"Keep a wide berth from people who obsess about their IQs. 'People who boast about their IQ are losers,' Stephen Hawking once told the New York Times."

"See, for example, Donald Trump. The only thing Trump seems to love more than making creepy comments about his daughter Ivanka is boasting about how high his IQ is. He’s referenced his IQ at least 22 times but the most memorable instance might be when he tweeted: 'Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.' An IQ score is a flawed measurement of intelligence – but boasting about one is a failsafe way to show people you’re a dimwit."

That's point #5 in "Want to quickly spot idiots? Here are five foolproof red flags" by Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi.

1. It's a red flag to believe your red flags are foolproof. 

The Turtle House.

That's The Turtle house by Kurt Völtzke at El Gouna (Red Sea, Egypt), which I'm seeing this morning at the Wikipedia article "Cultural depictions of turtles." I got there because, after blogging about the Green Reaper, I went looking for other government-designed mascots. I'd thought of Smokey the Bear on my own, but that's the one that seems to make us think that the government should be in the mascot-designing business. I found a WaPo article from 2014, "It’s (almost) Smokey Bear’s birthday. Here are some other decidedly less iconic government mascots." There I discovered a Federal Trade Commission atrocity called Dewie the E-Turtle, which was supposed to teach us about protecting our privacy on the internet. That got my attention because I believed the green thing in this photograph was Dewey:



I was wrong about that. The green thing is actually BAC, a creation of the Department of Agriculture. He's a bacterium, which explains the other mascot, which is Thermy, who's there to bully you into overcooking your meat. But I'm only figuring that out now, after I've become entranced by "The Cultural Depiction of Turtles." I love Wikipedia.

"I am sure that during this century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression."

"Laws will probably be passed against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won’t be able to resist the temptation to improve human characteristics, such as memory, resistance to disease and length of life.... Once such superhumans appear, there will be significant political problems with unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete... Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving at an ever-increasing rate."

Wrote Stephen Hawking.

"I have dwarfism. I was 13 when Verne Troyer hit our screens as Mini-Me in Austin Powers sequel The Spy Who Shagged Me."

"The character was a compound of stereotypes of people with dwarfism. He was hypersexual, unintelligent and aggressive. He was not even a character in his own right but a replica of another, average height role. Like dwarf performers in circuses of days past, his character only existed in contrast to others.... Throughout the series he serves as Dr Evil’s biddable pet. I imagine few who watched it know that in the past aristocrats and monarchs often 'kept' dwarf people like this – abusing, ridiculing, and, sometimes, even killing them... Troyer died on Saturday. He was just 49 years old. A statement on his Facebook page, said he had struggled with 'his own battles' but that 'unfortunately, this time was too much.'... Even in death, his body marks him as a target for ridicule. Ignorant still but much less malicious were comments that he was 'bigger than [insert height here],' 'a small guy but had a big heart,' or 'a big man in a tiny package,' and so on. Such remarks, commonly used by the media, propagate assumptions that dwarfism is something negative for which we have to compensate through our achievements or character.... [I]t is often in death that average height and able-bodied people easily erase an individual’s disability or difference – as demonstrated by the recent passing of Professor Stephen Hawking – to claim they were 'larger than life' or are 'finally free from their disability.'"

From "Verne Troyer’s tragic death underlines the harm Mini-Me caused people with dwarfism/The role of the aggressive, biddable pet in the Austin Powers films did huge damage to the dwarfism community and our struggle for respect" by Eugene Grant (in The Guardian).

This continues the discussion we were having last month when Hawking died, here, after the actress Gal Gadot, surely believing she was being nice, said "Now you’re free of any physical constraints."

And here's the Wikipedia article on "Court dwarfs" ("Court dwarfs enjoyed specific placement right next to the king or queen in a royal court during public appearances and ceremonies, because they were so small, the king appeared much larger and visually enhanced his powerful position").

There's some interesting artwork, such as this, by Velasquez (c. 1645):

"Gal Gadot’s Seemingly Innocent Tribute To Stephen Hawking Pissed Off Some People/ Several disability rights advocates called it ableist."

I haven't read this HuffPo piece yet, but I'm pretty sure I know the sentimental, conventional idea that Gadot expressed and exactly why people who care about disability rights got pissed off. I'm not irascible enough to get "pissed off" about it, but I've been objecting to quite a few things, including a cartoon I saw that showed Hawking's wheelchair empty, and the figure of Hawking walking toward the stars — free at last, supposedly, even though Hawking, the real man, famously said "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Now, I'm reading what Gadot (AKA "Wonder Woman") tweeted, and it's exactly what I thought: "Rest in peace Dr. Hawking... Now you’re free of any physical constraints. Your brilliance and wisdom will be cherished forever."

