You just don’t.  Nobody does.

People like to speculate on the IQ of various celebrities. A popular one recently was Sarah Palin (“likely somewhere between 110 and 115“).  We may also have “learned” that Beyonce’s IQ is 124 (or is it 110?) And nobody can agree on Einstein’s putative IQ, except that it was somewhere between “only” 160 and 250 or more.

Online, I’ve seen the same group of nerds who enjoy self-diagnosing Asperger’s report their IQ scores as 180 or more (200 is a popular number).  There are two possible reasons a person might say this:

1. They took some fake test on the web.
2. They are making it up.

Whatever you happen to think about the intrinsic worth and predictive ability of psychometrics, real IQ tests are based on math.  The math expresses how many other people in their sample population achieved the same raw score that you did, by percentile.  Ideally, this sample group is a cross-section of the population that’s representative of the subject’s environment.

The most popular and reliable IQ test for adults is the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, or WAIS, now in its fourth edition.  It was normalized against a sample of 2,200 adults.  Keep that number in mind.

This graph should be familiar to most people.  It’s a Gaussian curve, or normal distribution, of performance on a properly normalized IQ test like the WAIS.  Each color change represents one additional standard deviation from the mean.

It’s instructive to look really closely:

Each standard deviation in the WAIS is 15 IQ points further from the mean of 100. Because performance is normalized, only 0.27% of those taking the test are expected to fall outside of 3 standard deviations — in the WAIS this translates to scores above 145 and below 55.

If you take the WAIS and achieve a raw score comparable to only the top 0.135% of the original sample of 2,200, it means your performance is measured relative to 3 people.   Score 4 standard deviations above the mean (IQ >= 160) and you’re being compared to just 0.065 other geniuses.  In other words, it’s highly likely that no one in the WAIS sample scored as high as you.  Congratulations, you are “only” as smart as the lowest estimated IQ of Albert Einstein.

Above (or below) a certain threshold, IQ performance is simply noise.  If you extrapolated all the way to IQ 200 (and if you were that smart, you understand why you can’t), you’re scoring a whopping 6 standard deviations above the mean and will have to look elsewhere for your intellectual equals.  Since 99.9999998027% of a normally-distributed group falls within 6 standard deviations, the number of members of your uber-Mensa is 6.  In the entire world.

The fact is, most adults simply do not know their IQ.  Bright children are rarely tested as a matter of course (although some private schools do it).  In general, a child is given an IQ test when their school record is lacking, usually because there’s a disparity in expected versus actual performance.  IQ testing is a good way to reveal that an otherwise smart kid has a particular learning disability.  Psychologists typically do not care whether your IQ is 130 or 145.  They want to know if your non-verbal IQ is high but your reading score is below-average; you may have dyslexia and need special educational strategies to succeed.

But the real benefit of IQ is knowing that when someone quotes you a number and it’s greater than 145, it’s safe to assume they’re not as smart as you.

I have a feeling that these are some of the last of the good books in my haul from ALA, but I plan to dig through the pile once more and survey the wreckage.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

This is a young adult novel being marketed as adult fiction, but that’s no complaint. It’s a hugely fun book and I’m glad I read it. I’m sure the film rights have been snapped up already.

Kids rarely want to read about other kids their own age (most “teen” books are read by precocious 10-12 year-olds). In this case, the main character is twelve but much of the plot might be lost on children younger than that, so I’m not sure what age I’d recommend it for. Probably I am being a stuffy grownup; my favorite book when I was 12 was 1984.

Anyway, most stuffy grownups with affection towards adventure stories will enjoy this too. It’s well-written with memorable characters and a satisfying fable-like ending.

The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan

It takes a certain dedication to read a 600-page historical novel about India from a first author with no reviews or even a back-cover blurb as a guide, but I have that moral fortitude. Also if I hadn’t liked it after 20-some pages I would’ve given up. I liked it, so I finished it.

The inter-generational story is sprawling, slow at times, and messy — all in an appealing way. It opens in 1896 and marches on through the years. Without a synopsis I didn’t know how far into the future it would progress, which lent a nice tension. Although there are characters who strive for modernity — especially those appearing after the 1930s — none felt anachronistic. In fact, I spent a lot of time wanting to slap some sense into these people. But when it was over I was sad to leave them behind.

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

I think that I like historical fiction, but maybe I really don’t. There are a number of things that are almost inevitably true in historical fiction that drive me absolutely up the wall:

• There’s always a character (often the protagonist) who is wise beyond his time period
• Someone famous wanders through the plot, no matter how improbably
• No one really sounds like they’re actually from the period in which they’re living

The Black Tower is about an amazingly prescient proto-detective and his amazingly prescient doctor sidekick who uncover a plot to kill Louis XVII of France, who had been presumed to have died in prison during the Revolution. I enjoyed it in a goofy way for awhile before it totally went off the rails.

One of the reasons I liked The 19th Wife was that the author took pains to make the first-person historical narrative feel like it was contemporary to the period. Having a real contemporary account to base it on certainly must’ve helped. I can’t say the same for Bayard, but if you’re on vacation and have a thing for French history (and no hangups on historical accuracy), you might enjoy it.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

I just now skimmed through some reviews in the mainstream press and most of them
begin like this one in the New York Times: “I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome.”

I thought this historical fiction novel was great.

The writing is bleakly funny and totally appropriate for a story about a starving city full of cannibals. While I don’t know anything at all about Russia or Russians, I believed that the characters might have existed and might’ve talked like that. The level of detail — real or imagined — felt perfect. Nobody famous blunders into the story; presumably Stalin had already purged them.

I had only one complaint, also mentioned by several reviewers, about the ending being too pat, but it’s forgivable. Highly recommended.

