Doc Searls does some interesting musing about IQ scores and their meaning.
Doc, I’ll toss something in from the other side of the equation than most of the other correspondents. You see, I know from personal experience that IQ is a meaningless indicator of future performance. My IQ was tested many times, mainly because i was the highest in my school. It was fairly consistent, never below 150 and only once approaching 180. And never once was I at the top of my class in school, nor have I really accomplished anything major in The Real World (I have one patent, but that’s more an indication of a sloppy patent system than my brilliance).
Teachers were a disappointment to me, in the main. Especially my seventh-grade English teacher.
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I know, it’s foolish to think of the Sci-Fi Channel as actually accurate, but I’m really getting depressed over the number of times the term “science fiction” is abused. The latest instance apparently includes horror and fantasy.
This is just silly. I suspect, however, it just is keeping in step with the general erosion of our societal attitude toward truth and facts. “Science Fiction” used to mean “no supernatural effects need apply.” The premises of a science fiction story had to be either demonstrable as fact, or at least possible/probable given what we know.
We have relaxed our collective definition of truth. It used to mean, “that which we can prove.” It now appears to mean “that which we cannot disprove.” There is a large distance between those two points that we have leaped, without good reason. I hope someday we recover our senses, before it’s too late and we’re lost.
The latest book in my return trip through Agatha Christie’s world is Cat Among the Pigeons. Someone is killing the schoolmistresses of one of the most exclusive girl’s schools in Britain.
This one comes from the period where Dame Agatha was truly sick and tired of Hercule Poirot; it’s one of the books where she keeps him offstage for as long as possible, bringing him in 2/3-rds the way through when one of the school girls finds something in a tennis racket, and remembers being told about him by an aunt, so she leaves school to find him.
Plot devices here include the kidnapping of the daughter of a foreign potentate. I find myself asking why I don’t find the plotting here as tiresome as in the Hilda Johansson tale I chatted about earlier, because I’m moved to give this book a higher ranking. Two reasons come to mind: first, the devices weren’t nearly as tired when Dame Agatha was writing, and that Dame Agatha wields them in a more believable story.
As for clues, no she doesn’t play fair this time. She gives Hercule Poirot access to information we don’t get until he announces the solution of the case, and she allows Hercule to guess correctly the interpretation of some clues that admit multiple interpretations without suffiecient evidence.
As a puzzle, it’s not one of her best. As a Poirot story, it’s almost non-existent, unless you’re partial to Deus Ex Machina endings. But it’s a passable story. All told, I wouldn’t recommend it unles you’re trying to be a completist. (If you’re looking for good mysteries, in fact, I’d suggest skipping this entire period; until she resigns herself to Poirot’s continued existence, the Poirot books are simply a master going through the motions, “phoning it in,’ as it were.)