I agree that part of learning to be a scholar is learning to use the tools of the scholar. But at the time the online tools of the scholar were developed, librarians were thinking in terms of replicating a paper system, not making the best possible use of the digital world.
IANALibrarian, but I worked as a cataloger and cataloger team lead in the early '90s, entering card catalogs, books, and other media into online databases for a vendor that serviced libraries. Many of the people I supervised or worked beside held or were seeking their MLS degrees, and at the time cataloging was respected among librarians as perhaps the most technically demanding part of their degree. I was informed last year by a librarian/cataloger colleague that the curent tendency is more and more to outsource cataloging to highly trained non-librarians, and that schools are starting to drop cataloging as a requirement to obtain a library science degree.
While there, I participated in a brainstorming session developing new services for libraries, and improving information accessibility (this was 1992). Among the suggestions given were scanning books, creating new ways of searching for data, creating new interfaces, allowing searches outside the library itself, and many more. Anything involving redesigning presentation of cataloging data was shot down because "people are used to the card catalog system." The idea that new users might want a different way, or that old users might profit by an improved approach and embrace it, was not supported.
The problem lies in the fact that librarians tend to categorize within existing systems. Even librarians who have migrated into the web world do this. I sat on a meeting discussing user interface for a personalized telecommunications site, and two people actually argued that the user interface should be identical to the directories storing the content. Those two were the sole librarians on the team, and the rest of us had to explain that the core concept of personalization (and indeed a major strength of the internet) is that content can be presented effectively in a broad variety of ways. One of them continued to resist, nonetheless, not comprehending that the architecture taxonomy did not need to equal the UI taxonomy (although of course it affected what was possible).
I agree wholeheartedly that learning to use library tools is part of learning to be a scholar. I think librarians serve an invaluable purpose. But I do think there is a hidebound tendency, which is being shown in the tendency to diminish the emphasis on online technical competency (not requiring cataloging for MLS degrees) and the tendency to dismiss the potential for improved interfaces out of hand.
Faraday knew how to talk to these people. Asked by the Minister of the Exchequer why pure research should be funded, he responded, "Who knows, Sir, but that someday you may be able to tax it."
You're absolutely right about the SSC. I know a dozen physicists who lost not only that job but their research careers because of the closing of that project. One of them told me that the moment the funding was stopped, CERN put in a hiring freeze for several years so they wouldn't have to deal with the influx of applications. Perfectly good physicists ended up teaching at local community colleges. I was studying physics at the time, and it certainly ended my desire to pursue a physics career in the U.S.
Yes, I finally understand now: Windows was the reason for that, not John Roth, et. al.'s, greed and poor management. And then that bastard ran off with over $300 million while 60,000 people lost their jobs.
Although from my limited perspective, the move away from Mac to Windows may have been symptomatic of the bad management.
Actually, it may still have been Northern Telecom at the time. With the exception of some Sun servers, I worked on Macs at Nortel from April 1995 until late 1997, when Nortel migrated nearly completely from Mac to Windows. So, thousands of computers, nearly 100% of a worldwide company, and it worked for years.
Using Macs, support was easy. We used Timbuktu for remote desktop access, and very rarely had networking problems. There were fewer crashes, etc., and when there was a problem it was typically a "how do I do this?" kind of thing. I was told (don't know for sure) that the decision to go with Microsoft was to open up the number of useful apps, and to prevent problems with incompatible files with partner companies, which primarily used Microsoft. At that time, files saved on a Mac did not necessarily open in the same application on a Windows box; they had to be saved as the "Windows" version.
Once the switch was made, my life immediately became more difficult. The percentage of problem caused by software and the computer increased dramatically. When I heard the change was going to happen I started tracking the problems I encountered, and the ratio was about 1 software-caused incident for every 5 or 6 ignorance-caused calls. This ratio changed to about 4 software-caused incidents to every one ignorance-caused incident; and since the ignorance-related calls did not decrease, you can guess my life was much busier.
