Rock, apparently, is not a synonym for stone. Now, I know a lot of words, and the definitions to most of them, but I went a little over three decades before I encountered this geological distinction in an anecdote that Barry Lopez shares in his book Horizon—a distinction that he, too, missed for years. A rock is still what you would expect. The hard stuff made of minerals. A stone, however, is a rock that has been modified in some way for human use. Crushed for gravel, shaped for a cornerstone, knapped into an arrowhead. I guess that means that rocks belong to geologists, and stones to archaeologists*.
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An article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the fallacy of IQ testing got me thinking of the way we measure intelligence, and perhaps more importantly, stupidity. What do those terms even mean? Can we come up with a useful heuristic for determining where people fit? And even if we can, do we need to? How do we manage our decisions with regards to spotting and dealing with the stupid and the smart?
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