To me, that's like saying about a Christian who has passed on something like "It's so sad that his beautiful soul is gone forever." You're imposing your religion on the person who had his own religion/atheism.

But it's worse than that, because it's saying that the life that he did have was a burden he's lucky to be rid of. Especially given that he did not believe in an afterlife (or so he said), the life he had was all he had. It was not worse than nothing. Hawking said (at the second link, above): "I accept that there are some things I can't do. But they are mostly things I don’t particularly want to do anyway. I seem to manage to do anything that I really want." And:

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

I'm now reading what the supposedly pissed off people said, and it's what I thought, not just people flying off the handle and being inappropriately mean to an "innocent" actress trying to deliver a "tribute":

I think you’re fantastic Gal but this tweet is very ableist. His physical constraints didn’t stop him from changing the world. People with disabilities don’t wish for death to be free of their challenges. We wish to be valued for what we CAN do, not pitied for we can’t.

You know, Wonder Woman, Gadot's movie character, has superpowers, and we love our superpowers in the movies. We need to think harder about what we celebrate, and Hawking is a stellar example of living well within limitations, and we all have limitations.

"What a triumph his life has been... His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more..."

"... around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds — a manifestation of amazing willpower and determination," said Cambridge cosmologist Martin Rees, quoted in "Stephen Hawking Dies at 76; His Mind Roamed the Cosmos/A physicist and best-selling author, Dr. Hawking did not allow his physical limitations to hinder his quest to answer 'the big question: Where did the universe come from?'"

Here's something from last year, "Stephen Hawking says we need global government to protect us from killer computers":

“Since civilization began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages... It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason."...

He suggests that “some form of world government” could solve the problems, as long it doesn’t enslave us first. “But that might become a tyranny,” he warned. Hawking now spends much of his time warning humanity of its impending doom. He recently said the human species could be brutally finished off by “rogue” robots that are too strong for us to defeat, as long as greedy humanity manages to avoid eating itself to extinction before then.

The legendary egghead is one of the most prominent critics of the unrestrained development of artificial intelligence....

The legendary egghead... you have to go back in time, before the obituaries, to encounter cheeky language like that. Or, I don't know, you're getting it here, right now.

Goodbye to the legendary egghead!

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race...."

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate... Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

Said Stephen Hawking.

Danny Boyle has declined a knighthood.

He's about being "an equal citizen," he says.

Who else has declined a knighthood? Among others:

David Bowie, musician
Francis Crick, physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Michael Faraday, scientist
Albert Finney, actor
E. M. Forster, author and essayist
Michael Frayn, novelist and dramatist
John Galsworthy, playwright and novelist
Graham Greene, novelist
Stephen Hawking, scientist
David Hockney, CH, RA, artist
Aldous Huxley, author
Rudyard Kipling, author
Henry Moore, sculptor
J.B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
Paul Scofield, actor
Ralph Vaughan Williams composer
H.G. Wells, writer

Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."

The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?

Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Said Thomas Paine.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail."

"There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Says Stephen Hawking, who "lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years" and is "not afraid of death, but... in no hurry to die."

Also, from the interview, this question-and-answer that I find quite puzzling:

What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.

What "societies" does he mean? Different categories of animals, so the human beings have the highest value? Or does he mean different societies of human beings? And why is this an answer to the question asked? It has the word "value" in it, but it seems to be used  in a completely different way. I'm going to assume that Hawking, one of the smartest individuals in the world, is making sense, so help me out here. What is he saying?

ADDED: Here's my stab at it. Under Darwinism, whatever is here now is what has survived because its ancestral line was able to survive. So we can look around and see all the living things and think of them as really valuable because they are alive. That is what we know: We are here because we survived, and that's impressive. Once we understand this — why we are here — we find value in the knowledge that everyone who has made it is impressive by virtue of having made it. It's the atheist's version of This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

"You were my heart throb"/"What am I now, chopped liver?... It must have been 'Barbarella', right?"/And he typed out "yes."

When Jane Fonda met Stephen Hawking.

"I regard the afterlife as a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark."

"Vibrating strings... point particles, 2-dimensional membranes, 3-dimensional blobs and other objects that are more difficult to picture and occupy even more dimensions of space."

Not God... vibrating strings... point particles, 2-dimensional membranes, 3 -dimensional blobs and other objects that are more difficult to picture and occupy even more dimensions of space.

M-theory, Stephen Hawking says, explains how the universe came to exist.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."

Stephen Hawking warns against contacting aliens.