Some years later (2003) I supported a small (about 50 boxes) terminal server network that had everything connected from Windows 3.1 - XP Professional and Mac OS 9 & X. Again, the Windows machines were much more likely to have software problems.
My point is that I've seen successful enterprise use of Macs, and I've seen large migrations from one to the other. This was long ago, before all the improvements in networking on both sides. So I see nothing against a Windows --> Mac migration. But I don't know that it's necessarily the best choice for everyone. The advantages or disadvantages, I think, would depend on the company in question, and their specific application requirements.
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot
be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be
put at all, then it can also be answered.
It's his birthday and this quote popped up. The logic of it threatens to actually change my mind;-)
Thought you'd be interested.
Well, while we might disagree about human capability and tools, we're both working in the same direction. And no one would be happier than I to be proven wrong:-)
I think you may misunderstand me. I do think we can and should attempt to understand the universe; it's been a goal for me since 1972, so I'm fairly invested in it. But I also understand that the attempt is being made with a primate brain and the tools that brain developed; that it's being made with the perception I'm capable of imaging within that brain; that it's being made within the dimensions and time I'm capable of perceiving and imagining. I've studied my history of science, and I've migrated from studying the universe to studying the brain we perceive it with. I know how subjective we are even when we do our best to avoid it. I'm not so arrogant as to think I can prove the universe works a specific way, although I've come up with plenty of approaches that explain everything I know. But I can't step outside the 'verse to test them. No human can be a human and know, we can only make a best guess.
The cult comment was hyperbole, and sort of an "in" joke—at the Superconducting SuperCollider (where I hasten to add I was not a physicist, just a student who dated one), there were various hypotheses about what future generations would make of the eleven-mile hole in the ground that came to naught, and some kind of nonsensical religious edifice was one conjecture, which of course led to quantum physicists as a kind of cult.
Yep, we're clueless. Like asking fish to explain water, except we're even more challenged.
The idea that any of us might see behind the face of the clock. I think it's worth trying (got to understand the playing field to play the game properly), but I think it's madness to actually believe we'll accomplish some unified, holistic understanding.
I predict a thousand years from now people will regard the quantum physics community as a cult, in much the same way we view Aztecs and their sacrifices. "It's quite mad, but it was their culture at the time."
A good point (and I agree. QP is like Ptolemy's epicycles; more and more unwieldy complexity, despite simpler explanations being available that meet the facts).
However, I see Occam referenced a lot on slashdot, and almost no one ever mentions that there are many anti-razors created in response to Occam's approach. Occam is a good decision-making tool, but not a universal truth. An anti-razor that a QP supporter might use would be, "Entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy," and also, "It is vain to do with fewer what requires more."
A funny one we might use in response to those is Crabtree's Bludgeon, which states: "No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated."
Quantum mechanics shows behavior that is counter-intuitive because it displays faster-than-light knowledge transfer, seems to imply reality is created by observation, etc. Most physicists believe there are local hidden variables which make sense of this: reality behind-the-scenes, making sense of what we perceive as nonsensical. Einstein, among others, believed in this kind of local realism.
John Bell predicted, decades ago, that "No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics." This was an important insight. He derived a mathematical prediction (Bell's inequality), which has been refined by others over the years, which if violated would confirm his prediction, potentially confounding those who expect reality to behave in a sensible manner.
Alain Aspect and others have violated Bell's and similar inequalities in various experiments. While some researchers think this makes nonsense of quantum theory, others have proposed theories which actually manage to "marry" the two concepts of quantum theory and local realism. The "many worlds" and "holographic universe" concepts, for example, not only allow for each other but also incorporate both realism and the seeming insanity of quantum mechanics.
Actually, there was a recent article in either New Scientist or The Scientist (can't recall which) that discussed the possibility that laws are evolving over time, meaning they may be changing in response to deeper laws. Very bizarre stuff.
