>> ^Drachen_Jager:
Sorry but Canadians do NOT score lower than Americans.
1. Canadian children scored Full Scale IQ= 103.34, Verbal= 101.4, Performance = 104.96 on the (American) WISC-III. Source: Wechsler, D. (1996), Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Third Edition, Canadian Supplement. (Communicated by Dr. D. Saklofske).
(Since the tests are standardized American tests the average American score is of course 100)


Are IQ tests standardised to FORCE the average to 100? That seems really unlikely to me. Because if we were getting thicker, we'd have an average of 90 IQ, then we'd go "Hang on a minute, add 10 to that to put the average to 100 again." Then we'd have an average of 100, and be less intelligent than a guy 10 years ago with 100IQ.

Of course IQ is an arbitrary scale invented by humans, but that scale can't MOVE surely, otherwise it puts all figures into dissaray, they mean nothing. It's like saying "Ok, earth temperatures have gone up by 2 degrees celsius. So we're adjusting the scale downwards by 2 degrees. Temperature restored guys!"

This was in July, when it's usually 25-30 degrees Celsius in the Oslo area. But due to the rainy weather, the temperature was just below 20 at the time of this trip. The fact that it was very wet as well did not help.

Can we add this to *lies?

This is total BS, because people would "fit" into a geographic area does not mean that the Earth can support us, certainly not in the way in which westerners have become accustomed with a new car every 5-10 years and a multitude of new computers and high tech goods every year or two, also, food PRODUCTION has never been a huge issue, lots of crops go to waste every year, it's the distribution that's a problem, but he doesn't even cover the production side, yeah people could fit into Texas, but he said himself that wasn't the issue. And who wants to live in Texas anyhow?

Population-wise I think the Earth is OK, as long as we all consume about 1/10 of what westerners do now, THIS is where the real problem comes up, the world population is not growing that fast but it's places like China where the energy use and consumerism have been exponential (in spite of the one child policy I might add) that are liable to tip the balance towards catastrophe.

I say all this sitting baking in the heat at all time record temperatures, second day in a row we've set the record (2 degrees over the record yesterday, that's celsius so 4 degrees for you Americans), how many of you are also seeing record temperatures where you live?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, dara o briain, celsius, fahrenheit, h2o' to 'Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Dara O Briain, celsius, fahrenheit, h2o' - edited by EndAll

Thanks for the explanation Lithic. In German it's Celsius either way, so to a non native Brit i guess this might not make sense depending of origin.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, dara obrien, celsius, fahrenheit, h2o' to 'Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, dara o briain, celsius, fahrenheit, h2o' - edited by alien_concept

>> ^ajkido:
Um. But why was the answer wrong?


I feel this is quite a frequent offence of QI actually, these trick questions that are quite badly phrased. If the question was "at what temperature does water boil" then a correct answer is indeed 100 degrees Celsius (unless you want to go into the decimal points like conan did). The point that Stephen Fry was making was when Anders Celsius invented the scale he graded it in the reverse. That 100 degrees was the melting point and 0 degrees the boiling point. Shortly after his death the scale was then changed by other people to what it is now (100 degrees boiling) and that was what came out as the generally accepted scale and the one that's used today.

Some people might now say "oh but the reversed scale we use today is called the CENTIGRADE, while Celsius is still the one that he invented so if the question was 'at what temperature CELSIUS does water boil' then Stephen Fry would actually be in the right". A question of semantics, in many countries (maybe even most?) including Celsius native Sweden, the current scale is also called the Celsius scale and no name distinction is made between the original and the current version of the scale, and even in countries where a distinction is made Celsius is still the generally accepted name for the current scale among the population.

Then again I guess the show wouldn't be much fun if the obvious answer turned out to be the right one...

