Whack Science

"Scientists," if you can call them that, are reporting again on links between birth order and IQ. An age old question (yes, bad pun), but apparently only of interest if the subjects are boys. At first, my reaction was on par with what may be considered "hormonal" by "science" standards, and at the very least involved the finer vocabulary I learned from going to church with my grandma--What? you think I went for any other reason? But, the finer points of the research focused on boys became evidently clear as I read the article. Clearly, as the superior sex, the research needs to be focused on boys--testing girls would only throw off the results--and make the boys look really, really bad. That is clearly the case since they did make reference to studies performed that included girls--and they were "inconclusive" and folks, we all know what that means... these male scientists didn't want the world to know their older sisters were of higher IQ than they.

Super Genius rating: 4

Terrible disappointment

As I mentioned last night, I have ideas brewing for my next story... and as such, it requires a little research on my part. This morning, I delayed my walk due to weather, and embarked on the said research. Suffice to say I am greatly and terribly disturbed by Time magazines early recant of the Top 25 crimes of the century... which they did not too long ago as an 75th anniversary of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

I'm not disappointed my Time's list so much as I am with the female criminal representation on it. As women, we can certainly do better... OR maybe we do, and we just aren't dumb enough to get caught? But still, women account for less than one-fifth of the top crimes... and even then, Lana Turner/Cheryl Crane, Andrea Yates, Mary Kay Letourneau are all crimes of "victims" that were just sensationalized... Patty Hearst maybe the only one I could garner some respect for, but even her crimes were dubbed as her being a victim of the situation. Where is the female Lucky Luciano? That's what I want to see; shear genius... even the Tate murders give credit to Manson and don't even mention the women that did the actual crimes.

I'm not saying that women should commit more criminal activity or that I justify what Manson did, but I am saying I find it interesting that we haven't seen it. We very much romanitcize these male perpetrators of vicous crime and make the women as victims of another situation that devalues the horrendous nature of what they did. I need to champion someone else other than Martha Stewart or Winona Ryder or Heidi Fleiss... although Heidi was/is a genius female criminal or at least the potential is there... I wonder what she's up to these days?