By all accounts, as the world’s record-holder for highest
IQ, Marilyn vos Savant lived a largely unremarkable childhood. She was born Marilyn Mach in 1946 in St.
Louis, Missouri. She came from a humble
family of coal miners (both her grandfathers worked in the mines), and her
parents were immigrants from Germany and Italy.
Interestingly—or perhaps serendipitously—both sides of Marilyn’s family
have surnames with ‘Savant’ in them. Her
paternal grandmother’s surname was Savant while her maternal grandfather passed
on the ‘von Savant’ surname to Marilyn’s mother. The word ‘savant’ refers to “a learned
person,” a fitting name for her in retrospect.
Perhaps intuitively predicting the name would bring her good fortune,
Marilyn decided to adopt her mother’s maiden name as her own. Growing up, as a student she excelled at
science and math. But when Marilyn von
Savant turned 10, her life changed forever.
The young Marilyn’s intelligence was tested using two types of IQ
tests—one was the Stanford-Binet test, which focuses on verbal abilities using
five components as indicators of intelligence and was originally designed to
gauge mental deficiencies among children.
The other test Marilyn was subjected to was Hoeflin’s Mega Test. The prodigy scored extremely high on both
tests. She eventually moved to New York
City to pursue a career in writing and became a columnist for Parade magazine
which had done a previously popular profile on Marilyn vos Savant. Seeing the enthusiasm from readers that vos
Savant’s “world’s smartest” title generated, the magazine offered her the job. The column was named “Ask Marilyn” and readers
wrote in to vos Savant to inquire about various questions related to academia,
science, and logic puzzles. Katie Serena https://allthatsinteresting.com/marilyn-vos-savant
In September
1990, Marilyn vos Savant devoted one of her columns to a reader’s question,
which presented a variation of the Monty Hall Problem: “Suppose you’re on a game show, and
you’re given the choice of three doors.
Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who
knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a
goat. He says to you, "Do you want
to pick door #2?" Is it to your
advantage to switch your choice of doors?” “Yes; you should switch,” she
replied. “The first door has a 1/3
chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance.” Though her answer was correct, a vast swath
of academics responded with outrage. In
the proceeding months, vos Savant received more than 10,000
letters--including a pair from the Deputy Director of the
Center for Defense Information, and a Research Mathematical Statistician from
the National Institutes of Health--all of which contended that she was entirely
incompetent. Eventually though, many of
those who’d written in to correct vos Savant’s math backpedaled and ceded
that they were in error.
An exercise proposed by vos Savant to better understand the problem was
soon integrated in thousands of classrooms across the nation. Computer models were built that corroborated
her logic, and support for her intellect was gradually restored. Whereas only 8% of readers had previously
believed her logic to be true, this number had risen to 56% by the end of
1992, writes vos Savant; among academics, 35% initial
support rose to 71%. Among the new
believers was Robert Sachs, a math professor at George Mason University, who’d
originally written a nasty letter to vos Savant, telling her that she “blew
it,” and offering to help "explain.”
After realizing that he was, in fact, incorrect, he felt compelled to
send her another letter--this time, repenting his self-righteousness. “After removing my foot from my mouth I'm now
eating humble pie,” he wrote. https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-worlds-smartest/
Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the
mind. * Happiness is the only
good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others
so. * The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing
heart. * Music expresses
feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it
is above and beyond all words. Robert Green Ingersoll
(1833–1899), American writer and orator
https://www.wiseoldsayings.com/authors/robert-green-ingersoll--quotes/
balkanize (British balkanise) transitive verb Divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or
groups. 1920s
from Balkan Peninsula (where this was done in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries). https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/balkanize
The Balkans also
known as the Balkan Peninsula,
are a geographic area in southeastern Europe with various definitions and
meanings, including geopolitical and historical. The region takes
its name from the Balkan Mountains that
stretch throughout the whole of Bulgaria from the Serbian–Bulgarian border to the Black Sea coast. The Balkan Peninsula is bordered by the Adriatic Sea in the northwest, the Ionian Sea in the southwest, the Aegean Sea in the south, the Turkish Straits in the east, and the
Black Sea in the northeast. The northern
border of the peninsula is
variously defined. The concept of the
Balkan Peninsula was created by the German geographer August Zeune in 1808, who mistakenly
considered the Balkan Mountains the
dominant mountain system of Southeast Europe spanning from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea.
The term of Balkan Peninsula was a synonym for Rumelia (European Turkey) in the 19th
century, the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire in Southeast Europe. It had a geopolitical rather than a
geographical definition, further promoted during the creation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in
the early 20th century. The definition
of the Balkan Peninsula's natural borders do not coincide with the technical
definition of a peninsula and hence
modern geographers reject the idea of a Balkan peninsula, while scholars
usually discuss the Balkans as a region.
The term has acquired a stigmatized and pejorative meaning related to
the process of Balkanization, and
hence the preferred alternative term used for the region is Southeast Europe. The term is
criticized for having a geopolitical, rather than a geographical meaning and
definition, as a multiethnic and political area in the southeastern part of
Europe. The geographical term of a peninsula defines that the water border must be longer than land, with
the land side being the shortest in the triangle, but that is not the case with
the Balkan Peninsula. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans
The Hanseatic
League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Northwestern and Central Europe. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 1100s, the league came to dominate Baltic
maritime trade for three centuries along the coasts of Northern Europe. Hansa territories stretched from the Baltic to
the North Sea and inland during the Late Middle Ages, and diminished slowly after 1450.