I'm Canadian, but I'm not old enough to have been around when we made the switch. I think it would be worthwhile for the US to make the switch as far as road speed limits go, but then again, Canada can me retardatly Imperial at times.
I went to paintball a few weeks ago with some Japanese exchange students. Keep in mind that Japan uses far less imperial measurements than Canada. We were told not to shoot from less than 15 Feet away, but it wasn't until the very last game that one of the Japanese students turned to me and asked "How far is 15 Feet?".

Oh, and also start using Celsius, Fahrenheit makes less sense than FOX.

ahoy! I replied to this note, and attempted to maintain civility. cheers!

In reply to this comment by BansheeX:
Forget about stupidity on both sides, you people always pick a punching bag who can't defend their position to make your own dumb viewpoint seem like the right one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html

CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.

Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.

The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).

http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.

Forget about stupidity on both sides, you people always pick a punching bag who can't defend their position to make your own dumb viewpoint seem like the right one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html

CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.

Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.

The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).

http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm

So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.

So, i'm from Canada, right? I'm 24. When I was a kid, i'd walk to school.
Every day would be -45 degrees Celsius outside, I couldn't catch my breath, i'd get frostbite, a runny nose, and my feet would be chilled numb, and there was never a Halloween that passed without having to brave the cold and snow for the candy.

Time passes.

Now, the winter months are a shell of the former frigid might, we get what are called Chinooks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_winds) coming over the mountains more often now than ever before, we have days where it reaches +11 degrees C in months not generally known for it, and it stays that way for a week, before returning to like, what, -1dC, yeah sure we get cold days, it's winter, but just, you feel that each passing winter is the easiest to get through, and warmest in comparison to those that have passed before. I don't get sick as much, if ever. Colds are almost a distant thing of the past. And the last two Halloween nights have been snow free affairs, which I though would not happen, again, due simply to the time of the season.

My whole problem with Global Warming, is that it is too politicized for what it is. I dream for a day where people realize that we are owed clean and efficient technologies. We demand them! not for global warming's sake, or to fight pollution, but rather because that is progress, and trying to justify stalling out progress in the name of the status quo, is just foolish. I want to fill my car with electricity, and surf the web on the sun! Why are these things that are bad in any way? Why shouldn't everyone want to have a low cost utility bill every month, or be capable of running your meters backwards, and contributing to the grid? We spend our whole lives taking every opportunity to make ourselves more comfortable, and to be able to provide for our loved ones. Except now, with this.

What will it be, dogma, or progress? That is the choice, and that is the argument. However, history has shown that people, when confronted by unyielding ideology, fight for progress. May this be another of those times.

Cheers, Dave
From Calgary

(The place, you know, in between the arctic circle, and the middle of America, and seeing global warming unfold out my window right now.)

you already are! your paying for it in higher health costs , but they are widespread and low grade , also lower worker productivity due to high particulate counts in the air thanks to dirty coal.
the difference here is credit vs. pay now .
currently we are back loading all the energy costs in our country and hiding the total cost because adding up those costs are extremely complex .
the cost of keeping our military and intelligence agencies active in the oil rich regions for more than 50 years equals what?
and what is the cost of 2-4 degrees celsius in 50 years next?
for around 1.1 trillion we could cut our emissions to 50% OF 2005 . for about 30 billion we could feed all the hungry everywhere in the world for a year .
instead ,, we gave it to the banks. for what?
as far as how bad our debt will be? lets hope buddha will be kind,, cause the next year surely wont be.

of course celsius, but still too damn cold! anything below 10°C is...
an entire region that cold? I can hardly believe it, must be some kind of mistake...

>> ^looris:
do they only have negative temperatures? wtf is it THAT cold?


Celsius, motherfucker, do you speak it?

>> ^GoShogun:
Lol, right there with you plastique. -38 C in Calgary tonight with windchill. If you can't see your breath, it's shorts and t-shirt weather in the prairies.


Hell I showed up in Edmonton in January one year during a freakish warm spell - a few degrees above freezing, maybe 5 or 10 degrees Celsius.

There was a guy wandering on the street in shorts.