gladwell's back

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/12/free-fernando-v.html

I guess he had another book to do. But in new developments, the discourse level of the blogosphere has renewed somewhat to reasonable.

This one wasn't the most rabid in it's debate of his more recent fare (that would be the race and IQ debate spurred by the scientist formerly known as Watson). But in some ways it was more vivid on a political level. The nature of governmental thinking seems to be that if something has a dangerous, hazardous, or otherwise harmful use, then all it's other potential benefits or otherwise harmless uses are negated. Thus the legal backlash against medical marijuana (or just personal use of marijuana in general). HGH is not strictly speaking a 'performance enhancing' substance, but is still listed as a banned substance by MLB among other athletic institutions. I am not certain as to why this would be. It sounds to me like it's primary medicinal use for athletes is to try to recover from injuries faster. There seems to be no performance enhancing qualities according to studies and the anecdotes of players who have used it.
Yet, much as with pot by the government, baseball has quested to have HGH purged from it's players. There is legitimate complaint that the players are acquiring HGH illegally without a prescription. But to what end?
As a followup, there's another blog entry which posits a number of questions as to the ability of the testing agencies to much of anything other than track illegal non-prescriptive uses or excessive "performance enhancing" usage, done without any masking agents and without some form of medical supervision.

Moving along, Kenyan marathon runners entry was also a nice twist. A million kids running 10-12 miles per diem! We'd have to look far and wide to find that many kids running that a week in this country. I manage to run that in a week if the weather cooperates (winter not so much), but wow. No wonder they dominate long distance running. There doesn't have to be any genetic advantages at all for athletic ability when there's a pool of runners that large.

For the race and IQ debate, go: http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/(38)%20Turkheimer%20et%20al%20(2003).pdf

I like the source data, but if you're unwilling to page through it.
http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/12/race-and-iq.html
The basics are that socioeconomic factors have much larger importance at the margin, and that heredity has greater importance in the middle ground, or as one rises in social status.

I'm liking the fact that he has a large base of commentary, because there's yet another entry on FBI serial killer profiling, which I haven't finished yet.