YOU ARE AN IDIOT

No, not you, gentle reader. "You" as in:

• these "scienticians" who think that Phrenology is an exciting new idea:

"When boys reach puberty, testosterone often lengthens and enlarges their jaws and makes their brow ridges more prominent. The hormone also increases their facial width-to-height ratio, a comparison of the distance between the cheekbones to the distance between the upper lip and brows. Last year, paleontologist Eleanor Weston of the Natural History Museum in London concluded from an analysis of skulls that this ratio is larger in males and that the difference is independent of the male-female inequality in body size. Intrigued by this finding, behavioral neuroscientist Cheryl McCormick and psychologist Justin Carré of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, decided to see if the ratio correlated with aggressiveness, which also depends on testosterone levels....

To find out, the researchers first measured facial width-to-height ratios in 88 male and female volunteers. They then gave the subjects a test that involved pushing buttons ... 15% of the individual differences in aggressive behavior could be explained by individual differences in facial ratios, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society

Moving the experiments to the real world, the researchers plotted face ratios for college and professional ice hockey players from their photos on the Internet. .. This time, the researchers found that 30% of the aggressive behavior exhibited by males could be predicted by their facial morphology.

The team concludes that this aspect of male facial structure may convey an "honest signal" of propensity for aggressive behavior."

Let's see... Facial feature A correlates with B, which is also found to correlate with socially-loaded construct C. Hey, I know, let's see if A and C correlate, without bothering to see if it's all about B!!! Since we're SCIENTISTS, we've thought of everything and haven't even thought of the fact that in doing this we're basically just resurrecting discredited racialist bullshit! This is fun!!

• Also an idiot is IOC president Jacques Rogge, who saw fit to publicly single out, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, chastising him for like celebrating or something. I loved this response, even though I don't buy into the idea that the US, Europe, and Russia have any business shaking their fingers at China.