I Am Very Tall

Ok, back from Turkey, Taiwan, San Francisco, and Mexico. It's been a long trip. I'm sure all of you missed me dearly. Thanks to Pudge, here's some material from the Economist. In short, it argues that beauty (or it's scientific proxy, symmetry) can be a marker for "other, underlying characteristics such as health, good genes, and intelligence." Here's the bigger quote:

'... three researchers correlated people's bodily symmetry with their performance on intelligence tests. Such tests come in many varieties, of course, and have a controversial background. But most workers in the field agree that there is a quality, normally referred to as “general intelligence”, or “g”, that such tests can measure objectively along with specific abilities in such areas as spatial awareness and language. Dr Miller and his colleagues found that the more a test was designed to measure g, the more the results were correlated with bodily symmetry—particularly in the bottom half of the beauty-ugliness spectrum.'

I have two responses to this (if it's true, of which I'm somewhat skeptical). First, if this is true, then it must really, really suck to be ugly. The second one would be to wonder why this didn't seem to make much of an impact at my school/workplace.