"Gracie Is Late For The Show"
"George Lands A Movie Role"
"Gracie Talks With Miss Pringlepat O'Brian"
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Thursday, March 6, 2014
I've been thinking about ballet. I don't like disliking things without being able to articulate why, especially when it's so clearly a matter of opinion. I mean, no one really likes serial spree murders, but lots of people like ballet, so obviously this is not something of unmitigated horror.
I took ballet classes until I was maybe ten, and then I put my foot down and refused to do anymore. Even my mother wasn't going to pay for something I wouldn't attend, and I was fine with taking tap and jazz lessons, so there was only a little bit of a fight. I remember being some combination of bored and frustrated. Frustrated because there was obviously something I wasn't getting, because I felt constantly corrected for things I couldn't even see, and bored because they wouldn't explain it any other way or let me switch to something I had a better grip on so I could make some sort of progress.
Ballet is, in large part, an art of control. The strength and balance you get is admirable, but there is a lot of rigidity in the description of movements. There is a right way to do everything, and any deviations are the wrong way; the ballerina is not encouraged to use her judgement in deciding how, exactly, to perform. I still do pirouettes and rondes des jambes and other things like that, but I'm not particularly fussy about where my arms are or where I'm looking, as long as the movement I actually care about -- usually the legs -- looks right. They're idle drills more than anything.
Most ballerinas are perfectly normal people. If you meet a lot of serious bunheads, though, you start to notice that when they do snap, they all snap the same way. Lots of eating disorders and obsessive perfectionism. The ideal ballerina is sylph-like and weightless. This is obviously impossible -- real human beings are always going to have mass. It's a challenge you're automatically going to fail. Other people must get a sense of achievement from continuing to struggle -- or feel like they're wresting control back by defying reality and doing exactly what everyone is sure they can't -- but I never did. I've dealt with enough no-win situations in my life that purposely putting myself in another one holds no appeal.
Come to that, all the dance critiques I can remember that even as a child struck me as someone bitching that I wasn't doing the impossible came from ballet class. It's one thing to be told you're missing a strike in the middle of a tap sequence or you're off-beat somewhere in the sixth measure; that's pretty concrete, and that matters when performing. It's another thing entirely to be told something like 'you're landing too heavily'. I can practice the leap until it looks easy, but I'm still going to weigh actual pounds, and if you want me to do it like that, all of those actual pounds are going to land on that one foot. The laws of physics say so.
I was last a ballerina years before the Puberty Fairy visited, but that does bring up another point I find objectionable. Ballet still runs on a very 19th c. aesthetic. Previously, the ideal for female dancers was something like 'pliable but womanly'. Ballerinas are supposed to be very tiny, delicate, slender and, philosophically, have an innocence that transcends the mere physical world. They are not supposed to be perceived as sexy or sexual, even when they dance in skin-tight costumes and quite blatantly have their feet waving around over their heads. Several of the burlesque dancers are classically-trained ballerinas, and they are well aware that they're transgressing badly by performing in toe shoes and pasties.
This would not work for me. I would never be dainty and bird-like even if I starved myself; I have wide shoulders and broad hips. I will never not jiggle. I'm fine with this. The jiggling tends to get positive feedback out in the real world. Since dance is all about getting your movements to look like you want them to, this means I would be doing it wrong even if I were technically doing it entirely right. That pretty much kills off any appeal of trying.
I think it really just boils down to I'm allergic to rule systems that give you a lot of arbitrary constraints, and then discourage use of creativity to compensate for the restrictions. I'm pretty inured to the media messages about weight and appearance that we hear so much about, but ballet is one of the few places I can recall ever being told, essentially, that I was too big and lumbering and that was wrong. Really does not make me want to go back and please the community that said that.
I took ballet classes until I was maybe ten, and then I put my foot down and refused to do anymore. Even my mother wasn't going to pay for something I wouldn't attend, and I was fine with taking tap and jazz lessons, so there was only a little bit of a fight. I remember being some combination of bored and frustrated. Frustrated because there was obviously something I wasn't getting, because I felt constantly corrected for things I couldn't even see, and bored because they wouldn't explain it any other way or let me switch to something I had a better grip on so I could make some sort of progress.
Ballet is, in large part, an art of control. The strength and balance you get is admirable, but there is a lot of rigidity in the description of movements. There is a right way to do everything, and any deviations are the wrong way; the ballerina is not encouraged to use her judgement in deciding how, exactly, to perform. I still do pirouettes and rondes des jambes and other things like that, but I'm not particularly fussy about where my arms are or where I'm looking, as long as the movement I actually care about -- usually the legs -- looks right. They're idle drills more than anything.
Most ballerinas are perfectly normal people. If you meet a lot of serious bunheads, though, you start to notice that when they do snap, they all snap the same way. Lots of eating disorders and obsessive perfectionism. The ideal ballerina is sylph-like and weightless. This is obviously impossible -- real human beings are always going to have mass. It's a challenge you're automatically going to fail. Other people must get a sense of achievement from continuing to struggle -- or feel like they're wresting control back by defying reality and doing exactly what everyone is sure they can't -- but I never did. I've dealt with enough no-win situations in my life that purposely putting myself in another one holds no appeal.
Come to that, all the dance critiques I can remember that even as a child struck me as someone bitching that I wasn't doing the impossible came from ballet class. It's one thing to be told you're missing a strike in the middle of a tap sequence or you're off-beat somewhere in the sixth measure; that's pretty concrete, and that matters when performing. It's another thing entirely to be told something like 'you're landing too heavily'. I can practice the leap until it looks easy, but I'm still going to weigh actual pounds, and if you want me to do it like that, all of those actual pounds are going to land on that one foot. The laws of physics say so.
I was last a ballerina years before the Puberty Fairy visited, but that does bring up another point I find objectionable. Ballet still runs on a very 19th c. aesthetic. Previously, the ideal for female dancers was something like 'pliable but womanly'. Ballerinas are supposed to be very tiny, delicate, slender and, philosophically, have an innocence that transcends the mere physical world. They are not supposed to be perceived as sexy or sexual, even when they dance in skin-tight costumes and quite blatantly have their feet waving around over their heads. Several of the burlesque dancers are classically-trained ballerinas, and they are well aware that they're transgressing badly by performing in toe shoes and pasties.
This would not work for me. I would never be dainty and bird-like even if I starved myself; I have wide shoulders and broad hips. I will never not jiggle. I'm fine with this. The jiggling tends to get positive feedback out in the real world. Since dance is all about getting your movements to look like you want them to, this means I would be doing it wrong even if I were technically doing it entirely right. That pretty much kills off any appeal of trying.
I think it really just boils down to I'm allergic to rule systems that give you a lot of arbitrary constraints, and then discourage use of creativity to compensate for the restrictions. I'm pretty inured to the media messages about weight and appearance that we hear so much about, but ballet is one of the few places I can recall ever being told, essentially, that I was too big and lumbering and that was wrong. Really does not make me want to go back and please the community that said that.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
All right: Spins.
First off, you cannot really do skating spins on a dance floor. Quite. The most I can do with sit spins is try to balance myself while stationary, which doesn't work as well as you'd hope. A lot of positions are much more stable while spinning, primarily because the direction in which you topple over is defined relative to you, and not relative to the surface you're spinning on. Rotate fast enough, and you stay upright quite literally because you don't have enough time to finish falling over in any one direction. Friction and a lack of starting velocity kill your chances for this one. Camel spins are similarly impractical.
Standing spins are easier. If you can pirouette on floor, you can at least kind of gauge how you'd perform basic one- and two-foot spins, scratch spins, and corkscrew or crossfoot spins. It's slower than it would be on ice, and you can't keep the rotation going long enough to get into some of the fancier positions, but you can at least start them convincingly.
