Author: Ibrahim El Merehbi

“Smartness” and “Intelligence”

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Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids 

Mettalicity of stars

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As any student who studied a bit of chemistry knows that metals in the periodic table are various, after all the periodic table is usually taught to students as including group 1 and group 2 corresponding to alkali metals and alkaline earth metals, respectively.

Since the universe is mostly made up of hydrogen (74%) and helium (24%) [1], astronomers often refer to all the other elements we know of as “metals”. What we know about the “metallicity” is that it is tightly related to the age of the star. In other words, astronomers categorize stars into populations (I, II, III) based on their metallicities. Initially a star is born with mainly hydrogen and some helium (i.e; low metallicity). As the star burns the hydrogen, the helium gets more abundant and as the helium and hydrogen are consumed new elements (metals) are formed. So logically, young stars have low metallicities (these belong to population II) and old stars have high metallicities (population I)! Population III stars are those that have no metallicities and are yet to be discovered.

The metallicity is denoted by the letter Z as well as [Fe/He], the latter of which is read “the ratio of iron to helium” (i.e; abundance of Fe / abundance of He). For example, one of the brightest stars in our sky is Sirius, a main sequence star. It has a [Fe/He] = 0.5 [2]. It should be noted here that Z and [Fe/He] are calculated differently so they have different but correlated values, where [Fe/He] is logarithmic in that [Fe/He] = log(abundance of Fe / abundance of He)!

Below is an example of a plot of the logarithmic (base 10) abundance versus the atomic number, Z, of the elements, the latter not to be confused with metallicity, in the solar system!

Abundance of elements in the Solar system

Footnotes

[1] of all baryonic matter!
[2] The Abundance Patterns of Sirius and Vega [H. M. Qiu et al. 2001] doi:10.1086/319000

Debt and talented people

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I was just reading “The Way of No Debt” [1] by Leo Babauta, and having been following his posts and reading most of them since a year of so ago, I see in this post further evidence to my thinking that people are not born superior to others, in the intellectual sense, (i.e; geniuses) but are turned into or turn themselves into such superior humans. It’s further evidence that they become like such due to adequate and conscious nurture and, of course, dedication, hard work, and persistence.

What made me make a connection between this thought about the superior humans, or as many call them “geniuses” or “talented”, and Leo is that this post of his [1] made me think of the situation he was in. He definitely was not happy or positive and he surely was in pain. One could only imagine being in such a situation, but dealing with it is just another matter.

I am also reminded of a video I watched earlier today about “Avoiding Career Obsolescence” that mentions the “talented” students issue. It might help convey my message [2].

“…the talent is the province exceptional people doing exceptional things.
We can recognize the talented lady Gaga or Roger Federer but not the talent of a cook at a local coffee shop who day in day out prepares delicious meals for the patron…

…this perverse view of talent begins very early in our lives.
it begins in elementary school when we give a test to kids and we designate one small group who score high on that test as gifted and talented which means by definition that every other child is un-gifted and untalented…

…now of course we want to do whatever we can to take care of our kids that are academically proficient but we have to find a way to do that without signaling to every other child that they were at the anvil wine when talent was handed out because nothing could be further from the truth. You see talent isn’t a skill, it isn’t a competency. Talent is the capacity for excellence and it is an attribute [characteristic] of our species…”*

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[1] http://zenhabits.net/no-debt
[2] http://youtu.be/NSNIIsmbKIk?t=7m15s
* square brackets are my emphasis

“If you continuously compete with others…

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“If you continuously compete with others, you become bitter, but if you continuously compete with yourself, you become better.”

OpenDNS: Parental control and internet protection

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I have been searching for a way to filter out inappropriate internet content. I thought one time that a tool (something like iptables) must exist that has an index of such sites and their IP’s which can be used to filter them out or block them. I thought maybe one could use such an index if it exists to feed it to a modem or router and have the modem/router do the job. Unfortunately this is not possible. Actually any modem or router has the ability to block and allow certain domains but that would require the manual labor of entering each specific domain, which is inefficient in any case.

After some searching I found out about something called OpenDNS and FamilySield. It turned out that OpenDNS is actually what I have been looking for. It does everything I was thinking of and even more. So hereafter, I “outline” the four main steps to get OpenDNS working on your network hoping that this might actually be of use to you. Continue reading