On-topic: Einstein thought Bohm was on the right track, and a significant but small group of other physicists do as well. Additionally, Bohm literally wrote the book on quantum mechanics; his textbook in the field is a classic. But like Pauli, he wrote exceptionally well about something he thought was wrong. (Pauli had a very provocative comment about reality: "There must be something else. I think I know what is coming. I know it exactly. But I don't tell it to others. They may think I am mad. So I am doing five dimensional theory of relativity although I don't really believe in it. But I know what is coming. Perhaps I will tell you some time." Of course he never told us, though he might have told Jung.)
A note: Alain Aspect, the physicist questioning the interpretations of the results, did research in the same area in the early '80s that Bohm took to be supportive, and which was one of the many research directions that prompted Michael Talbot to write The Holographic Universe.
Off-topic but related: A question for others who have had stories accepted on/. I wrote a very different intro than the above, and while I'm happy they gave me credit for the story, I'm a bit taken aback by the writing being attributed to me. Anyone else encounter this?
Many women do want to sign up, but are put off by the thought they will be discriminated against. Whether the discrimination happens or not is beside the point; the issue is perception. Active recruitment helps dispel that for those interested, but nervous.
I suppose it depends on the company and the service, but I've had quite the opposite experience. Most of my customers were not lying. But the majority had difficulty telling me the relevant information because they simply didn't know enough to know what to tell. But that was my job, to figure out what might be happening and get them to tell me what I needed to know to fix it, or walk them through fixing it.
What frustrates me are the tech support people who think every problem is the same and should be treated identically. I guess it's easy to do, we diagnose a lot and we've see a lot of repetition, but there's nothing worse than a doctor who's only as good as his last diagnosis. There's an art to troubleshooting. If you're not tied to a script by your employer, thirty seconds of investigation is much better than a knee-jerk, "Clear your cache."
--
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
He might not have said it, but there is the strong possibility *some* of our neurons use quantum-level behavior, which rather expands the traditional neurotransmitters + electrical signaling model for neural activity. In 1996 biophysicist Luca Turin suggested electron tunnelling as a solution for the mystery of olfactory receptors can interpret similar molecules differently, and very different molecules the same. No one had a useful explanation for this issue until Turin, and he was of course dismissed by most neuroscientists, who are educated and work in macro-, not quantum-, level models.
Last year some other physicists released research in Nature that showed Turin may be right*, and olfactory neurons may indeed use electron tunnelling. Research is ongoing, but given the lack of alternative explanations, this may be an example of humans requiring a quantum mechanism for something very basic - scent.
* Free registration required for physicsweb.org access.
--
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. —Thomas Huxley
Oh, I totally agree! Perhaps I'm rationalizing in exactly the way I described, but I think it's being "us" not "them" that made the whiz thing apparent to me. I've been introduced to one too many of "them" that had been described as a whiz and was sadly disappointed....
Here's a perspective that brought me up short: I have a cousin who specializes in teach "gifted" high school students. She was talking about how fascinating it was to her, and used this explanation to make the difference clear: as different as a "normal" person's mental understanding is to someone mentally challenged, that's how different high intelligence is from the norm. So above 4 or so standard deviations, it becomes difficult to make distinctions in intelligence, and even to describe what's happening in an individual's head; as difficult as imagining what's happening in a person with an IQ of 40 or below. She was talking at a party and I was just listening in, and suddenly I understood why I always felt alone in the crowd.
So I've just given up trying to guess who will or won't understand a thing, and just try to do my best not to scare the normals;-)
even in the computer professional world I've met many "whizzes" not much more intelligent about what computers are and how they work
The definition of a "whiz" seems to be "anyone who knows more than I do." Partly this is because people don't understand the subject, but I think mostly it's to bolster our own egos. If the person who knows more is some kind of guru, it's ok that they know more; but if they're just someone who delved a little deeper and perhaps read a few books it casts the know-less/know-nothings in a bad light.
Which reminds me of the old joke: If you were walking beside Einstein (or Newton, or da Vinci, or Goethe) and he suddenly doubled his intelligence, how would you know?