I'm not sure this exact sequence of moves is represented as a dance step -- probably, although not in ballet, which is loathe to depend on the slickness of the floor to accomplish things when it can dump all responsibility on the dancer instead -- but the question is moot, because I already do these damn things. All the time. Like, in the kitchen waiting for my pasta water to boil. Crossing the living room, when there is nobody else home to accidentally run into. Occasionally in the supermarket, as it provides a good half-second of entertainment where just turning around the normal way would be boring. Any time I'm in socks or slick enough shoes on flooring, really. I am a toddler who has discovered office chairs, is my point here.
I probably do them weirdly. Most dancers are discombobulated by spins too fast to spot, but spotting things has always made me much dizzier than not spotting things. (My running hypothesis is that there's something wonky with my inner ear. I only hate high places when I'm the one responsible for not falling off of them, and I have issues with staring at my feet on stairs and balance beams.) Between that and saccadic masking, I just give up on using my eyes, and stick with whatever I get from various proprioceptive senses. An amusing side-effect of that is that it throws me out of whack if I try to spin with my hair all pinned to the back of my head -- it makes quite a nice pendulum when loose or in a long plait, whose swing helps me judge speed and whether I'm upright.
The start to a basic standing spin is a sort of fouetté with the feet farther down. Fouettés are normally done en pointe, more or less; on an ice skate, that would roll you all the way up onto the toe pick. You could probably do it like that, but it would be really unstable and not recommended to the point where I haven't caught any of the Olympians doing it, not even Kurt Browning, who seems to have been determined to invent a new way to send himself to the hospital every time he did his footwork.
Here also is an example of Wikipedia being written by demented monkeys -- either "backward inside/outside edge" does not mean what I think it does or the Wiki article is bizarrely wrong, because if you click through their example pictures, all of the skaters are balanced on the front of the blade, on the curve just behind the pick. The shadows and the buildup of snow make that quite clear. This squares with the instructions for upright, sit, and camel spins I've gotten from unrelated YouTube videos, and I haven't found anything mentioning the rules say you have to do it the nearly-impossible way for it to count, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the sensible way is right and the Wiki-monkeys are wrong.
There are three ways to spin yourself: Pivot on one foot by kicking backwards, pivot on one foot by kicking forwards, and pivot on one foot by swinging your free leg around, usually to the back. All are easy and the first two are methods any bored kindergartener with slippery shoes would discover. Mind that I may have the terminology entirely wrong, as Wikipedia is my source for this, and this is a really horribly confusing article, and their example photos are almost entirely devoted to explaining the many ways in which you can do this while waving one of your feet around in the air, ideally over your head.
The first one is a kind of standard upright spin. You start on your chase leg, step forward onto the ball of your jumping foot, and kick the chase leg backwards to spin yourself in the same direction as you normally jump. You can do whatever with your chase foot. Like with the sit spins, pretty much anything is legal as long as you don't fall down; I was doing what are basically scratch spins, which is where you're balanced on one foot with the other one in close and locked in a spiral cross, almost-not-touching the surface. (On skates, this makes the toe pick of the non-supporting foot scratch a light circle in the ice, hence the name.) The kick-off foot is allowed to trail and wrap whichever way is handiest, which for this kick-off nocks it around the back of your skating ankle.
The second method is called a backspin -- in this case, a back scratch, because of the foot position -- because when you kick off forwards, you obviously spin backwards. You step off onto whatever foot you don't use for the regular spins and kick off forwards with the other, sending yourself backwards in your usual jumping direction. The kick-off foot trails front this time, and the back of that ankle nocks over the front of your skating foot. I think this is also a kind of crossfoot spin, because the free foot is in front, but don't quote me on that.
A corkscrew spin is a kind of crossfoot spin where instead of kicking off the ice as you enter the spin, you rotate by kicking a foot around and whipping it behind you, usually to cross the skating leg somewhat higher than the ankle. These can also be done as sit spins, although this is one of the weirder positions to be in with your knee bent that far, kinesthetically speaking.
With dance slippers on polished studio floor, you can get several good revolutions out of all of these starts. Three to four times around isn't a lot, but it is enough to figure out how you balance, and how to swap out feet. Flipping from a scratch spin to a corkscrew spin is pretty easy, and rather fun. You do it by switching feet. I step out right and flip my left leg around front to set myself off clockwise, locking my left ankle over the front of my right foot; to switch, step down left and lift right, keeping my right foot where it is relative to the floor, rotating until the right one is in front, then flip my right leg around back to continue rotation. It's less complex than it sounds. CCW spinners use the other feet, of course; I screw around like this so much it's actually comfortable in both directions.
I expected to have to un-learn a lot of dance posture for this, but funnily enough, I don't. The main thing is that the foot position is much flatter, because skates don't bend and you don't want to be on the pick; I'm on the ball of my foot rather than my toes. I also have to fight the impulse to step way out of things -- you do that in dance because you want to stop your foot momentarily relative to the floor if you change feet, whereas on ice you wouldn't, so the "step out" for a foot switch is more of a "step down and try not to break the flow".
It improved my mood quite a bit to catch myself in the mirror and note that my entry into a corkscrew spin looks a lot like Lambiel's already, which is what I'm shooting for. Most skaters, particularly the men, accelerate into spins by swinging their arms and legs, then pulling them in to reduce the radius of the spinning mass and therefore get going faster. Conservation of momentum, etc. They tend to stay straight up and down as much as possible as they start, like Amber Corwin here, even if they intend to drop into a sit spin or bow into a layback later. Lambiel swings himself way into contrapposto, a very distinctive form. If what I'm doing is an accurate reflection, he's actually throwing himself into the spin with one hip, plus the counter-rotation of his shoulders. It pitches his full body weight into the move, rather than just relying on limb acceleration, which is probably how he gets going fast enough to keep that up for a good minute if he switches feet in the middle. It also explains why he's not much for things like shotgun spins -- it would be pretty difficult to swing into one of those cockeyed. The catchfoot pancake spins are all creative ways of flattening out those same contrapposto poses.
I also totally fail to grasp why everything I read insists that layback spins are terribly difficult things. I ended up about 90% of the way to the iconic pose (not enough rotation time to get your arms up into a loop on floor, sadly), just trying to figure out what happened if I pulled a foot off the floor in a corkscrew spin. If you're already that flexible, and you're throwing yourself around contrapposto, it's trivial to roll back into the bend instead of straightening up once you're spinning.
First off, you cannot really do skating spins on a dance floor. Quite. The most I can do with sit spins is try to balance myself while stationary, which doesn't work as well as you'd hope. A lot of positions are much more stable while spinning, primarily because the direction in which you topple over is defined relative to you, and not relative to the surface you're spinning on. Rotate fast enough, and you stay upright quite literally because you don't have enough time to finish falling over in any one direction. Friction and a lack of starting velocity kill your chances for this one. Camel spins are similarly impractical.
Standing spins are easier. If you can pirouette on floor, you can at least kind of gauge how you'd perform basic one- and two-foot spins, scratch spins, and corkscrew or crossfoot spins. It's slower than it would be on ice, and you can't keep the rotation going long enough to get into some of the fancier positions, but you can at least start them convincingly.
I'm not sure this exact sequence of moves is represented as a dance step -- probably, although not in ballet, which is loathe to depend on the slickness of the floor to accomplish things when it can dump all responsibility on the dancer instead -- but the question is moot, because I already do these damn things. All the time. Like, in the kitchen waiting for my pasta water to boil. Crossing the living room, when there is nobody else home to accidentally run into. Occasionally in the supermarket, as it provides a good half-second of entertainment where just turning around the normal way would be boring. Any time I'm in socks or slick enough shoes on flooring, really. I am a toddler who has discovered office chairs, is my point here.