Hanse, later spelled as Hansa, was the Old High German word for a convoy, and this word was applied to bands of
merchants traveling between the Hanseatic cities—whether by land or by sea. Merchant circles established the league to
protect the guilds' economic interests and diplomatic privileges in their
affiliated cities and countries, as well as along the trade routes which the
merchants used. The Hanseatic cities had
their own legal system and operated their own armies for mutual protection and
aid. Despite this, the organization was
not a state, nor could it be called a confederation of city-states; only a very
small number of the cities within the league enjoyed autonomy and liberties
comparable to those of a free imperial city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
Anaglyph 3D is
the stereoscopic 3D effect achieved by means of encoding
each eye's image using filters of different (usually chromatically
opposite) colors, typically red and cyan. Anaglyph 3D images contain two differently
filtered colored images, one for each eye.
When viewed through the "color-coded" "anaglyph
glasses", each of the two images reaches the eye it's intended for,
revealing an integrated stereoscopic image. The visual cortex of the brain fuses this
into the perception of a three-dimensional scene or composition. Anaglyph images have seen a recent resurgence
due to the presentation of images and video on the Web, Blu-ray Discs, CDs, and even in print. Low cost paper frames or plastic-framed glasses hold accurate color filters
that typically, after 2002, make use of all 3 primary colors. The current norm is red and cyan,
with red being used for the left channel.
The cheaper filter material used in the monochromatic past dictated red
and blue for convenience and cost. There
is a material improvement of full color images, with the cyan filter,
especially for accurate skin tones.
Video games, theatrical films, and DVDs can be shown in the anaglyph 3D
process. Practical images, for science
or design, where depth perception is useful, include the presentation of full
scale and microscopic stereographic images.
Examples from NASA include Mars Rover imaging, and the solar
investigation, called STEREO, which uses two
orbital vehicles to obtain the 3D images of the sun. Other applications include geological
illustrations by the United
States Geological Survey, and various online museum objects. A recent application is for stereo imaging of
the heart using 3D ultra-sound with plastic red/cyan glasses. Anaglyph images are much easier to view than
either parallel (diverging) or crossed-view pairs stereograms. However, these side-by-side types offer
bright and accurate color rendering, not easily achieved with anaglyphs. Recently, cross-view prismatic glasses with
adjustable masking have appeared, that offer a wider image on the new HD video
and computer monitors. The oldest known
description of anaglyph images was written in August 1853 by W. Rollmann
in Stargard about his
"Farbenstereoscope" (color stereoscope). He had the best results viewing a yellow/blue
drawing with red/blue glasses. Rollmann
found that with a red/blue drawing the red lines were not as distinct as yellow
lines through the blue glass. In 1858,
in France, Joseph
D'Almeida delivered a report to l'Académie des
sciences describing how to project three-dimensional magic lantern slide shows
using red and green filters to an audience wearing red and green goggles.
Subsequently he was chronicled as being responsible for the first
realisation of 3D images using anaglyphs.
On April 1, 2010, Google launched a feature in Google Street View that shows anaglyphs rather than regular images,
allowing users to see the streets in 3D.
See many graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D See also http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~edubois/anaglyph/
Ronald Harwood, aged 85, died September 8, 2020. He was an indefatigably hard-working
playwright, novelist and screenwriter, who won an Oscar for best screenplay
for The Pianist (2002), his adaptation of Władysław
Szpilman’s book about surviving the Warsaw ghetto. He first made a serious impression with his
best-known play, The Dresser (1980), which drew on his experience of working
with the actor-manager Donald Wolfit in the 1950s. He was a
compassionate writer whose ingrained decency and moral integrity also governed
his public behaviour. He was active in
the British branch of PEN before becoming president of the international
section from 1993 to 1997. Harwood was born Ronald Horwitz, in Cape Town,
South Africa, the youngest son of Isaac Horwitz, a Lithuanian refugee, and his
wife, Isobel (nee Pepper), a cultured and powerful personality. His father, who figured in many of his plays
and novels, was a commercial traveller and had suffered a nervous breakdown,
later becoming a semi-invalid. Harwood
published his first novel, All the Same Shadows, in 1961 and wrote two
television plays for the BBC, one of which, Private Potter, starred the young
Tom Courtenay, who would play the saint-like lead in One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich (1970), Harwood’s screen adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
diary in Stalin’s gulag. His
screenwriting debut had come with an adaptation of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind
in Jamaica in 1965, directed by Alexander
MacKendrick, who, said Harwood,
taught him everything he knew about writing for the cinema. Michael Coveney https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/sep/09/sir-ronald-harwood-obituary
In October 1871, railway workers sparked a brush fire in
northern Wisconsin, which swept into the city of Peshtigo and killed 1,500
people there and elsewhere across a gargantuan footprint of 1.2 million
acres. And in the great fires of 1910,
fires burning across several Western states killed hundreds and razed a number
of towns. People escaped by train as the fires virtually licked at their
heels. After this the US sought to
suppress all wildfires before they could gain a foothold. In the 1930s, the US Forest Service instituted
its so-called 10am policy, according to which fires had to be stamped out by
that time the next day. Later came the
“10-acre policy”, dictating that fires should not be permitted to grow beyond
that size. Fire was the enemy, an idea
catalyzed by wartime imagery of firebombed cities such as Dresden, Hamburg and
Tokyo. Smokey Bear helped to reinforce
it, too. This strategy had a pronounced
effect--though not necessarily in ways that were intended. Fire activity decreased, it is true, but with
scouring flames removed from the environment, forests grew far denser and
brushier than they had been before. In
one Arizona forest, 20 trees per acre became 800 trees per acre. These forests can and will burn more
severely. In addition the climate crisis
is rendering vegetation ever drier, and by 2050 up to three times more acreage
in Western forests will burn as a result of global warming. Meanwhile 60m homes can now be found in or close to
high-risk areas where wildfires have previously burned. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/12/wildfires-are-striking-closer-and-closer-to-cities-we-know-how-this-will-end
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2257
September 14, 2020