--
Know Less knew no lore;
Picked up a book, began to pore.
Know less, no more.
Yes, of course. There's a reason Michael Kamen did Symphony & Metallica. Personally, I think Grieg would've been a head-banger if he'd been born a little later;-)
Interesting you point that out; I think it's all dependent on the preferred coping method of the autistic-spectrum person in question. As an autistic person and someone who's also worked as a therapist with autistic toddlers, I can tell you this tendency is not an across-the-board rule.
The stress of autism is largely an inability to screen out sensory input - you can think of it conceptually as a complete lack or very, very low level of latent inhibition (think River Tam's stripped amygdala in Serenity). (That's certainly not all autism is, but it's a definite side-effect.) But sometimes an increase in one area allows temporary relief in others. For example, the autistic child who can't bear wool because of the multiple brushing of hairs against skin may be able to relax under the strong, steady pressure of some heavy weight (I used to crawl under my mattress; Temple Grandin made herself a "hug" machine). Likewise, the autistic person who is maddened by all the different levels of ambient sound may find relief in a loud, complex, rhythmic music that engages their brain and auditory system more fully. Some heavy metal (not all) will do that for me, among other genres of music.
Another thing I experience - and I don't know if this is autistic or synesthetic or both or just weird - but there is some music that I feel throughout my body, where the notes are felt not only in aurally but in very specific places on my body, typically along my spine or parts of my head, but sometimes in my limbs. It's not the vibration, because it's location-specific and can happen at low volumes with some music, while other music doesn't do it at all no matter how loud it is. It's like my skin has a map of different notes, and some songs turn this on. Anyone else get that?
This makes perfect sense in light of the above research;-) Going faster than light, the dupe naturally went back in time and displaced the original; conservation of time then displaced the original into the dupe's niche. The real question is how the dupe managed to slingshot around the sun to achieve the FTL speed....
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that part of learning to be a scholar is learning to use the tools of the scholar. But at the time the online tools of the scholar were developed, librarians were thinking in terms of replicating a paper system, not making the best possible use of the digital world.
IANALibrarian, but I worked as a cataloger and cataloger team lead in the early '90s, entering card catalogs, books, and other media into online databases for a vendor that serviced libraries. Many of the people I supervised or worked beside held or were seeking their MLS degrees, and at the time cataloging was respected among librarians as perhaps the most technically demanding part of their degree. I was informed last year by a librarian/cataloger colleague that the curent tendency is more and more to outsource cataloging to highly trained non-librarians, and that schools are starting to drop cataloging as a requirement to obtain a library science degree.
While there, I participated in a brainstorming session developing new services for libraries, and improving information accessibility (this was 1992). Among the suggestions given were scanning books, creating new ways of searching for data, creating new interfaces, allowing searches outside the library itself, and many more. Anything involving redesigning presentation of cataloging data was shot down because "people are used to the card catalog system." The idea that new users might want a different way, or that old users might profit by an improved approach and embrace it, was not supported.
The problem lies in the fact that librarians tend to categorize within existing systems. Even librarians who have migrated into the web world do this. I sat on a meeting discussing user interface for a personalized telecommunications site, and two people actually argued that the user interface should be identical to the directories storing the content. Those two were the sole librarians on the team, and the rest of us had to explain that the core concept of personalization (and indeed a major strength of the internet) is that content can be presented effectively in a broad variety of ways. One of them continued to resist, nonetheless, not comprehending that the architecture taxonomy did not need to equal the UI taxonomy (although of course it affected what was possible).
I agree wholeheartedly that learning to use library tools is part of learning to be a scholar. I think librarians serve an invaluable purpose. But I do think there is a hidebound tendency, which is being shown in the tendency to diminish the emphasis on online technical competency (not requiring cataloging for MLS degrees) and the tendency to dismiss the potential for improved interfaces out of hand.
Faraday knew how to talk to these people. Asked by the Minister of the Exchequer why pure research should be funded, he responded, "Who knows, Sir, but that someday you may be able to tax it."