I probably do them weirdly. Most dancers are discombobulated by spins too fast to spot, but spotting things has always made me much dizzier than not spotting things. (My running hypothesis is that there's something wonky with my inner ear. I only hate high places when I'm the one responsible for not falling off of them, and I have issues with staring at my feet on stairs and balance beams.) Between that and saccadic masking, I just give up on using my eyes, and stick with whatever I get from various proprioceptive senses. An amusing side-effect of that is that it throws me out of whack if I try to spin with my hair all pinned to the back of my head -- it makes quite a nice pendulum when loose or in a long plait, whose swing helps me judge speed and whether I'm upright.
The start to a basic standing spin is a sort of fouetté with the feet farther down. Fouettés are normally done en pointe, more or less; on an ice skate, that would roll you all the way up onto the toe pick. You could probably do it like that, but it would be really unstable and not recommended to the point where I haven't caught any of the Olympians doing it, not even Kurt Browning, who seems to have been determined to invent a new way to send himself to the hospital every time he did his footwork.
Here also is an example of Wikipedia being written by demented monkeys -- either "backward inside/outside edge" does not mean what I think it does or the Wiki article is bizarrely wrong, because if you click through their example pictures, all of the skaters are balanced on the front of the blade, on the curve just behind the pick. The shadows and the buildup of snow make that quite clear. This squares with the instructions for upright, sit, and camel spins I've gotten from unrelated YouTube videos, and I haven't found anything mentioning the rules say you have to do it the nearly-impossible way for it to count, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the sensible way is right and the Wiki-monkeys are wrong.
There are three ways to spin yourself: Pivot on one foot by kicking backwards, pivot on one foot by kicking forwards, and pivot on one foot by swinging your free leg around, usually to the back. All are easy and the first two are methods any bored kindergartener with slippery shoes would discover. Mind that I may have the terminology entirely wrong, as Wikipedia is my source for this, and this is a really horribly confusing article, and their example photos are almost entirely devoted to explaining the many ways in which you can do this while waving one of your feet around in the air, ideally over your head.
The first one is a kind of standard upright spin. You start on your chase leg, step forward onto the ball of your jumping foot, and kick the chase leg backwards to spin yourself in the same direction as you normally jump. You can do whatever with your chase foot. Like with the sit spins, pretty much anything is legal as long as you don't fall down; I was doing what are basically scratch spins, which is where you're balanced on one foot with the other one in close and locked in a spiral cross, almost-not-touching the surface. (On skates, this makes the toe pick of the non-supporting foot scratch a light circle in the ice, hence the name.) The kick-off foot is allowed to trail and wrap whichever way is handiest, which for this kick-off nocks it around the back of your skating ankle.
The second method is called a backspin -- in this case, a back scratch, because of the foot position -- because when you kick off forwards, you obviously spin backwards. You step off onto whatever foot you don't use for the regular spins and kick off forwards with the other, sending yourself backwards in your usual jumping direction. The kick-off foot trails front this time, and the back of that ankle nocks over the front of your skating foot. I think this is also a kind of crossfoot spin, because the free foot is in front, but don't quote me on that.
A corkscrew spin is a kind of crossfoot spin where instead of kicking off the ice as you enter the spin, you rotate by kicking a foot around and whipping it behind you, usually to cross the skating leg somewhat higher than the ankle. These can also be done as sit spins, although this is one of the weirder positions to be in with your knee bent that far, kinesthetically speaking.
With dance slippers on polished studio floor, you can get several good revolutions out of all of these starts. Three to four times around isn't a lot, but it is enough to figure out how you balance, and how to swap out feet. Flipping from a scratch spin to a corkscrew spin is pretty easy, and rather fun. You do it by switching feet. I step out right and flip my left leg around front to set myself off clockwise, locking my left ankle over the front of my right foot; to switch, step down left and lift right, keeping my right foot where it is relative to the floor, rotating until the right one is in front, then flip my right leg around back to continue rotation. It's less complex than it sounds. CCW spinners use the other feet, of course; I screw around like this so much it's actually comfortable in both directions.
I expected to have to un-learn a lot of dance posture for this, but funnily enough, I don't. The main thing is that the foot position is much flatter, because skates don't bend and you don't want to be on the pick; I'm on the ball of my foot rather than my toes. I also have to fight the impulse to step way out of things -- you do that in dance because you want to stop your foot momentarily relative to the floor if you change feet, whereas on ice you wouldn't, so the "step out" for a foot switch is more of a "step down and try not to break the flow".
It improved my mood quite a bit to catch myself in the mirror and note that my entry into a corkscrew spin looks a lot like Lambiel's already, which is what I'm shooting for. Most skaters, particularly the men, accelerate into spins by swinging their arms and legs, then pulling them in to reduce the radius of the spinning mass and therefore get going faster. Conservation of momentum, etc. They tend to stay straight up and down as much as possible as they start, like Amber Corwin here, even if they intend to drop into a sit spin or bow into a layback later. Lambiel swings himself way into contrapposto, a very distinctive form. If what I'm doing is an accurate reflection, he's actually throwing himself into the spin with one hip, plus the counter-rotation of his shoulders. It pitches his full body weight into the move, rather than just relying on limb acceleration, which is probably how he gets going fast enough to keep that up for a good minute if he switches feet in the middle. It also explains why he's not much for things like shotgun spins -- it would be pretty difficult to swing into one of those cockeyed. The catchfoot pancake spins are all creative ways of flattening out those same contrapposto poses.
I also totally fail to grasp why everything I read insists that layback spins are terribly difficult things. I ended up about 90% of the way to the iconic pose (not enough rotation time to get your arms up into a loop on floor, sadly), just trying to figure out what happened if I pulled a foot off the floor in a corkscrew spin. If you're already that flexible, and you're throwing yourself around contrapposto, it's trivial to roll back into the bend instead of straightening up once you're spinning.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Bianca has now been all the way down to Jamaica Plain and survived. She was awake the whole time, not for lack of trying -- she spent the first twenty minutes of the trip trying to beat the box open with her head. Binky does not like buses, or trains, although she seems okay with walking, even when it's 19°F outside, as long as she's in a box full of fabric stuffed into a tote bag.
She only freaked out a little while we were at the MSPCA, mainly because she didn't know where she was. The vet confirmed what I rather suspected, which is that she's functionally if not completely blind, which is not unusual for albino rats. They have no pigment in their irises at all, and some badly-defective visual receptors; bright light causes irreversible retinal degeneration, and it's generally figured that their eyes deteriorate into uselessness a few weeks after they open for the first time. Yuki and Edelweiß seem to be able to see things that they're about to smack into, but that's about it. Bianca can't tell when I have the cage door open until I ping on it with my fingernails, so she can hear the noise goes farther out than normal. None of them can track my fingers waving around outside the cage, so I've just taken to clicking my nails together and talking a lot when I let them out for playtime.
(I got the poor critters out of a glass terrarium under a 30W shelf light, on a retail shop floor. There is a reason I do not have a high opinion of the PetCo people.)
All of that is completely beside the point, because I actually took her in for an ear infection. Rats list to the deaf-ish side when their ears plug up, and she's been scuttling around her cage in a left-handed spiral, because she's having a hard time telling which way is up. Binky's freak-out took the form of her scrambling around the box and spinning, spinning, spinning in place, like a terrified little furry torpedo. She eventually either gave up or exhausted herself somewhere around the point where the vet took her for weighing. Normally, Binky isn't much for sustained scritches or cuddles, but she decided to lay under her pile of fabric in the box and chitter quietly while I pet her face, as I got her prescription and the dosing instructions. When I finally got her home, she wadded herself up in my sweater until her feet and tail were warm again.
