I believe that you've made an incredibly intelligent statement for a person 40 years younger than yourself. The problem isn't with the belief that genius is an overused statement, but with your underlying logic in categorizing genius.
Maxwell, Einstien, Newton, (not sure I agree with Turing as an example at all in your explanation) all made use of their genius to simplify a problem.
Genius itself exists everywhere. For example, the creator of the paperclip was a genius. It's the degree of genius that is important. I have personally met a tremendous number of geniuses since a genius is typically a person with a higher ability of association that others. A genius in my opinion is nothing more than the top 1-2% of the world at associative skill.
What you are defining as genius narrows the field to a specific type of genius. You don't even include one of the best known geniuses ever, Mozart. The reason why is that you clearly believe that a genius is nothing more than a person that has managed to become famous by publishing some form of theory that revolutionizes a specific field of math or physics. In this case there are many more geniuses alive today than ever before. It is just that the level of math and physics being dealt with today is far above what the typical Joe could possibly comprehend even the application of. Many scientists and mathemeticians are taking the more complex theories of Einstien and Hawkings and simlifying them for particular purposes. Many are even innovating in the same way. But let's face it, even 95% of the people reading this site couldn't possibly appreciate the benefit of the energy emitted by colliding bucky balls. It will be 100 years before the great discoveries of today make sense to a higher percentage of people.
Now yours immature need to innapropriately narrow the term genius to strictly the 0.01% of the 1-2% should be stricken from history and you should understand better what a genius really is.
Some people say a genius is just a person scoring within the top 1-2% of IQ tests. These people are typically people that have scored that high and have not applied their ability to anything.
To me, a genius is a gifted person. (whether the gift is genetic or environmental I will never understand) Genius is the ability and action of producing associations. The gift can be the ability to associate emotion to the sound of the keys on a piano (or even the twanger thingy of a jews harp.). It can be the ability to simply look at complex logic and comprehend and apply it. It can even be the ability to detect another persons (or even dogs) emotions and accurately judge the correct action to take to alter it in a predictable maner, a skill useful to social workers and terrorist interrogators alike.
One of personal genius abilities is the understanding and furthering of work theory. The ability to take the hands of people and their minds and calculate methods to decrease the amount of work they do to increase the results the produce. I can evaluate a persons preferences for using their hands, the methods in which they move their fingers most comfortably, and in which motions they are most likely to experience muscle or eye fatigue and teach them the simplest rules to increase their output and increase their satisfaction doing it. This is a genius that I never studied in a school, but simply heard reference to the topic once and understood it. After having run an electronics assembly shop for a while, I have tested my theories extensively and once I've published will have forwarded the field and decreased the cost of producing your next DVD player.
Another genius of mine is the ability to recognize patterns rapidly. I can find patterns in larges sets. This is a trait that is not appliable directly since I often lack the skills to apply it to the field it applies, however, I identify comple patterns for other people and they implement it in practice. For a very simple example, if you wanted to identify whether a specific point is within a polygon co
I have to admit that I have extensive experience with this. We have portable DVD, multiple notebook computers, portable video players and so far the most successful toy is my Pocket PC based telephone. It has a good 4 inch screen and when you give one to each of the children, they have thier own show to watch. This has worked out to be a $1000 investment per child so it's definately not a mainstream solution, but using a show selector application I put together, the kids can choose what to watch.
I don't think the iPos is as ideal a solution since the controls are by far too complex for my 2 and 3 year old to handle. I prefer the "Thomas, tap Thomas on the nose with your finger" solution over the "Turn the dial until it ticks 4 times and press the middle button" solution since counting past 5 becomes a disaster.
I think it's a good idea for people looking to buy an iPod, but I'm not convinced it's worth upgrading our ipods for it.