You're absolutely right about the SSC. I know a dozen physicists who lost not only that job but their research careers because of the closing of that project. One of them told me that the moment the funding was stopped, CERN put in a hiring freeze for several years so they wouldn't have to deal with the influx of applications. Perfectly good physicists ended up teaching at local community colleges. I was studying physics at the time, and it certainly ended my desire to pursue a physics career in the U.S.
Yes, I finally understand now: Windows was the reason for that, not John Roth, et. al.'s, greed and poor management. And then that bastard ran off with over $300 million while 60,000 people lost their jobs.
Although from my limited perspective, the move away from Mac to Windows may have been symptomatic of the bad management.
Actually, it may still have been Northern Telecom at the time. With the exception of some Sun servers, I worked on Macs at Nortel from April 1995 until late 1997, when Nortel migrated nearly completely from Mac to Windows. So, thousands of computers, nearly 100% of a worldwide company, and it worked for years.
Using Macs, support was easy. We used Timbuktu for remote desktop access, and very rarely had networking problems. There were fewer crashes, etc., and when there was a problem it was typically a "how do I do this?" kind of thing. I was told (don't know for sure) that the decision to go with Microsoft was to open up the number of useful apps, and to prevent problems with incompatible files with partner companies, which primarily used Microsoft. At that time, files saved on a Mac did not necessarily open in the same application on a Windows box; they had to be saved as the "Windows" version.
Once the switch was made, my life immediately became more difficult. The percentage of problem caused by software and the computer increased dramatically. When I heard the change was going to happen I started tracking the problems I encountered, and the ratio was about 1 software-caused incident for every 5 or 6 ignorance-caused calls. This ratio changed to about 4 software-caused incidents to every one ignorance-caused incident; and since the ignorance-related calls did not decrease, you can guess my life was much busier.
Some years later (2003) I supported a small (about 50 boxes) terminal server network that had everything connected from Windows 3.1 - XP Professional and Mac OS 9 & X. Again, the Windows machines were much more likely to have software problems.
My point is that I've seen successful enterprise use of Macs, and I've seen large migrations from one to the other. This was long ago, before all the improvements in networking on both sides. So I see nothing against a Windows --> Mac migration. But I don't know that it's necessarily the best choice for everyone. The advantages or disadvantages, I think, would depend on the company in question, and their specific application requirements.
Glad it was helpful :-)
Well, while we might disagree about human capability and tools, we're both working in the same direction. And no one would be happier than I to be proven wrong :-)
I think you may misunderstand me. I do think we can and should attempt to understand the universe; it's been a goal for me since 1972, so I'm fairly invested in it. But I also understand that the attempt is being made with a primate brain and the tools that brain developed; that it's being made with the perception I'm capable of imaging within that brain; that it's being made within the dimensions and time I'm capable of perceiving and imagining. I've studied my history of science, and I've migrated from studying the universe to studying the brain we perceive it with. I know how subjective we are even when we do our best to avoid it. I'm not so arrogant as to think I can prove the universe works a specific way, although I've come up with plenty of approaches that explain everything I know. But I can't step outside the 'verse to test them. No human can be a human and know, we can only make a best guess.
The cult comment was hyperbole, and sort of an "in" joke—at the Superconducting SuperCollider (where I hasten to add I was not a physicist, just a student who dated one), there were various hypotheses about what future generations would make of the eleven-mile hole in the ground that came to naught, and some kind of nonsensical religious edifice was one conjecture, which of course led to quantum physicists as a kind of cult.
Yep, we're clueless. Like asking fish to explain water, except we're even more challenged.
The idea that any of us might see behind the face of the clock. I think it's worth trying (got to understand the playing field to play the game properly), but I think it's madness to actually believe we'll accomplish some unified, holistic understanding.
I predict a thousand years from now people will regard the quantum physics community as a cult, in much the same way we view Aztecs and their sacrifices. "It's quite mad, but it was their culture at the time."