I just paid the MSPCA $250 to fix a $4 rat. They want me to come back in a couple of weeks for another $100 checkup, but I can figure that out. Everyone who chipped in will eventually be receiving a photograph of the rat whose medical care you just financed, as soon as I can figure out how to make the little bastard stand still long enough to get one. Not knowing which way is up does not actually stop Bianca from stealing stashed food and beating the hell out of her sisters. Her eyes don't work and one ear is wonky, but her whiskers are fine, she's familiar with the layout of her cage, and she sure as hell still knows how to use her nose.
I also ran out to the grocery store once Binky let me put her down again. You can apologize to a lot of rats with 70¢ worth of cheez doodles, which of course is what I have been doing for the past few hours. Bianca was upset at the field trip, and the other two were vehement that I needed to give the other rat back, although I'm not entirely sure whether they were being protective of their tiny little rat horde, or just worried that Binky was getting some sort of special treat that they weren't. They're asleep in a pile now, all of them having stashed whatever cheez doodles they haven't eaten someplace they're sure the other rats won't find them.
She only freaked out a little while we were at the MSPCA, mainly because she didn't know where she was. The vet confirmed what I rather suspected, which is that she's functionally if not completely blind, which is not unusual for albino rats. They have no pigment in their irises at all, and some badly-defective visual receptors; bright light causes irreversible retinal degeneration, and it's generally figured that their eyes deteriorate into uselessness a few weeks after they open for the first time. Yuki and Edelweiß seem to be able to see things that they're about to smack into, but that's about it. Bianca can't tell when I have the cage door open until I ping on it with my fingernails, so she can hear the noise goes farther out than normal. None of them can track my fingers waving around outside the cage, so I've just taken to clicking my nails together and talking a lot when I let them out for playtime.
(I got the poor critters out of a glass terrarium under a 30W shelf light, on a retail shop floor. There is a reason I do not have a high opinion of the PetCo people.)
All of that is completely beside the point, because I actually took her in for an ear infection. Rats list to the deaf-ish side when their ears plug up, and she's been scuttling around her cage in a left-handed spiral, because she's having a hard time telling which way is up. Binky's freak-out took the form of her scrambling around the box and spinning, spinning, spinning in place, like a terrified little furry torpedo. She eventually either gave up or exhausted herself somewhere around the point where the vet took her for weighing. Normally, Binky isn't much for sustained scritches or cuddles, but she decided to lay under her pile of fabric in the box and chitter quietly while I pet her face, as I got her prescription and the dosing instructions. When I finally got her home, she wadded herself up in my sweater until her feet and tail were warm again.
I just paid the MSPCA $250 to fix a $4 rat. They want me to come back in a couple of weeks for another $100 checkup, but I can figure that out. Everyone who chipped in will eventually be receiving a photograph of the rat whose medical care you just financed, as soon as I can figure out how to make the little bastard stand still long enough to get one. Not knowing which way is up does not actually stop Bianca from stealing stashed food and beating the hell out of her sisters. Her eyes don't work and one ear is wonky, but her whiskers are fine, she's familiar with the layout of her cage, and she sure as hell still knows how to use her nose.
I also ran out to the grocery store once Binky let me put her down again. You can apologize to a lot of rats with 70¢ worth of cheez doodles, which of course is what I have been doing for the past few hours. Bianca was upset at the field trip, and the other two were vehement that I needed to give the other rat back, although I'm not entirely sure whether they were being protective of their tiny little rat horde, or just worried that Binky was getting some sort of special treat that they weren't. They're asleep in a pile now, all of them having stashed whatever cheez doodles they haven't eaten someplace they're sure the other rats won't find them.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Every so often, I find tea on sale and decide I should really try some again. I tend to not like tea that tastes like tea; mainly, I drink things like Thai iced tea and chai lattes, which are so full of cloves and milk and sugar that if you forgot the actual tea leaves nobody would ever notice. The grocery store had Twinings on sale, so I picked up some ultra-spice chai, which is perfectly fine, and some rooibos, which is not.
Rooibos is actually some sort of reddish bush that grows in South Africa, which I presume they started brewing because in the olden days schlepping Darjeeling down there was even more of a bitch than shipping it to England. I can't drink the Twinings stuff.
I'm heavily cross-wired, including a lot of assorted synaesthesiae. I don't have the cool grapheme → color ones, and I'm light on the sound → (color, movement) stuff, but I do have a lot of the numeric → spatial varieties. I also have some completely random ones, which bend heavily towards the complex multi-modal stimulus → kinesic and linguistic → (spatial, affective, movement) kinds. It probably sounds quite bizarre and overwhelming if you don't work like that, but if your brain has always filed things weird, then the main annoyance is trying to explain it to people who have no idea what you're talking about.
The Twinings rooibos, for whatever reason, I can only describe as tasting round. And even that's a terrible description. I don't actually taste 'round' anymore than anyone else does, at least when not under the influence of powerful hallucinogenic drugs -- what's actually going on is that when I am trying to describe the perception of taste that the rooibos evokes, whatever neurons are involved in taxonomically classifying that experience overlap in some way with the neurons that taxonomically classify the experience of some quality of roundness, in the same way that most people find the taste of something like crème anglais evokes an experience classified similarly to the taste of vanilla ice cream. (Or, in my case, the same way the smell of Moggie's violet candies remind me inescapably of bath crystals. Can't eat those, either.) And it's not even roundness like a drawing of a circle embodies roundness; it's kinesthetic, as if it bears a passing similarity to the sensation of holding a large bubble gum bubble in the back of your mouth, pressing against your tongue and palate, just before you bite down and pop it.
There's nothing particularly wrong with that crossover, except that olives and olive oil also taste round and some kinds of wood varnish smell round in the same indescribable way. Rooibos doesn't taste anything like olives, especially with the amount of sugar I dump into it, and it doesn't smell anything like wood varnish, but the synaesthetic overlap makes it impossible to not associate the experience with both of those things, which is just about the exact opposite of what you want when you're trying to drink cheap tea.
This phenomenon of 'overlap' sounds terribly sloppy and confusing, but I actually find it's a great help in a lot of respects. It happens in an even less-describable way when I'm dealing with languages. I can read things in a lot of languages I don't technically speak, if they're in a script that I do already read, and if I don't think about it too hard. Even in cases where the words don't look enough like words I know for me to have any explicit conscious etymological associations, a lot of the time, I'll get enough overlapping neurons for me to be able to get the general idea of what the text is saying. If Zeitgeist is the general atmosphere of an era, what I get from large blocks of things I don't technically read is a sort of a Schriftgeist, a sense of what the passage is about. I don't classify myself as 'speaking' or 'understanding' these languages, because I cannot translate anything properly, and if I think about it too hard whatever comprehension I have falls apart, but I can get some information from them nonetheless.
My guess that it's a matter of pattern overlap is bolstered by the fact that it works better the more text I have -- I wouldn't bet on my ability to read individual road signs in Italian or Portuguese, but Wikipedia articles usually aren't a problem. It also has to be related in some way to something I know in order for me to have a base pattern for it to intersect. Slavic languages only make sense insofar as they overlap with, say, random t.A.T.u. lyrics, but that's rapidly going up as I work my way through the Russian lesson book.
