen quoted by somebody elsewhere.

<Dom: <My radio doesn't have a car.>>

Gimme a metric on that thousand-yard stare, man ...

'Man'? That's twice. My inner hippie is struggling with the geek inside ...

One of Robert Anton Wilson's book has a pair of matched cartoons. One features a hippie type with the words "Hey, man, you know you're only using half your brain? Let us introduce you to the mystical power of the equation..."

The other, predictably, had a maths prof being coaxed into holism. "Excuse me, sir, but your analogical hemisphere is idle..." Simplistic left brain/right brain stuff ... but funny.

"Space is a province of Brazil" may be familiar because I've said it before. Now that I've read 'Brasyl' by Ian McDonald, I find that time is also a province of Brazil. It's not out there with Harrison's 'Light', but it's still the 2nd-best recent-ish SF novel I've read.

I could have said "vertically unfaithful" but that might have been read as an allusion to the line about dancing as the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

"He has spoken of his difficulties with depression in the past, the chess enthusiast obliquely likening his predicament to that of a second bishop on a chess board."

The Raven [progressive matrices; advanced is one of the 3 Raven's, the others being normal and coloured] is always deemed to be non-cultural which is too optimistic. Compared to the Wechsler and Binet scales, it cuts the apparent selection bias in half; where latinos/latinas and african americans typically score 15 points lower on those tests, when compared to caucasians, it is around 7-8 with the Raven.

Now, while this is certainly great, there is indeed the problem with <IQ: the notion that all that complexity can be reduced to a single one-dimensional number>. The WISC and WAIS [both Wechsler, resp. for children and adults] on the other hand measure more but have a bigger cultural error.

The reason why the Raven is used so much is because it correlates very heavily with 'Spearman's g'. Spearman thought there was a specific measurable factor which was the general intelligence, he called this factor g. Indeed, most IQ-tests correlate with each other indicating they measure the same thing -- the Raven simply correlates much better than the others, implying it is best to measure this factor; whatever that factor may be.

As you already noted, the Raven test is not based on reproductive knowledge, as stated in their manual, but on educative knowledge as measured indeed by seeking general rules in seeming chaos.

What is being measured is highly debatable indeed. The Flynn effect basically is the fact that IQ scores steadily increase over time, over the whole of the population. This is why the norms have to be adjusted consequently; the advanced version of the Raven of 50 years ago is comparable to the normal version now. Due to this effect it is for instance arguable that the measured 'g' simply a certain measure of 'modernity' as nowadays it is more important to multi-task and look for combinations and correlations making us more trained at such.

But again, it is <NOT> totally culturally-independent. Out of all things which are culturally dependent, the way of testing scores very high -- as does the idea of testing an IQ at all!

Who wants to be *sure*? It's almost always a delusion. The guy with two watches has two pieces of high-probability data, even if they conflict. The one-watch man has only one, whose accuracy must be measured against all the virtual watches he doesn't have.