A good point (and I agree. QP is like Ptolemy's epicycles; more and more unwieldy complexity, despite simpler explanations being available that meet the facts).
However, I see Occam referenced a lot on slashdot, and almost no one ever mentions that there are many anti-razors created in response to Occam's approach. Occam is a good decision-making tool, but not a universal truth. An anti-razor that a QP supporter might use would be, "Entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy," and also, "It is vain to do with fewer what requires more."
A funny one we might use in response to those is Crabtree's Bludgeon, which states: "No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated."
Quantum mechanics shows behavior that is counter-intuitive because it displays faster-than-light knowledge transfer, seems to imply reality is created by observation, etc. Most physicists believe there are local hidden variables which make sense of this: reality behind-the-scenes, making sense of what we perceive as nonsensical. Einstein, among others, believed in this kind of local realism.
John Bell predicted, decades ago, that "No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics." This was an important insight. He derived a mathematical prediction (Bell's inequality), which has been refined by others over the years, which if violated would confirm his prediction, potentially confounding those who expect reality to behave in a sensible manner.
Alain Aspect and others have violated Bell's and similar inequalities in various experiments. While some researchers think this makes nonsense of quantum theory, others have proposed theories which actually manage to "marry" the two concepts of quantum theory and local realism. The "many worlds" and "holographic universe" concepts, for example, not only allow for each other but also incorporate both realism and the seeming insanity of quantum mechanics.
Hope this helps!
Actually, there was a recent article in either New Scientist or The Scientist (can't recall which) that discussed the possibility that laws are evolving over time, meaning they may be changing in response to deeper laws. Very bizarre stuff.
On-topic: Einstein thought Bohm was on the right track, and a significant but small group of other physicists do as well. Additionally, Bohm literally wrote the book on quantum mechanics; his textbook in the field is a classic. But like Pauli, he wrote exceptionally well about something he thought was wrong. (Pauli had a very provocative comment about reality: "There must be something else. I think I know what is coming. I know it exactly. But I don't tell it to others. They may think I am mad. So I am doing five dimensional theory of relativity although I don't really believe in it. But I know what is coming. Perhaps I will tell you some time." Of course he never told us, though he might have told Jung.)
/. I wrote a very different intro than the above, and while I'm happy they gave me credit for the story, I'm a bit taken aback by the writing being attributed to me. Anyone else encounter this?
A note: Alain Aspect, the physicist questioning the interpretations of the results, did research in the same area in the early '80s that Bohm took to be supportive, and which was one of the many research directions that prompted Michael Talbot to write The Holographic Universe.
Off-topic but related: A question for others who have had stories accepted on
Many women do want to sign up, but are put off by the thought they will be discriminated against. Whether the discrimination happens or not is beside the point; the issue is perception. Active recruitment helps dispel that for those interested, but nervous.
I suppose it depends on the company and the service, but I've had quite the opposite experience. Most of my customers were not lying. But the majority had difficulty telling me the relevant information because they simply didn't know enough to know what to tell. But that was my job, to figure out what might be happening and get them to tell me what I needed to know to fix it, or walk them through fixing it.
What frustrates me are the tech support people who think every problem is the same and should be treated identically. I guess it's easy to do, we diagnose a lot and we've see a lot of repetition, but there's nothing worse than a doctor who's only as good as his last diagnosis. There's an art to troubleshooting. If you're not tied to a script by your employer, thirty seconds of investigation is much better than a knee-jerk, "Clear your cache."
--
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
Speak it, bro! I think fear of being seen as stupid is a self-fulfilling prophecy—it causes a lot more ignorance than it resolves.
My apologies for the redundancy of this post; I searched on nose and olfactory beforehand, and apparently should've kept searching....