The meta-ability to keep track of what's going on with this is also rather useful. I do most of my people reading by realizing that someone reminds me inexplicably of something, and then backtracking to figure out what and where the overlap is. It's also good for parlor tricks. A common format for the kind of psych experiments that pay you petty cash for participation is sitting you in front of a computer and flashing some sort of stimuli, then requiring you to press a key depending on what it is. F'rex, half the screen will flash stripes and the other half will flash polka dots, and they want you to hit the up arrow if the stripes are on top, or the down arrow if the stripes are on the bottom. I just go through the tutorials, make a note that 'okay, this set of neurons go fizz at stripes', then spend the rest of the experiment staring vaguely at the center of the screen and paying more attention to my own brain response than what's actually flashing.
I've no idea how I'm keeping notes on which neurons are fizzing, or even if that's what I'm really doing -- it's the imagery that comes immediately to mind when I try to describe the sequence. It's entirely possible to do things like that, but I don't know how other people describe it; something similar must be going on in biofeedback applications, but I've only seen the research enumerate the results, without sharing any descriptions from the participants of what they actually think they're doing. It's much faster than waiting for my explicit processing brain to catch up and tell me 'okay! there are the stripes!', at any rate. I've racked up quite a collection of weird looks from Harvard psychologists over the past couple of years.
Rooibos is actually some sort of reddish bush that grows in South Africa, which I presume they started brewing because in the olden days schlepping Darjeeling down there was even more of a bitch than shipping it to England. I can't drink the Twinings stuff.
I'm heavily cross-wired, including a lot of assorted synaesthesiae. I don't have the cool grapheme → color ones, and I'm light on the sound → (color, movement) stuff, but I do have a lot of the numeric → spatial varieties. I also have some completely random ones, which bend heavily towards the complex multi-modal stimulus → kinesic and linguistic → (spatial, affective, movement) kinds. It probably sounds quite bizarre and overwhelming if you don't work like that, but if your brain has always filed things weird, then the main annoyance is trying to explain it to people who have no idea what you're talking about.
The Twinings rooibos, for whatever reason, I can only describe as tasting round. And even that's a terrible description. I don't actually taste 'round' anymore than anyone else does, at least when not under the influence of powerful hallucinogenic drugs -- what's actually going on is that when I am trying to describe the perception of taste that the rooibos evokes, whatever neurons are involved in taxonomically classifying that experience overlap in some way with the neurons that taxonomically classify the experience of some quality of roundness, in the same way that most people find the taste of something like crème anglais evokes an experience classified similarly to the taste of vanilla ice cream. (Or, in my case, the same way the smell of Moggie's violet candies remind me inescapably of bath crystals. Can't eat those, either.) And it's not even roundness like a drawing of a circle embodies roundness; it's kinesthetic, as if it bears a passing similarity to the sensation of holding a large bubble gum bubble in the back of your mouth, pressing against your tongue and palate, just before you bite down and pop it.
There's nothing particularly wrong with that crossover, except that olives and olive oil also taste round and some kinds of wood varnish smell round in the same indescribable way. Rooibos doesn't taste anything like olives, especially with the amount of sugar I dump into it, and it doesn't smell anything like wood varnish, but the synaesthetic overlap makes it impossible to not associate the experience with both of those things, which is just about the exact opposite of what you want when you're trying to drink cheap tea.
This phenomenon of 'overlap' sounds terribly sloppy and confusing, but I actually find it's a great help in a lot of respects. It happens in an even less-describable way when I'm dealing with languages. I can read things in a lot of languages I don't technically speak, if they're in a script that I do already read, and if I don't think about it too hard. Even in cases where the words don't look enough like words I know for me to have any explicit conscious etymological associations, a lot of the time, I'll get enough overlapping neurons for me to be able to get the general idea of what the text is saying. If Zeitgeist is the general atmosphere of an era, what I get from large blocks of things I don't technically read is a sort of a Schriftgeist, a sense of what the passage is about. I don't classify myself as 'speaking' or 'understanding' these languages, because I cannot translate anything properly, and if I think about it too hard whatever comprehension I have falls apart, but I can get some information from them nonetheless.
My guess that it's a matter of pattern overlap is bolstered by the fact that it works better the more text I have -- I wouldn't bet on my ability to read individual road signs in Italian or Portuguese, but Wikipedia articles usually aren't a problem. It also has to be related in some way to something I know in order for me to have a base pattern for it to intersect. Slavic languages only make sense insofar as they overlap with, say, random t.A.T.u. lyrics, but that's rapidly going up as I work my way through the Russian lesson book.
The meta-ability to keep track of what's going on with this is also rather useful. I do most of my people reading by realizing that someone reminds me inexplicably of something, and then backtracking to figure out what and where the overlap is. It's also good for parlor tricks. A common format for the kind of psych experiments that pay you petty cash for participation is sitting you in front of a computer and flashing some sort of stimuli, then requiring you to press a key depending on what it is. F'rex, half the screen will flash stripes and the other half will flash polka dots, and they want you to hit the up arrow if the stripes are on top, or the down arrow if the stripes are on the bottom. I just go through the tutorials, make a note that 'okay, this set of neurons go fizz at stripes', then spend the rest of the experiment staring vaguely at the center of the screen and paying more attention to my own brain response than what's actually flashing.
I've no idea how I'm keeping notes on which neurons are fizzing, or even if that's what I'm really doing -- it's the imagery that comes immediately to mind when I try to describe the sequence. It's entirely possible to do things like that, but I don't know how other people describe it; something similar must be going on in biofeedback applications, but I've only seen the research enumerate the results, without sharing any descriptions from the participants of what they actually think they're doing. It's much faster than waiting for my explicit processing brain to catch up and tell me 'okay! there are the stripes!', at any rate. I've racked up quite a collection of weird looks from Harvard psychologists over the past couple of years.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Radiolab's podcast for last Tuesday, when I was dragging a rat out to Allston in vain, was an interesting little piece called "What's Left When You're Right?" The whole thing's worth listening to, if you're the sort who likes interesting little thought problems with some entertaining background, but the last segment, "What's Right When You're Left?", about an inexperienced boxer foolishly trying his first fight against a southpaw, got me thinking.
Humans are pretty definite about having a preferred hand. The phenomenon is generally called 'laterality', and it occurs in more than just human handedness, both in the sense that humans also tend to have a dominant eye, ear, leg, etc., and in that other animals show a preference for handedness. I don't have a full list of "handed" species, but the Radiolab guys mention that macaws are about 90% left-taloned -- exactly the opposite of humans -- and rats are generally known to be about 10%-ish left-pawed. I don't know about birds, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that handedness is heritable in rats about the same as it is in humans. The Bridge Crew was the only batch I've had that I can be sure were all full siblings, and all four of them were left-pawed. It's difficult to find stats on ambidexterity, in part because even people who are coordinated with both hands tend to prefer one or the other, but most suggestions are about 1%. Interestingly, there seems to be a much higher percentage of rats (5-7%) who don't care which paw grabs the food, as long as the food paw belongs to them.
It's difficult to generalize from a few examples, but I will note that the handed species mentioned are all known for not just being clever and having excellent fine motor coordination, but also being aggravated by the presence of an unsolved puzzle. Rats and talking birds are notorious for figuring out how to undo complicated cage latches, and then not really doing anything much about it once it's done. Rats will just go 'open open open i know this opens i have seen this open how does it open CHEW CHEW CHEW RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE' for hours on end until they figure out how it works, stick their faces out and smell things for about thirty seconds, and then go home to take a nap, because things that are already open aren't that interesting.