This is a math question which I've asked many people to test them for job positions ranging everywhere from mathematicians requesting jobs as encryption engineers to sales people selling embedded applications. Their first and second responses to the questions can provide me with a tremendous amount of information regarding the persons' intelligence as well as their social skills. I don't expect sales people to come up with the right answer, but I do expect that after a quick guess, they should admit their guess was wrong, not try to sell me their answer no matter how wrong it is. Only once have I ever seen anyone answer the question without using paper, and he was a Ph.D. in math from Chambridge. Often I like to simply hear peoples suggestions on how best to solve the problem or at least find out what the first thing they'd look up would be to solve the problem.
Give it a try :
Given two circles of equal size (in other words, both are in fact circles and have equal radii). To simplify the question we'll assume the radius of the circles is 5. What is the distance between the origins of the two circles so that the area of the intersecting part is equal to the nonintersecting area of one circle. In other words "How far apart are the centers of the two circles so that if you compare the overlapped region of the circles so that it is equal to one half the area of one of the circles)
The following bit of information is what I tend to look at for answers.
First, with the exceptions of math freaks, people immediately answer 5 without thinking about the fact that this is completely wrong. I've had a sales person spend 10 minutes trying to convince me that his answer is in fact correct. He did no get the job.
Shortly after, I typically am hoping to hear "Well, it must be less than 5 since the circles would have to have a greater overlap in order to achieve half coverage". For programmers, I hope to hear this observation before they reach for a pencil. If this conclusion isn't reached or they've gone the wrong direction, the programmers typically don't get the job either.
I typically allow a few minutes from this point before I see a bunch of work on paper and if they're on the right track, I sometimes let them go ahead until they solve it or give up. Alternately, if they are not on the right track, I ask them "What's the first thing you'd look up to solve the problem?". What I'd like to hear is something like "I'd find out how to calculate the area of the intersect".
The beauty of the problem is that the question itself (especially when you can draw two circles and describe it) sounds so incredibly simple, but in fact even most programmers can't solve it since this is the type of math they learn an later forget.
As a note, I am a programmer and I've taught myself all my math, well at least post high-school math, I just tested out of the college level stuff since I didn't have the money to pay the whole credits. It took me 3 months on and off solving this problem. All together I think I had 45 hours invested it (not counting the endless hours laying in bed thinking about it)
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I believe that you've made an incredibly intelligent statement for a person 40 years younger than yourself. The problem isn't with the belief that genius is an overused statement, but with your underlying logic in categorizing genius.
Maxwell, Einstien, Newton, (not sure I agree with Turing as an example at all in your explanation) all made use of their genius to simplify a problem.
Genius itself exists everywhere. For example, the creator of the paperclip was a genius. It's the degree of genius that is important. I have personally met a tremendous number of geniuses since a genius is typically a person with a higher ability of association that others. A genius in my opinion is nothing more than the top 1-2% of the world at associative skill.
What you are defining as genius narrows the field to a specific type of genius. You don't even include one of the best known geniuses ever, Mozart. The reason why is that you clearly believe that a genius is nothing more than a person that has managed to become famous by publishing some form of theory that revolutionizes a specific field of math or physics. In this case there are many more geniuses alive today than ever before. It is just that the level of math and physics being dealt with today is far above what the typical Joe could possibly comprehend even the application of. Many scientists and mathemeticians are taking the more complex theories of Einstien and Hawkings and simlifying them for particular purposes. Many are even innovating in the same way. But let's face it, even 95% of the people reading this site couldn't possibly appreciate the benefit of the energy emitted by colliding bucky balls. It will be 100 years before the great discoveries of today make sense to a higher percentage of people.
Now yours immature need to innapropriately narrow the term genius to strictly the 0.01% of the 1-2% should be stricken from history and you should understand better what a genius really is.
Some people say a genius is just a person scoring within the top 1-2% of IQ tests. These people are typically people that have scored that high and have not applied their ability to anything.
To me, a genius is a gifted person. (whether the gift is genetic or environmental I will never understand) Genius is the ability and action of producing associations. The gift can be the ability to associate emotion to the sound of the keys on a piano (or even the twanger thingy of a jews harp.). It can be the ability to simply look at complex logic and comprehend and apply it. It can even be the ability to detect another persons (or even dogs) emotions and accurately judge the correct action to take to alter it in a predictable maner, a skill useful to social workers and terrorist interrogators alike.