He might not have said it, but there is the strong possibility *some* of our neurons use quantum-level behavior, which rather expands the traditional neurotransmitters + electrical signaling model for neural activity. In 1996 biophysicist Luca Turin suggested electron tunnelling as a solution for the mystery of olfactory receptors can interpret similar molecules differently, and very different molecules the same. No one had a useful explanation for this issue until Turin, and he was of course dismissed by most neuroscientists, who are educated and work in macro-, not quantum-, level models.
Last year some other physicists released research in Nature that showed Turin may be right*, and olfactory neurons may indeed use electron tunnelling. Research is ongoing, but given the lack of alternative explanations, this may be an example of humans requiring a quantum mechanism for something very basic - scent.
* Free registration required for physicsweb.org access.
--
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. —Thomas Huxley
'Scuse me, gotta make a run to the store -
Oh, I totally agree! Perhaps I'm rationalizing in exactly the way I described, but I think it's being "us" not "them" that made the whiz thing apparent to me. I've been introduced to one too many of "them" that had been described as a whiz and was sadly disappointed....
;-)
Here's a perspective that brought me up short: I have a cousin who specializes in teach "gifted" high school students. She was talking about how fascinating it was to her, and used this explanation to make the difference clear: as different as a "normal" person's mental understanding is to someone mentally challenged, that's how different high intelligence is from the norm. So above 4 or so standard deviations, it becomes difficult to make distinctions in intelligence, and even to describe what's happening in an individual's head; as difficult as imagining what's happening in a person with an IQ of 40 or below. She was talking at a party and I was just listening in, and suddenly I understood why I always felt alone in the crowd.
So I've just given up trying to guess who will or won't understand a thing, and just try to do my best not to scare the normals
even in the computer professional world I've met many "whizzes" not much more intelligent about what computers are and how they work
The definition of a "whiz" seems to be "anyone who knows more than I do." Partly this is because people don't understand the subject, but I think mostly it's to bolster our own egos. If the person who knows more is some kind of guru, it's ok that they know more; but if they're just someone who delved a little deeper and perhaps read a few books it casts the know-less/know-nothings in a bad light.
Which reminds me of the old joke: If you were walking beside Einstein (or Newton, or da Vinci, or Goethe) and he suddenly doubled his intelligence, how would you know?
--
Know Less knew no lore;
Picked up a book, began to pore.
Know less, no more.
Yes, of course. There's a reason Michael Kamen did Symphony & Metallica. Personally, I think Grieg would've been a head-banger if he'd been born a little later ;-)
Interesting you point that out; I think it's all dependent on the preferred coping method of the autistic-spectrum person in question. As an autistic person and someone who's also worked as a therapist with autistic toddlers, I can tell you this tendency is not an across-the-board rule.
The stress of autism is largely an inability to screen out sensory input - you can think of it conceptually as a complete lack or very, very low level of latent inhibition (think River Tam's stripped amygdala in Serenity). (That's certainly not all autism is, but it's a definite side-effect.) But sometimes an increase in one area allows temporary relief in others. For example, the autistic child who can't bear wool because of the multiple brushing of hairs against skin may be able to relax under the strong, steady pressure of some heavy weight (I used to crawl under my mattress; Temple Grandin made herself a "hug" machine). Likewise, the autistic person who is maddened by all the different levels of ambient sound may find relief in a loud, complex, rhythmic music that engages their brain and auditory system more fully. Some heavy metal (not all) will do that for me, among other genres of music.
Another thing I experience - and I don't know if this is autistic or synesthetic or both or just weird - but there is some music that I feel throughout my body, where the notes are felt not only in aurally but in very specific places on my body, typically along my spine or parts of my head, but sometimes in my limbs. It's not the vibration, because it's location-specific and can happen at low volumes with some music, while other music doesn't do it at all no matter how loud it is. It's like my skin has a map of different notes, and some songs turn this on. Anyone else get that?
This makes perfect sense in light of the above research ;-) Going faster than light, the dupe naturally went back in time and displaced the original; conservation of time then displaced the original into the dupe's niche. The real question is how the dupe managed to slingshot around the sun to achieve the FTL speed....
All too true :-)