It happens to be of particular interest to me because of the figure skating investigations, and the fact that I came up on the oddball side of things again. Somewhere in the range of 90% of skaters do all their jumps and spins counterclockwise, and I don't. I confess my reaction to figuring out I ought to be going clockwise on jumps was a mix of 'hooray! I'm rare!' and 'oh goddamnit, I'm weird'. I wonder, in fact, if the numbers of CW jumpers is somewhat artificially low -- CCW spinners are so prevalent that formal instruction is generally done in that direction, and when you've got an authority figure telling you that the correct way to do things is to jump off your left foot and swing with your right, then a comparatively low number of students are going to have the brainwave 'hey, try that the other way maybe?' It is surprisingly difficult to sort out the feet going the wrong way. A lot of the people who ought to be jumping CW may well just conclude they have no aptitude for this and quit. A completely unscientific survey of Wikipedia suggests a high proportion of CW spinners in the pros started out by teaching themselves how to work on roller skates, or by fucking around on dance floor like I've been doing, and were already very definite about which way they were supposed to be going around by the time they got formal lessons.
Several sources indicate that the directional preference is tied to hand preference, usually assuming that right-handed = counterclockwise jumper. Just from observation I can tell you that this is mainly hogwash, although I see an unusually high rate of functional ambidexterity in skaters who can do most of the spinny-things in both directions. Johnny Weir signs things right and is otherwise pretty definitely right-hand dominant, but spins CW; Stéphane Lambiel signs right but wears his watch right and handles things like bottle caps with his left, and is CCW dominant for quads and most triples, but quite capable of landing doubles and doing most spins CW if he feels like it. I haven't caught Rohene Ward signing anything yet, but I've only seen him land doubles CW, and when he spins and spirals he's balanced on his left leg, which is what I'd expect of a CCW spinner. Michelle Kwan is famous for a backwards camel spin, but as far as I know that's the only thing she does clockwise.
Very nearly 100% of skaters spin the same direction they jump. You can't really do scratch spins or corkscrew scratch spins or layback spins on a dance floor, because friction prevents you from maintaining the rotation long enough, but you can certainly kick off like you're going to do one. I do both pirouette-style spins and backspins clockwise, like the jumps, but for sit spins I want to balance on my right leg with my left propped out for balance -- which is for a counterclockwise spinner. This is going to cause me some issues if I ever want to learn flying spins, which I do, because death drops look like a hell of a lot of fun. The only skater I've found who jumped and spun natively in opposite directions is John Curry, who amusingly enough, also shares a birthday with me. He also does his Ina Bauers --another thing that's much more comfortable on one side than the other -- on the same feet I do, opposite most skaters.
The other theories floated is that spin dominance has to do with leg dominance, or even eye dominance. This would be easier to test if the tests for leg/eye dominance didn't give me ambiguous results every damn time. I quite definitely do not have a dominant eye. It causes me no end of trouble if I lose a contact lens for some reason. Most people can function with one lens in and one out, as their brain will just set the non-dominant eye to 'ignore' and they can walk around with mostly monocular vision until they can fix the situation. I can't. My brain insists on paying attention to both inputs, and I'm not talented enough to set each eye to a different focal length. Either both lenses come out, or I walk around with a hand over one eye, like a particularly slapdash pirate. Most tests for eye dominance are things like 'what eye do you use for kaleidoscopes or telescopes?' which is rubbish for me -- they all go right, not because my right eye is better, but because I'm strongly right-hand dominant and consistently use my right hand to hold or steady anything that's going to be right up against my very valuable eyeball. The test that comes close to working is the one where you focus on something distant through a small aperture held about a foot away from your face, and all that tells me is that I have to pick an arbitrary eye to use, because if I look straight on the distant thing I'm supposed to be looking at is hidden by the overlap of the images of the aperture edge.
The dominant leg test is no more helpful. Most of them look like this one. I step forward on my right foot, but my left knee goes down first when kneeling. (Sometimes this test asks which foot you prop yourself on when getting off the floor; the question is moot for me, since I usually do this by getting both feet under me seza and then rolling back on my toes.) Which direction I cross my legs has more to do with where I'm sitting and what kind of foot room I have, and I switch legs if one of them starts to fall asleep. The jump rope test is a new one on me; I used to do a lot of that in grade school and junior high, including some fairly fancy tricks, and until I looked that up I had no idea that other people pull one foot off the ground before the other. I bounce on both toes. I haven't got any convenient friends to shove me around, nor do I have a sand pit in which to measure footsteps right now, as everything outside is frozen solid right now.
It would help if any of these ever mentioned whether the "dominant" leg is supposed to be the stronger one or the more dexterous one. or even whether it's weird that these are not the same leg for me. Whichever way it goes, I generally want to push my weight around with my right, and direct my weight with my left. My hula hoops go backwards for the same reason I jump backwards: I want to plant my right foot for stability and throw me/the hoop forward and around with my left hip. I can hoop the other way if I have to, but it's distinctly awkward.
Humans are pretty definite about having a preferred hand. The phenomenon is generally called 'laterality', and it occurs in more than just human handedness, both in the sense that humans also tend to have a dominant eye, ear, leg, etc., and in that other animals show a preference for handedness. I don't have a full list of "handed" species, but the Radiolab guys mention that macaws are about 90% left-taloned -- exactly the opposite of humans -- and rats are generally known to be about 10%-ish left-pawed. I don't know about birds, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that handedness is heritable in rats about the same as it is in humans. The Bridge Crew was the only batch I've had that I can be sure were all full siblings, and all four of them were left-pawed. It's difficult to find stats on ambidexterity, in part because even people who are coordinated with both hands tend to prefer one or the other, but most suggestions are about 1%. Interestingly, there seems to be a much higher percentage of rats (5-7%) who don't care which paw grabs the food, as long as the food paw belongs to them.
It's difficult to generalize from a few examples, but I will note that the handed species mentioned are all known for not just being clever and having excellent fine motor coordination, but also being aggravated by the presence of an unsolved puzzle. Rats and talking birds are notorious for figuring out how to undo complicated cage latches, and then not really doing anything much about it once it's done. Rats will just go 'open open open i know this opens i have seen this open how does it open CHEW CHEW CHEW RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE' for hours on end until they figure out how it works, stick their faces out and smell things for about thirty seconds, and then go home to take a nap, because things that are already open aren't that interesting.
It happens to be of particular interest to me because of the figure skating investigations, and the fact that I came up on the oddball side of things again. Somewhere in the range of 90% of skaters do all their jumps and spins counterclockwise, and I don't. I confess my reaction to figuring out I ought to be going clockwise on jumps was a mix of 'hooray! I'm rare!' and 'oh goddamnit, I'm weird'. I wonder, in fact, if the numbers of CW jumpers is somewhat artificially low -- CCW spinners are so prevalent that formal instruction is generally done in that direction, and when you've got an authority figure telling you that the correct way to do things is to jump off your left foot and swing with your right, then a comparatively low number of students are going to have the brainwave 'hey, try that the other way maybe?' It is surprisingly difficult to sort out the feet going the wrong way. A lot of the people who ought to be jumping CW may well just conclude they have no aptitude for this and quit. A completely unscientific survey of Wikipedia suggests a high proportion of CW spinners in the pros started out by teaching themselves how to work on roller skates, or by fucking around on dance floor like I've been doing, and were already very definite about which way they were supposed to be going around by the time they got formal lessons.
Several sources indicate that the directional preference is tied to hand preference, usually assuming that right-handed = counterclockwise jumper. Just from observation I can tell you that this is mainly hogwash, although I see an unusually high rate of functional ambidexterity in skaters who can do most of the spinny-things in both directions. Johnny Weir signs things right and is otherwise pretty definitely right-hand dominant, but spins CW; Stéphane Lambiel signs right but wears his watch right and handles things like bottle caps with his left, and is CCW dominant for quads and most triples, but quite capable of landing doubles and doing most spins CW if he feels like it. I haven't caught Rohene Ward signing anything yet, but I've only seen him land doubles CW, and when he spins and spirals he's balanced on his left leg, which is what I'd expect of a CCW spinner. Michelle Kwan is famous for a backwards camel spin, but as far as I know that's the only thing she does clockwise.