One of personal genius abilities is the understanding and furthering of work theory. The ability to take the hands of people and their minds and calculate methods to decrease the amount of work they do to increase the results the produce. I can evaluate a persons preferences for using their hands, the methods in which they move their fingers most comfortably, and in which motions they are most likely to experience muscle or eye fatigue and teach them the simplest rules to increase their output and increase their satisfaction doing it. This is a genius that I never studied in a school, but simply heard reference to the topic once and understood it. After having run an electronics assembly shop for a while, I have tested my theories extensively and once I've published will have forwarded the field and decreased the cost of producing your next DVD player.
Another genius of mine is the ability to recognize patterns rapidly. I can find patterns in larges sets. This is a trait that is not appliable directly since I often lack the skills to apply it to the field it applies, however, I identify comple patterns for other people and they implement it in practice. For a very simple example, if you wanted to identify whether a specific point is within a polygon co
I have to admit that I have extensive experience with this. We have portable DVD, multiple notebook computers, portable video players and so far the most successful toy is my Pocket PC based telephone. It has a good 4 inch screen and when you give one to each of the children, they have thier own show to watch. This has worked out to be a $1000 investment per child so it's definately not a mainstream solution, but using a show selector application I put together, the kids can choose what to watch. I don't think the iPos is as ideal a solution since the controls are by far too complex for my 2 and 3 year old to handle. I prefer the "Thomas, tap Thomas on the nose with your finger" solution over the "Turn the dial until it ticks 4 times and press the middle button" solution since counting past 5 becomes a disaster. I think it's a good idea for people looking to buy an iPod, but I'm not convinced it's worth upgrading our ipods for it.
This is a math question which I've asked many people to test them for job positions ranging everywhere from mathematicians requesting jobs as encryption engineers to sales people selling embedded applications. Their first and second responses to the questions can provide me with a tremendous amount of information regarding the persons' intelligence as well as their social skills. I don't expect sales people to come up with the right answer, but I do expect that after a quick guess, they should admit their guess was wrong, not try to sell me their answer no matter how wrong it is. Only once have I ever seen anyone answer the question without using paper, and he was a Ph.D. in math from Chambridge. Often I like to simply hear peoples suggestions on how best to solve the problem or at least find out what the first thing they'd look up would be to solve the problem.
Give it a try :
Given two circles of equal size (in other words, both are in fact circles and have equal radii). To simplify the question we'll assume the radius of the circles is 5. What is the distance between the origins of the two circles so that the area of the intersecting part is equal to the nonintersecting area of one circle. In other words "How far apart are the centers of the two circles so that if you compare the overlapped region of the circles so that it is equal to one half the area of one of the circles)
The following bit of information is what I tend to look at for answers.
First, with the exceptions of math freaks, people immediately answer 5 without thinking about the fact that this is completely wrong. I've had a sales person spend 10 minutes trying to convince me that his answer is in fact correct. He did no get the job.
Shortly after, I typically am hoping to hear "Well, it must be less than 5 since the circles would have to have a greater overlap in order to achieve half coverage". For programmers, I hope to hear this observation before they reach for a pencil. If this conclusion isn't reached or they've gone the wrong direction, the programmers typically don't get the job either.
I typically allow a few minutes from this point before I see a bunch of work on paper and if they're on the right track, I sometimes let them go ahead until they solve it or give up. Alternately, if they are not on the right track, I ask them "What's the first thing you'd look up to solve the problem?". What I'd like to hear is something like "I'd find out how to calculate the area of the intersect".
The beauty of the problem is that the question itself (especially when you can draw two circles and describe it) sounds so incredibly simple, but in fact even most programmers can't solve it since this is the type of math they learn an later forget.
As a note, I am a programmer and I've taught myself all my math, well at least post high-school math, I just tested out of the college level stuff since I didn't have the money to pay the whole credits. It took me 3 months on and off solving this problem. All together I think I had 45 hours invested it (not counting the endless hours laying in bed thinking about it)