Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

navy seals

Parnental involvement of almost any + kind increases mental acuity.  

I take pride in the fact that I still learn how to get places and once I've been there (sometimes once, sometimes it takes a few) I can navigate just fine w/o GPS. I used to have to travel to Colorado frequently for work, and if I could get through an entire trip, seeing multiple customers, w/o GPS I was happy.

I've told this story before, but per your football story I have to recount the 2001 Rose Bowl. I moved to CA literally that week. As in arrived in San Jose, dropped all my stuff in a storage unit b/c I couldn't get into my apartment for another week, and then drove down the 101 to meet up with buddies for the game. I think I had bought a CA map (that didn't show anything more detailed than major highways), didn't have a cellphone, and had never been to SoCal and was meeting people who had never been to SoCal.

I managed to drive down there, locate my buddies based on calling (from a payphone) the one person in the group who had a cellphone, and found them off Wilshire Blvd in LA.

I don't think anyone under the age of 35 could accomplish this today lol ;-)

I have a story somewhat similar to your RoseBowl story:
This was the 1996 season, 1997 RoseBowl:
First, understand that while it is easy to think #helmetschoolproblems, understand that after going to four straight RoseBowls from the 1972-1975 seasons the Buckeyes only went to two in the 20 seasons from 1976-1995 and they lost both (1979/80 and 1984/85 both to USC).

I was born in 1975 and in college in 1996 and I had only a vague memory of watching the Buckeyes in the 1984/85 RoseBowl when I was nine and no recollection whatsoever of the 1979/80 or 1975/76 games. Ie, this was a BIG deal to us.

We lucked into phenomenal seats. A friend of my dad was a salesman and he had a salesman friend who was based in California and lived in Pasadena. This friend of a friend was a member of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce which is the organization that sponsors the RoseBowl. We got 50 Yard line tickets about ten rows off the field for my dad, mom, brother, and I.

The complication was that he couldn't just flip the tickets to us online like today, we had to get the physical tickets from him in California. My dad was a nervous wreck most of the trio out because he didn't know this guy from Adam and we had to find him and get the tickets AFTER driving 2,000+ miles to get to LA.

When we got to Pasadena we stopped at a bar to use a payphone and called him. He asked where we were, knew the place, and came there to give us our tickets.

It was a great family trip and hanging over my head in my office as I type this is a picture frame that my dad made with an Ohio State logo, my RoseBowl ticket, and a picture of the four of us under the RoseBowl scoreboard reading 00:00, ASU 17, tOSU 20.

Included in better nutrition is more diverse nutrition.  Go back 100 years, and you ate what you grew/raised.  Now, you can eat everything and you can eat it year-round.  We're not limited by seasonality.  That's huge.

I hate that people study for the SAT.  

Related to this talk about nutrition and @betarhoalphadelta comment about height.


When I was at Ohio State I took a fascinating course called Economic History. The Professor along with two partners (Harvard and somewhere out West) were apparently the world's leading experts at evaluating the relative wealth of historical civilizations based on their heights.

To do this they generally ignored females due to a lack of sufficient reliable records but were able to get enough accurate male height records even for some ancient civilizations from military records kept about recruits.

When one person is tall or short that is anecdotal and doesn't tell us anything about their childhood nutrition because individuals vary widely for lots of reasons. OTOH, when a civilization has lots of tall guys, they are eating well in childhood.

Yep. And if you compare North Korea vs South Korea, the average male height in South Korea is about 13 cm--over 5 inches(!)--taller, despite the fact that from an ethnic perspective there should be no difference between them. Yet the difference is huge.

So I suspect that a very big portion of the 20th century rise in IQ was nutritional. 

Yep. And if you compare North Korea vs South Korea, the average male height in South Korea is about 13 cm--over 5 inches(!)--taller, despite the fact that from an ethnic perspective there should be no difference between them. Yet the difference is huge.

So I suspect that a very big portion of the 20th century rise in IQ was nutritional.

So, taller folks are smarter?