The other theories floated is that spin dominance has to do with leg dominance, or even eye dominance. This would be easier to test if the tests for leg/eye dominance didn't give me ambiguous results every damn time. I quite definitely do not have a dominant eye. It causes me no end of trouble if I lose a contact lens for some reason. Most people can function with one lens in and one out, as their brain will just set the non-dominant eye to 'ignore' and they can walk around with mostly monocular vision until they can fix the situation. I can't. My brain insists on paying attention to both inputs, and I'm not talented enough to set each eye to a different focal length. Either both lenses come out, or I walk around with a hand over one eye, like a particularly slapdash pirate. Most tests for eye dominance are things like 'what eye do you use for kaleidoscopes or telescopes?' which is rubbish for me -- they all go right, not because my right eye is better, but because I'm strongly right-hand dominant and consistently use my right hand to hold or steady anything that's going to be right up against my very valuable eyeball. The test that comes close to working is the one where you focus on something distant through a small aperture held about a foot away from your face, and all that tells me is that I have to pick an arbitrary eye to use, because if I look straight on the distant thing I'm supposed to be looking at is hidden by the overlap of the images of the aperture edge.
The dominant leg test is no more helpful. Most of them look like this one. I step forward on my right foot, but my left knee goes down first when kneeling. (Sometimes this test asks which foot you prop yourself on when getting off the floor; the question is moot for me, since I usually do this by getting both feet under me seza and then rolling back on my toes.) Which direction I cross my legs has more to do with where I'm sitting and what kind of foot room I have, and I switch legs if one of them starts to fall asleep. The jump rope test is a new one on me; I used to do a lot of that in grade school and junior high, including some fairly fancy tricks, and until I looked that up I had no idea that other people pull one foot off the ground before the other. I bounce on both toes. I haven't got any convenient friends to shove me around, nor do I have a sand pit in which to measure footsteps right now, as everything outside is frozen solid right now.
It would help if any of these ever mentioned whether the "dominant" leg is supposed to be the stronger one or the more dexterous one. or even whether it's weird that these are not the same leg for me. Whichever way it goes, I generally want to push my weight around with my right, and direct my weight with my left. My hula hoops go backwards for the same reason I jump backwards: I want to plant my right foot for stability and throw me/the hoop forward and around with my left hip. I can hoop the other way if I have to, but it's distinctly awkward.
One of my friends posted one of those unofficial internet IQ tests on Facebook a while ago. He got a ludicrously high number -- totally not surprised at that, he's practically the poster boy for ADHD genius. He gets particularly Sherlocky when drunk, as it makes him slow the fuck down. I have a long, proud history myself of taking those things at parties, when I'm completely obliterated. I consistently test out at 140 when I've had so many daiquiris I'm leaning my head on my hands and reading the screen with one eye closed to make the cursor stop wobbling.
I know a lot of people who do this, and the reason we take it about as seriously as your average OK Cupid quiz is that scores in this range are meaningless. Anything over two standard deviations -- 130, give or take about five points, depending on which IQ test you're using -- essentially just equates to "thar be smarts". There's no particularly good agreement on where the cutoff for "genius" is, but most of the GATE (gifted and talented education) programs I've heard of will automatically accept students who test out at 120 or higher.
(If you just said, "...the line is that low?" congratulations, you're probably in my bracket. We have LEGO over there on the table, a tub of oobleck in the corner, Top Gear on the TV, and free wifi everywhere in the building. Whiteboards and teaching spaces are available for when you inevitably need to share your cool brain-toys with other people.)
The main problem with these tests is that you can only control the accuracy of your results to the extent that you can control the accuracy of your test environment. When your test environment is the human brain, all bets are off.
The point of an IQ test is to assess your ability to take in information, analyse a situation, and come to logical conclusions about it. (We will leave aside the question of whether this is the only, or even the primary, factor in what other people perceive as intelligence. I'm not writing a thesis here.) In order for them to do this, first they have to be sure you understand the question. If you only speak English and they hand you a test packet entirely in Swahili, in the words of the immortal Bender: "You're boned." They try to make these things value- and culture-neutral, insofar as you can do that, but there are constant arguments over wording and content that mostly boil down to, "The IQ scores for [group X] are artificially low because your test questions are making [cultural assumption Y] that they do not share." For more on this problem, see any one of about four hojillion very long and often very ranty books on the topic. Amazon is your friend.
Okay, so what happens at the other end? Why are the high scores so scattershot?
Part of your score for these things is, obviously, whether you get the right answer. (We are also going to ignore the problems that a rigid definition of "right answer" can cause. Every gifted kid has stories of getting dinged on a project grade because they did something creative and whoever was scoring it failed to follow. Personally, it drives me bats when I get a foreign language teacher who can't tell the difference between me screwing up at grammar, and me screwing around with grammar.) The other part of your score is how long it took. Your time for a given question is from the instant they give it to you to the instant you give them your solution -- including the time it takes you to read the thing and stuff all the pertinent information into your noggin.
The people who do well on IQ tests tend to also be the people who used to fight their siblings for the cereal box at breakfast, because having to sit at the table with nothing to read would make their brains implode. The more you read, the faster you get, mainly because you develop what's called a "recognition vocabulary". Your recognition vocabulary is the collection of words you recognize as a shape unto themselves, without having to actually scan them letter by letter. Instead of going, "D... O... G... let me check the filing cabinet here... aha, this must be DOG!" your brain just takes in the word as a whole and goes, "DOG! I've got that right here!" When you spend every second of every day scanning your environment for something to read, if not just jamming your nose overtly into a book while walking around, your recognition vocabulary can get quite large and varied. Not having to go through word analysis for most of the English (or whatever) language knocks huge chunks off your time on an IQ test, raising your score by a lot.
(On the downside, you spend a lot of irritating seconds of your life staring blankly at pieces of paper, because you've learned the hard way that if you hand it back when you're really done with it, the other person will accuse you of not having actually read it.)
This is why none of the IQ and IQ-type tests they gave me as a kid gave them any kind of sensible result. I happen to be wired for language. I started reading signs aloud to people when I was about a year and a half old; God only knows how long I'd been doing that and not bothering to share. I was maybe four before they figured out I could read grown-up cursive upside-down. My home life was crazy and I had exactly zero real friends until I was a teenager, so I coped by living inside books. All of their score sheets just went TILT, because there is no such thing as a test that is calibrated properly for a kindergartener who is reading at a 12th grade level. Likewise, there's no such thing as a test that is calibrated properly for an adult who isn't reading sequentially so much as just jamming snapshots of the page directly into their brain. It becomes a case of taking the limit as reading time approaches zero. A little jog left or right on an asymptotic function like that can change your Y value by a lot, so to a very real extent, when you are in the high upper reaches, your exact score depends on how many of the words on your version of the test you are particularly close friends with.
This idea generalizes quite well to the rest of the test. IQ tests are, by design, made of basic spatial and reasoning puzzles. They are stripped down as much as possible in an effort to eliminate confounding variables like presentation or cultural connotation or just plain distraction. They just want to know if you can spot patterns. Gifted kids are good at spotting patterns -- so good, in fact, that it's not uncommon to look at one of those things and go, "Hey, I've already seen a brainteaser shaped just like that!" Essentially, you develop a recognition vocabulary of puzzle bits just like you do with words. When your time-per-question is already extremely low, recognizing whether or not you've already seen that one in a back issue of Scientific American can knock you a couple seconds, and hence points, in either direction.