I’m not sure what it says about my state of mind or the global economy but I immediately followed this with The Road by Cormac MacCarthy, which I bought on my Kindle. This was my honeymoon vacation reading.

(NPR has excerpted the first chapter of City of Thieves, although this part is literally like none other in the book, as the entire remainder of the story is told in the past.)

Chairs 2, originally uploaded by liza31337.

We didn’t stay here during All Tomorrow’s Parties, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.

Tickets for next year are on sale already, same great location!

This was a pre-release copy but the book had come out by the time I read it, so I already knew it had gotten good reviews. It’s one of those parallel-stories-separated-in-time novels, and as is often the case the best parts are the historical fiction. Ebershoff fictionalizes an actual 19th century memoir with the much-superior title, Wife no.19, or the story of a life in bondage. Being a complete exposé of Mormonism, and revealing the sorrows, sacrifices and sufferings of women in polygamy. At least I don’t have to explain the plot.

Anyway, I recommend it. Don’t read it if you’re a woman and have recently been dicked over by a guy, though. Especially if you own a weapon.

In my free book feeding frenzy I picked up a few young adult novels without realizing it. I decided to give this one a chance because it was British and therefore automatically more interesting (also it had originally been published by Oxford University Press, which I flatter myself by thinking is a mark of quality).

Despite the goofy title, as a suspense novel it’s not bad. There are some genuinely creepy scenes. I can imagine that a young adult suspense story is likely to be superior to one for adults because the prose is necessarily more clear and events move along at a good clip.

The problem is that like any number of other horror, fantasy or science fiction books with wildly inexplicable happenings, it doesn’t actually resolve to any conclusion. The open-ended “I guess we’ll never know what really happened” ending is okay for high school creative writing classes but it just does not cut it in published fiction. Authors: if you don’t know how your story ends, figure that out before you write the book.

A bigger surprise than the ooh-so-mysterious ending is that the UK cover is, for once, far inferior. Those fonts, they burn!

The world’s best, easiest chicken stock:

1. Buy a slow-cooker and a whole duck

2. Tear apart duck

4. Put duck and 1.5 quarts water in slow-cooker

5. Set slow-cooker to 6 hours

We supplement the dog’s kibble with shredded duck (she seems to have a bad reaction to chicken) so I hit on this as the laziest way to prepare it.  It turns out that the (essentially leftover) cooking water is far and away the best “chicken” stock I’ve ever made, and I’ve made some pretty elaborate recipes.  If I happen to have random vegetables like carrots and celery around I’ll throw them in, but it really doesn’t matter.

You can strain or clarify it if you like (I don’t bother), but de-fatting it is trivial: just freeze it and scoop off the solid fat later. I have completely given up buying prepared stock now.

My most exciting personal development at the American Library Association conference was shipping back two huge boxes of free books. I learned from various attendees that running around the expo floor madly grabbing freebies is a sure sign of a publishing conference newbie and even a little bit gauche, but hey, nobody was reimbursing me more than $1000 in conference and travel fees.  Gimme my damn free books.

After the initial rush I felt silly shipping back all these books that, as one librarian said, “nobody ever reads,” so I’m going to make an effort to at least give all of them a chapter’s worth of a chance. There are 26 books in total.

The big score of the conference was a pre-release copy of the new Neal Stephenson, Anathem:

Spoiler-free summary: it’s good. I didn’t read the Baroque Cycle because I was waiting to find out if I’d like it, and I’m told I wouldn’t. I enjoyed Anathem though. So did Dan, although we liked different parts in different measures. It comes with a CD of various styles of chant, and while I like my music slow, repetitive and hypnotic, I had to rip it out of the player after track 3 to avoid escalating hostility.

If you already know you will read this then you’ll probably like it, and if you enjoy math and physics — well, then you would’ve read it anyway. I’m not sure if anyone who wasn’t already a nerd would be into it, although it might be possible to make it into a decent popular film.

I don’t like fantasy as a rule, but The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss had some pretty enthusiastic reviews on the back (“One of the best stories told in any medium in a decade” the Onion AV Club, wrote, breathlessly).

It’s… okay. It’s part one of three and pretty much stops rather than ends. Without giving away too much of the plot, I will say that it about a talented orphan boy at a boarding school for students of magic where he must use his skills to battle evil. Quite.

It’s actually not much like the Harry Potter novels, in fact, but a set-up like that is going to invite comparisons. The writing is pretty good. There aren’t any names with apostrophes in them. I’ll read the other two books in the series when they came out. I’ll probably even pay for them.

A victory for free content: positive advance word on a new book and two future sales in a series I’d have never read.

Dan and I got married.  It was a pretty awesome party. I’m sorry we couldn’t invite all of our friends and family, but I’m thrilled that those who did come made it a great night.

I didn’t take enough photos so please post yours if you get the chance.  Some of these are more blurry than I would normally share (it was really dark in there) but I didn’t have a lot to choose from.

More tagged as dfalywedding on Flickr.

Today I got a package from O’Reilly containing Essential SQLAlchemy, for which I did a technical edit.  I remembered that much, because I got a nice check from them, but I forgot that I’d also been asked to provide a quote for the back of the book.  Too bad that was before I started my own gig:

What better thing to do on a weekend of highs around 100F than spend time outside on the porch planting things?

This year’s haul:

• Basil (sweet, purple, Thai)
• Thyme (common)
• Oregano (Greek, hot)
• Lettuce (Romaine, two curly varieties)
• Mint
• Cilantro
• 2 tomatoes (Sunbrite)
• Lavender
• Rosemary
• Variegated sage

The lettuce was started back in April and won’t last much longer (I already pulled some of it to make room for basil). I’m not sure what I’ll do with the remaining space — maybe some late-season strawberries?