Where can I buy a large analogue meter?

That's because I'm in it.

Neanderthal And Proud! That provided the hybrid vigor the rest of the world sadly lacks.

Just sayin' since India is Asian, particularly if you're a Brit. Another technicality governs whether the US or India is #1. The US is the #1 producer of milk from cows. India also milks buffaloes making them #1 for milk from any sources.

Northern India tends to be truly lactose tolerant as might be expected from the Indo-European migrations. Recent studies indicate many people are partially intolerant and aren't fully utilizing the lactose while some are intolerant but don't exhibit and symptoms.

China is interesting. Supposedly Chinese people are lactose intolerant but they are growing their domestic dairy sector and are importing dairy products. At first I thought they might be exporting but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Some human-neanderthal matings produced fertile offspring. My genome and that of most people of European descent contains about 1.7% Neanderthal DNA. That's all we know. That says nothing about whether we bred freely or not - merely that the Neanderthal DNA we did get wasn't selected out after it got into our gene pool.

We don't know whether Neanderthals were a different species or merely a geographically selected race of modern humans, who merged back into the human gene pool when they came back into contact.

I recall reformulated IQ tests like the BITCH (I didn't name it) and the Chitlin. There was one attempt that had the embarrassing result of Asian kids doing better than the target audience.

I'm not a fan of IQ tests but if there is a correlation between measured IQ and success in the 21st century cultural bias doesn't matter. In other words if you can't cut it in the prevailing culture, sorry.

The correlation - such as it is - was set out in

It was widely criticised, as the wikipedia entry sets out.

(of which I have a copy) showed that the authors incompetence as statisticians had allowed them to make unrealistic claims about the significance of IQ test results.

The actual data they'd looked at demonstrated that the people they were dismissing as low in IQ had been well aware that it wasn't a good idea to do well on IQ tests, and had skipped large chunks of the tests. This was just one of many instances of incompetence that showed up.

Precisely the opposite is true. Pretty much everything in Windows and PC hardware has been compatible. But when Apple change something, you have to change everything. When they introduced USB, the serial ports just vanished, on the same day! No overlap so you could keep your old hardware. A f****ng disgrace. I know many who changed to PC at that point on principle. Fuck me some PCs you can buy today still have serial and parallel ports on the back.

Do you think someone who skips large chunks of a test would make a good employee?

Not the case; Keyspan quickly came out with USB-powered single and dual serial port modules; also there were USB/ADB dongles, every USB-equipped iMac could handle old Apple mice and keyboards. The Wintel world similarly has USB/PS2 keyboard/mouse interfaces that are generic enough that (for instance) barcode wedge-type scanners are still useful without a legacy keyboard port. Apple, in fact, offered the AppleTalk-on-Ethernet support so that a networked office could support old LocalTalk devices (printers, especially) with USB-only new hardware. I miss that bit nowadays, because the old (AppleTalk) laser printer is still working, but the network only connects to it while an elder OS is doing the print serving.

You seem to have a large number of opinions abouty everything under the sun. Except about electronics.

I hereby give you a giant PLONK award to stop your incessant babbling.

Thanks for proving my point. Lets patch up the crappy equipment with adapters.

Hah! That attitude is just a bout of new-paint disease, very silly. The pre-iMac mice were a great improvement over the first generation iMac USB ones, which were entirely symmetric; you couldn't tell by touch which way one was pointed. And, the LaserWriter II printers were pricey, suited for a 200k page lifetime, and did NOT have USB or (usually) Ethernet interfaces. No reason to recycle the reliable printers of the beige-Mac era; I'm still enjoying one of 'em.

The point at issue was that low caste people - coloured people in this case - who did well on IQ tests were seen as uppity, and got persecuted for it.

They were reacting intelligently to their environment, which suggests that they'd make excellent employees, likely to correct their bosses errors in ways that didn't draw attention to the fact that their boss had made an error. It might be better for the orgainsation if the boss could learn that they'd made an error, but only if the boss were capable of using the information well enough not to make the same error again. Bosses find it hard to believe that subordinates should be taken seriously. Lower caste subordinates are even less likely to be taken seriously.

It's more sociology than psychology, but "The Bell Curve" was trying to make a sociological point, and showed themselves up a sociologically inept.

According to google, you made that phrase up.

How can an earlier thing be an improvement over something that hadn't been made yet?

The cable is the clue.

And the main problem is they only had one button! And.... they had no non-button part, so what did you push against? It's like a mobile phone with no edge, everything causes you to click something.

Yes, I had to buy loads of adapters at work when the serial disappeared. And then find the adapters failed to work in 10% of cases.

The ethernet helped since most of ours had those or could be fitted. Since workers (and their machines) moved around a lot, and printers tended to sit in the corner of each office for a decade, it was easier to have them networked, especially if the workers wanted to print something in another section they used to work in when helping out a colleague.

Google credits me for that graceful turn of phrase? I'm flattered, but it isn't orginal.

It's an improvement, when your iMac mouse gets stuffed in the bottom drawer and you put an adapted old mouse back to work. The cable, yeah, it's a clue, but you don't touch the cable when working.

The hockey-puck mouse had as many buttons as anyone needed. The 'no non-button part' describes some touchpads, and some later USB mice, but not the original USB one from Apple.

Don't give up the day job.

It provides a subtle drag coefficient. And most people don't turn the mouse round. Unless you have evil colleagues.

One?!? No context menus?

If you do an image search for "apple mouse", you will see most of them have the entire top as a button. How the f*ck were you supposed to operate that? Lean on it? Maybe they were made for fat Merkins with oversize flabby fingers?

Push it down into the operating surface until it gives a bit. It's called proprioceptive feedback. "Key touch" on a piano is a more subtle version of the same effect. You can feel when the piano key loses contact with the hammer as the hammer flies off to hit the piano string . You can't consciously perceive it, but good pianists are very conscious of "piano touch" and the effect it has on the precise timing of the notes they play.

They used to use them in schools .. plugging in shunts or multipliers as needed.

You could easily knock one up ... wind a coil, hardboard pointer.

Yip, two foot tall. Surprised there's no market for them now. They do still teach kids what electricity is, right?