I'm not saying that the ability to pull this shit out of hammerspace isn't an aspect of genius -- it most certainly is -- but in order to use the skill you must previously have run into that particular bit of relevant information somewhere outside of the test environment, and they have no way to control for that. They're trying to test for reasoning ability independent of prior knowledge, but they can't keep you from cheating when the cheat sheet is in your brain, so it's an inevitable bit of confounding slop. It just happens that because of the aysmptotic nature of the bell curve function, once you get out onto the thinned-out ends, little bits of slop add up quickly.
Depending on the test, your age, the environment, the time of day, the phase of the moon, how drunk you are, whether you get a comfortable chair, how many of these damn things you've done already, etc. etc. etc., one person can easily get a range of scores that bounce around by as much as twenty points. As a practical matter, once you're out past the 98th percentile, your exact score means bupkis -- you're out in the area where people don't give you funny looks because you know stuff, they give you funny looks because you think weird. You're starting to develop your own internal organizational schemata that, to the casual outside observer, differ from schizophrenia mainly by a lack of tinfoil haberdashery.
(Also as a practical matter, all of the people in the discussion that prompted this are 98th percentilers. People who break the tests generally don't think much of them. It's been my experience that the people most concerned with my test scores were people who were squarely average and wanted an excuse for not knowing what the hell they were supposed to do with me. Gifted kids tend to pass IQ numbers around as silly trivia, like Meyers-Briggs personality types. It's kind of like horoscopes for science nerds.)
I know a lot of people who do this, and the reason we take it about as seriously as your average OK Cupid quiz is that scores in this range are meaningless. Anything over two standard deviations -- 130, give or take about five points, depending on which IQ test you're using -- essentially just equates to "thar be smarts". There's no particularly good agreement on where the cutoff for "genius" is, but most of the GATE (gifted and talented education) programs I've heard of will automatically accept students who test out at 120 or higher.
(If you just said, "...the line is that low?" congratulations, you're probably in my bracket. We have LEGO over there on the table, a tub of oobleck in the corner, Top Gear on the TV, and free wifi everywhere in the building. Whiteboards and teaching spaces are available for when you inevitably need to share your cool brain-toys with other people.)
The main problem with these tests is that you can only control the accuracy of your results to the extent that you can control the accuracy of your test environment. When your test environment is the human brain, all bets are off.
The point of an IQ test is to assess your ability to take in information, analyse a situation, and come to logical conclusions about it. (We will leave aside the question of whether this is the only, or even the primary, factor in what other people perceive as intelligence. I'm not writing a thesis here.) In order for them to do this, first they have to be sure you understand the question. If you only speak English and they hand you a test packet entirely in Swahili, in the words of the immortal Bender: "You're boned." They try to make these things value- and culture-neutral, insofar as you can do that, but there are constant arguments over wording and content that mostly boil down to, "The IQ scores for [group X] are artificially low because your test questions are making [cultural assumption Y] that they do not share." For more on this problem, see any one of about four hojillion very long and often very ranty books on the topic. Amazon is your friend.
Okay, so what happens at the other end? Why are the high scores so scattershot?
Part of your score for these things is, obviously, whether you get the right answer. (We are also going to ignore the problems that a rigid definition of "right answer" can cause. Every gifted kid has stories of getting dinged on a project grade because they did something creative and whoever was scoring it failed to follow. Personally, it drives me bats when I get a foreign language teacher who can't tell the difference between me screwing up at grammar, and me screwing around with grammar.) The other part of your score is how long it took. Your time for a given question is from the instant they give it to you to the instant you give them your solution -- including the time it takes you to read the thing and stuff all the pertinent information into your noggin.
The people who do well on IQ tests tend to also be the people who used to fight their siblings for the cereal box at breakfast, because having to sit at the table with nothing to read would make their brains implode. The more you read, the faster you get, mainly because you develop what's called a "recognition vocabulary". Your recognition vocabulary is the collection of words you recognize as a shape unto themselves, without having to actually scan them letter by letter. Instead of going, "D... O... G... let me check the filing cabinet here... aha, this must be DOG!" your brain just takes in the word as a whole and goes, "DOG! I've got that right here!" When you spend every second of every day scanning your environment for something to read, if not just jamming your nose overtly into a book while walking around, your recognition vocabulary can get quite large and varied. Not having to go through word analysis for most of the English (or whatever) language knocks huge chunks off your time on an IQ test, raising your score by a lot.
(On the downside, you spend a lot of irritating seconds of your life staring blankly at pieces of paper, because you've learned the hard way that if you hand it back when you're really done with it, the other person will accuse you of not having actually read it.)
This is why none of the IQ and IQ-type tests they gave me as a kid gave them any kind of sensible result. I happen to be wired for language. I started reading signs aloud to people when I was about a year and a half old; God only knows how long I'd been doing that and not bothering to share. I was maybe four before they figured out I could read grown-up cursive upside-down. My home life was crazy and I had exactly zero real friends until I was a teenager, so I coped by living inside books. All of their score sheets just went TILT, because there is no such thing as a test that is calibrated properly for a kindergartener who is reading at a 12th grade level. Likewise, there's no such thing as a test that is calibrated properly for an adult who isn't reading sequentially so much as just jamming snapshots of the page directly into their brain. It becomes a case of taking the limit as reading time approaches zero. A little jog left or right on an asymptotic function like that can change your Y value by a lot, so to a very real extent, when you are in the high upper reaches, your exact score depends on how many of the words on your version of the test you are particularly close friends with.
This idea generalizes quite well to the rest of the test. IQ tests are, by design, made of basic spatial and reasoning puzzles. They are stripped down as much as possible in an effort to eliminate confounding variables like presentation or cultural connotation or just plain distraction. They just want to know if you can spot patterns. Gifted kids are good at spotting patterns -- so good, in fact, that it's not uncommon to look at one of those things and go, "Hey, I've already seen a brainteaser shaped just like that!" Essentially, you develop a recognition vocabulary of puzzle bits just like you do with words. When your time-per-question is already extremely low, recognizing whether or not you've already seen that one in a back issue of Scientific American can knock you a couple seconds, and hence points, in either direction.
I'm not saying that the ability to pull this shit out of hammerspace isn't an aspect of genius -- it most certainly is -- but in order to use the skill you must previously have run into that particular bit of relevant information somewhere outside of the test environment, and they have no way to control for that. They're trying to test for reasoning ability independent of prior knowledge, but they can't keep you from cheating when the cheat sheet is in your brain, so it's an inevitable bit of confounding slop. It just happens that because of the aysmptotic nature of the bell curve function, once you get out onto the thinned-out ends, little bits of slop add up quickly.
Depending on the test, your age, the environment, the time of day, the phase of the moon, how drunk you are, whether you get a comfortable chair, how many of these damn things you've done already, etc. etc. etc., one person can easily get a range of scores that bounce around by as much as twenty points. As a practical matter, once you're out past the 98th percentile, your exact score means bupkis -- you're out in the area where people don't give you funny looks because you know stuff, they give you funny looks because you think weird. You're starting to develop your own internal organizational schemata that, to the casual outside observer, differ from schizophrenia mainly by a lack of tinfoil haberdashery.
(Also as a practical matter, all of the people in the discussion that prompted this are 98th percentilers. People who break the tests generally don't think much of them. It's been my experience that the people most concerned with my test scores were people who were squarely average and wanted an excuse for not knowing what the hell they were supposed to do with me. Gifted kids tend to pass IQ numbers around as silly trivia, like Meyers-Briggs personality types. It's kind of like horoscopes for science nerds.)
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