Sheering time: Let's go hyper-local Arizona

Original post from 2010. The 2026 update follows below. 

It's that time of year again. In September, Navajo sheep herders will start coming down from the mountains north of Valley of the Sun. No doubt they're psychologically well-prepared for news of the big city:

• a broken dam due to burst bladders at Tempe Town Lake;
• $1,000,000 price on the head of Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe by the usual Mexican cartels/drug lords;
• the ever popular (no, not really, except to me and Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) AZ Senate Bill 1070 also known as Arizona Immigration Reform.

To commemorate sheep-shearing season, I have an extravaganza of gentle sheepy imagery, from a variety of sources. Well, I admit, from two sources: a Zazzle merchant and Amazon.com. The images are so nice, I thought you might enjoy looking at them too. Hmmm... I need to find a better illustration source than re-purposed advertisement images. Until such time arrives, well, if you'd be so kind and not breathe a word of this.

Cute sheep sticker

Consider this a follow-up to my earlier post about the floatingsheep blog.

Coda and update

I was young and foolish in 2010. Those Amazon links broke long ago! Today is July 9, 2026. I shall replace the Amazon ads with the delightful ruminant-themed activity of Matthew Zook. He's webmaster of the floatingsheep blog. 

Professor Zook held a class competition for Best Map featuring sheep in New York City. Very challenging, as there probably weren't any sheep, not even in Sheepshead Bay, in 2010. (Maybe a few can still be found in the most remote and exotic of New York City's five boroughs: Staten Island.)

The contest winner was Team Mutton, for their work, "Sheep of Dreams", depicting:

... the locations of seven deadly plagues affecting sheep according to an ancient prophecy. The map uses kernel density estimation, a type of spatial analysis, to show where high densities of each plague occurred in the past. These indicate the most dangerous areas for sheep! They must try to avoid them in order to survive the same plagues, as foretold, prior to the second appearance of The MUTTON.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (their motto is "Know the World, Show the Way, From Seabed to Space") could probably keep Professor Zook and his students occupied with many exciting GIS projects.

Vibe coding an IQ test using GPT5

The purpose of IQ tests is to measure cognitive ability NOT knowledge per se. Education should not be about memorizing test answers (even though it often is). The idea of IQ test prep is even worse, as it defeats the entire purpose of psychometrics; yet evidence of efforts to increase one's IQ are everywhere  online. Sometimes, it is unclear whether the goal is increasing intelligence, or just getting better IQ test results! 

After a brief peek into this world, I found myself taking a timed online IQ test developed by GPT5.

reddit brain training

reddit offers multiple subreddits for users who are intent on increasing their IQs. First, I read this morose post in r/cognitiveTesting: I took mensa's online IQ test and got 95 despite thinking all my life that Im smart: (make some allowance for English as a second language... maybe?)

Throughout all my life, I was told i was intelligent and my relatively low grades didnt reflect poor cognition but rather, laziness. In secondary school... I was painfully mediocre, bordeline on below average, though teachers said ''if you specifically study more, you'd excel'' And always coped by saying ''its because im lazy, not because im dumb;;

In reality, i was both.

Dont know how i managed to get into a good uni. At uni, Im not the perfect student and Im a bit dissatisfied that study isnt easy.  I just wish I was more intelligent

I know its mostly biological, but can i naturally increase my IQ?

redditor Yonderboy responded:

Look up quad n-back (QNB). I can’t vouch for it personally, and most people will tell you it’s not possible (without ever having tried it), but there are a few cases of people dramatically improving test scores, school performance, and subjective feelings of cognitive ability after very prolonged (> 6 months) and regular (> 3.5h/wk) QNB training.

What is N-back training?

N-back tasks are often used in psychology and cognitive neuroscience assessments to measure working memory. The n-back task consists of reading a series of letters to the test subject. The subject indicates whenever a letter repeats some number of letters previously. The n in n-back is the number of letters. n = 3 is typical.

Some redditors and, admittedly other, less unhappy people, enjoy doing n-back tasks as a game. The IQ test redditors are interested in them as a means for improving memory, memory capacity, and increasing fluid intelligence. There is scant, if any, evidence that n-back "training" has any such beneficial effects.

Dual n-back is when two n-back tasks (e.g. one auditory and one visual) are administered simultaneously. Of course, there is a subreddit devoted to that, r/DualnBack. It is easy to misread it as Dual In Back. Multiple phone apps are available for dual n-back enthusiasts.

Rare and amusing Saturday Night Live satire of Democrats

It was near the finale of the 2024 U.S. Presidential campaigning. On the last weekend before the general election, Saturday Night Live satirized the media's penchant for the Democratic National Party; or perhaps, the GOP's allegations of such.  

I was delighted that the episode included a faux David Muir, whom I perceive as a thinly-veiled version of MSNBC's Rachael Maddow. (Muir does manage to maintains his composure and admittedly, Rachael's show is intended as commentary not reporting.)  The real Muir's news delivery has a distinctive "the world is ending!" tone, which isn't modulated by the gravity, or relative lack thereof, of the content he reports. I'm not a media professional nor even much of aa viewer, so I was delighted that at least one other person, the ersatz SNL Muir parodied real Muir's genuine anchorman voice with an edge of hysteria!  

A faux Minnesota governor Tim Waltz made multiple appearances. He professed his love of fried foods and dislike for anything spicier than a tomato. 

This doesn't happen very often

The real then-Vice President and DNC general election candidate Kamala Harris made a cameo appearance toward the end. Her SNL counterpart was great, so much so, that the opening of SNL made me laugh outright!

If you pan out, they look remarkably like the real thing. 

SNL viewer reactions

Plenty of people; i.e. the masses including me; were watching by time-delay via YouTube. There were many expressions of grief and anger in the comments. Did I already mention the extreme antipathy toward Donald Trump, regularly on display in his first term?    

In case you've forgotten, or are still trying to forget, Joe Biden had an unsettling tendency to smell women's and young ladies hair.  While visiting YouTube, I realized that this should have been well-known long before Biden's tenure as  President of the United States. 

I found a very brief clip of former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He is being vigilant, shooing Joe Biden away, preventing the VP's attempt to sniff the hair of Sessions' very young granddaughter.  Democrats didn't like Sessions. They didn't like the government waste and corruption that he acted against either

Government opacity or corruption

Sessions was appointed to lead the Department of Justice during the Trump 1.0 administration. He held the position of Attorney General for less than two years. I'm still impressed with one of his lesser-known accomplishments, in support of victim and taxpayer justice.