Category Archives: Life

Intelligence and Disease

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Why are some places more blessed with smart people? (Yes, I assume that more smarter people is better for a society, and no, I won’t attempt to convince you.) Some recent studies suggest that disease may be the reason for uneven distribution of intelligence:

In our 2010 study, we not only found a very strong relationship between levels of infectious disease and IQ, but controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor of the bunch. A recent study by Christopher Hassall and Thomas Sherratt repeated our analysis using more sophisticated statistical methods, and concluded that infectious disease may be the only really important predictor of average national IQ.

The researchers wondered if, since infant humans spend as much as 90 percent of their calories building and growing their brains, fighting disease detracts from that important work.

If this finding is correct, then the uneven distribution of intelligence may be a developmental matter rather than genetics or uncontrollable environmental factors like climate.

This Makes Our Government Look Responsible

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If you have problems with our government, as I do, and its misguided (“bone-headed”) mismanagement of the economy, remember it could be worse. You could live in Europe:

The European Agriculture Committee approved 2 million euros (£1.7 million) for research into homeopathic medicines or ‘phytotherapy’ for farm animals.

Try topping that, Washington!

Smart Playlists Just Got Dumber

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I mentioned recently how handy it can be to create complex “Smart Playlists” in iTunes. Suppose you want to make a smart play list like this one:

iTunes offers boolean logic for constructing Smart Playlists.

It says the songs in this new playlist have to be “My Non Dogs.” (My Non-dogs is another playlist that includes songs that are either unrated or rated 3 stars or above.) But besides not being dogs, this playlist’s songs also need to be performed either by David Byrne or by the Talking Heads. In other words, iTunes gives us a friendly way to construct a query using boolean algebra.

Prior to iTunes 10.4, that was easy enough. There were little buttons at the end of the pane. A ‘-‘ button deletes the rule; a ‘+’ button adds a new rule; a ‘…’ button makes a rule with multiple conditions, as above:

iTune's old '...' buttons

The problem is that iTunes 10.4 got rid of the ‘…’ buttons:

iTunes 10.4 no longer has '...' buttons.

Smart playlists can still use boolean algebra: all my old lists still work. The only problem is trying to make a new one. How do you push a button that’s not there?

The answer is to hold down the option key. Then the ‘+’ buttons become ‘…’ buttons:

In iTunes 10.4, hold down 'option' to turn the '+' buttons into '...' buttons

I should point out that taking a screenshot is a lot more difficult when you’re holding the option key. The only way I could figure out to do it was by doing a “Timed Screen Grab” using the Grab utility:

The 'Grab' utility is located in '/Applications/Utilities/Grab.app'

iTunes playlists, Drag’n’Drop, and Wacom tablets

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I noticed that with iTunes 10.4 (80) I can no longer drag songs from one playlist to another. It doesn’t matter whether the source is a smart playlist or a regular dumb one, or even the main music library.

As a workaround, I can copy (cmd-c) and paste (cmd-v), but this is … umm … sub-optimal, because you have to change playlists to do it. Then when you go back to the first folder, any search you might have used before is now gone.

My first thought was that it was a feature that Apple just dropped because that’s how they are, so I posted it to the discussion list on Apple’s site.

But when I made a more serious effort to find the solution, I found it. I found it a lot, in fact, which shows what a lousy job I did searching for an answer the first time. I summarized what I learned there, and I’m repeating the key points below because I’ll find them quicker on my own site.

The problem appears to be using a Wacom tablet. See the discussion here and (same thread) here and here. No idea when that will be fixed. I use a 8 or 9 year old Graphire, and drivers have been a problem for most of those. Sigh.

But this experience also made me learn that you can right click to add selections to a playlist.

I even learned how that first column works, which I never knew before.

Monsoon Panorama

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Microsoft has a free iOS app called PhotoSynth that stitches photos together into a panorama. It does a pretty good job. Here’s an example:

Desert Sky

That’s cropped and slightly color-corrected. The original looks like this.

We see clouds like that during the summer monsoons. They rarely turn to rain (or this wouldn’t be a desert) but they bring a fair bit of humidity with them, making it not all that pleasant to be outdoors.

Nature’s Bounty

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We’re about 80% of the way done with the extreme pruning project for the oleanders that ring our backyard.

Oleanders (Still Fighting)

We never did find a store that sells Ladybugs’n’Stuff, but we did find one that sells Aphid-Be-Dead in great quantities.

That only leaves one thing: the bees under the shed. They don’t want us messing with any of the oleander bushes on the east side of the property line. The good news is that a properly-treated bee sting hurts less than a scratch inflicted by an oleander bush. The bad news is that I have one sting and Mrs. Jones has two, so we’re knocking off…for the time bee-ing.

Smart Play Lists in iTunes

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Speaking of playlists…. I like the smart playlist feature in iTunes. The best part is building lists constructed from other lists. Here’s an example (click on the image for a larger version):

Smart Playlists in iTunes

Earlier this spring I saw the Rush documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage. (It’s a good documentary; I never blogged about it–what do you say? “The best rockumentary since Spinal Tap!”–but I mentioned it when I first learned of its existence.)

Anyway, since then, I’ve found myself listening to a lot of music from the late 70’s and early 80’s. So I made myself a smart playlist of music released in the decade from 1974 to 1984. That’s roughly when I was in high school and college, so that’s what I called it.

But I quickly discovered that a lot of the music from that period stunk. So I made another smart playlist of just my highest-rated songs: four and five stars. Then I edited the high school and college playlist to only include music that was also in the high-rated playlist.

That was good, but then I realized that what I used to listen to back then was mostly Rock with a little bit of Pop and New Wave sprinkled in for flavor. So I constructed another list that only included those genres, and edited my high school and college list so it only drew music that was both high-rated and rock/pop/new wave.

The playlist seen above is a final variation. Sometimes I just want to hear an old favorite. But sometimes I want to hear an old favorite I haven’t heard lately. So I made still another playlist with old favorites that haven’t been played in a month.

It’s all terribly neat, in a geeky way. It makes me wonder if there’s a limit of how many lists-within-lists I could make. It also explains why it takes iTunes about three minutes to boot up when it wasn’t closed properly. But the really amazing thing is that it’s there at all: usually, Apple turns off anything that computer geeks would appreciate, so that [whoever’s their their mass-market demographic target ] won’t get confused by it.