microplastics

here it is now illegal for a shop to give you a bag, they have to charge a minimum ~60 cents. And there are stiff fines for giving away a bag ..

If we buy beer or wine at BevMo, they put it into a cardboard box for free. Must be some loophole in the law.

BevMo has stuff that's hard to find elsewhere. Purple Haze, Bodington's, Harp, big Asahi Super Dry.

We are boycotting Sapporo.

Our house beer is now Modelo.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It tends to be required for pretty much every science degree. First year chemistry classes at Melbourne were huge. And there were lots of them running in parallel. Because I'd done my secondary education in Tasmania rather than Victoria, I got stuck in one of the classes with the people who hadn't done well in the Victorian secondary system. It didn't stop me doing well in the first year exams.

The virtue of an IQ test is that it doesn't take much preparation or need much marking. Their vice is that they don't tell you much.

A proper chemistry course involves giving some thirty lectures spread over a year, and as many practical classes, which have to be closely supervised.

There's quite a lot of content.

Once I became a graduate student I had to spend three hours per week during term time supervising ten undergraduates, and as much time again marking their practical chemistry reports.

I tried to persuade my mother - who did have a chemistry degree - to take on demonstrating to first year students after she moved to Melbourne and didn't have enough to do, but it was technical enough frighten her off.

The examinations weren't multiple choice, and the lecturers had to mark the what the students had written.

One of the undergraduates I supervised in my first year as a graduate student went on top become a graduate student while I was still working on my Ph.D. I met my wife at a party he (and his wife) threw some seven years after I'd first met him, not long after I'd actually got my Ph.D.

Or so Cursitor Doom imagines.

Off course "Globalist Propaganda" is a figment of Cursitor Doom's diseased imagination. He has read about it in place like ZeroHedge but lack the wit to realise that he is being lied to.

Amusingly Cursitor Doom is blind to the propaganda that has been spread by American big business since thew 1930's.

Ronald Reagan was a prominent mouthpiece for them before he exploited the visibility it won him by going into politics. Since he didn't have to write his own lines, senile dementia didn't slow him down during his second term.

I think the best beer (light beer as opposed to dark ale) I ever had was Danish Carlsberg and it came in blue and gold cans; used to find it on the cross channel ferries back in the 80s. You couldn't get it in mainland UK for some reason, but you could get 'Carlsberg' which was brewed under licence in the UK (and still is, I believe) but that stuff was vile and nothing like the original. I can't stand UK/US/Australian beers. I've been drinking Warsteiner for many years now as it's still made in Germany under the reinheitsgebot so no funny chemicals like you get in beer from English speaking countries.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Obviously you'll encounter the occasional old fool like Bill Sloman who doesn't know that *practice* for IQ tests really yields dividends. A mediocre student can gain a respectable score if he takes the time and trouble to run through a book of such questions prior to taking the test. Time is critical for points, and practicing enables one to get much faster at answering these kind of questions.

I took the SATs four times, and last time I left early (pissed off the other kids) and scored 800 on the math and 720 on verbal.

One recognizes patterns in the questions.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

If only you hadn't been playing with quicksilver....

But quite a few people can't manage even that. I messed up a second years practical chemistry experiment because I followed the recipe exactly - and it was wrong. We were making copper ammonium hexahydrate crystals, by making up a concentrated aqueous solution and getting the crystals to precipitate out by adding ethanol. The recipe said add the alcohol dropwise, and that produces a blue sludge of very fine crystals.

Pouring in the alcohol rapidly produces the large blue crystals that everybody wants. When I talked to my parents about it they both knew exactly what I was talking about - the crystals are used in some paper-making quality control tests and they had both made batches of them.

The lecturer who had written the practical course recipe wasn't all that clever.

Everybody knows that people who are familiar with IQ tests do better on then. There are "culture-free" IQ tests which are designed to be less influenced by the cultural background of the test subjects than the original Stanford-Binet IQ tests were

My wife and I got into this once, and while we both did very well on IQ tests, we tended to answer specific sorts of question first because we could do them faster - she was better on verbal tests and I was better on math and arithmetic. She was a linguist by training, and not deeply into math, though she once taught an undergraduate stats course.

A mediocre student can do better once they are test sophisticated, but they are unlikely to ever do better than respectably.

Part of the problem with IQ tests is that they only make sense for people who score in the range from one standard deviation above the means to one standard deviation below it. People who score more than one standard deviation above the mean tend to be able to use more complicated strategies to boost their score. and that introduces a lot more room for variation in the results.

Mensa ought to have specialised tests that reliably split the over-150 IQ scorers from the under under-150 group, but they don't seem to have gone to the trouble.

Since Clive Sinclair was chairman of Mensa UK for years, despite his capacity for ripping failure for the jaws of success, the defects of the concept should be obvious, even to you.