Roy :
On the Flip side Not being able to write a full paragraph can label one as Stupid . I also have dysgrapha ..
I would read college Electronics books in my free time in middle school learning so much but never able to Use it on paper and "look smart " to a average person ..
this was My case in grade school , I had to get by doing useless stuff that I will never use !
Mind I had my carerre path planed at the age of 13 ..
I still struggle on documentation ! in fact I will admit this forum has had a huge place in forceing me to document my BS2 MCU projects .
thankfully with modern things like computers and Photos and videos I can overcome the Docu issue ..
DORTHY is one of my first projects that Iam doing compleat full BEFORE I build documentation..
Hence why I have posted so many updates to the thread ...
Peter KG6LSE
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"Carpe Ducktum" "seize the tape!!" peterthethinker.com/tesla/Venom/Venom.html
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
LOL
The reality in this world is that most of us are simply smart enough. Really, that's where I got to on it. IMHO, the struggle is often with our own selves, more than it is anything else. Become secure in that, humble, friendly, loyal, and the world opens up one good person met at a time.
william chan said...
Why did Wozniak leave Apple?
Why he never designed another computer after apple?
There are two stories or two versions you might find and none of them are really important.· He is enjoying his life and that is all that is important.
The real story is the stockholders control the company and when Steve Jobs hired John Sculley,·John sometime later·fired Jobs.
Apple didn't make the 6502 and as far as I know didn't own a chip company until they bought PA Semi.· I look at the head of Commodore and I don't think he risked his fortune to save Atari.
You can't predict the future of computing two or threee years out from now.· Granted, some things stay the same but you are competing against companies that spend billions in research and the making of computer chips create hazardous waste.· Commodore had a tank that leaked causing the EPA to fine them $1 million dollars and it costs a lot to remediate the property.· I think that is the reason why people throw so much money into FPGA design because the average person isn't going to get the opportunity to bake their own chip.
The bottom line is that you need massive amounts of money to run a company, people aren't willing to risk their personal wealth, you can't predict the market after one or two years and most people don't have a billion dollars to invest in research to compete with the big boys and win.· Regardless of the real reason, that is the reason Woz is enjoying his life. ·
Scope said...
I'm "IQ-challenged" -- I am a total intellectual misfit to these forums
You are kidding, right!?
You make perhaps the finest post in a thread that by it's nature
is drawing in some very bright people and you consider yourself
slow?? I don't doubt for a second that you are a very smart guy.
BTW: I finished the iWoz book. I can recommend it highly!
Woz quit Apple because it wasn't fun any more. Woz was about doing stuff that was impossible in his garage. The time when Apple needed that particular skill set passed, and it became more about design and marketing. I remember reading that one of the last remnants of Woz tech was the floppy disk controller he designed, which was still in use in the early Macs. That was about the time Woz quit and went back to college.
Think about that. A guy with a billion dollars and an IQ of 200 WENT BACK TO COLLEGE. I seriously doubt he did that because he needed an education.
HollyMinkowski said...
@localroger
180!? OMG, I'm going to start asking you questions when I get stuck
You too JasonDorie.......
Mine hovers between 135 and 155, but if you're willing to settle....· [noparse];)[/noparse]
I have no problem answering questions.· I asked a lot of them myself when I was starting out, and many here (and a few other places) were kind enough to answer my silly n00b queries.· It's payback time.
localroger said...
Woz quit Apple because it wasn't fun any more. Woz was about doing stuff that was impossible in his garage. The time when Apple needed that particular skill set passed, and it became more about design and marketing. I remember reading that one of the last remnants of Woz tech was the floppy disk controller he designed, which was still in use in the early Macs. That was about the time Woz quit and went back to college.
Jack Tramiel left Commodore and took some of his crew to Atari so I'm willing to give Woz some credit and believe he could have stepped up to a 68000 Mac.· C-64 users basically upgraded to a 68000 based Amiga and that wasn't too hard because a lot of them are still writing programs on them today.
Chuckz, I seriously think Woz was just *DONE*. They had had the Apple III debacle, and the new Macintosh project just wasn't him. Jobs needed Woz to create miracles in his garage when that's all they had to sell, but once they had market capitalization Jobs went looking for "real engineers" and Woz cashed in his stock in the company so he could do what he wanted. Which was go back to college and meet girls.
I don't think the Apple III problem was all his doing. And what do you mean that Woz isn't an engineer? He worked for HP and I think creating the Apple IIe with 80 columns and making it a billion dollar business counts for something. It at least counts for life experience towards college credit. Who else doesn't have a college degree? Bill Gates dropped out of college.
Apple was losing money. 6502 and 68000 products couldn't compete. Apple fired Jobs. Jobs started his own company. Apple was bleeding money because it couldn't compete. Apple hired jobs back and it was a product like the iPod which is a product where IBM and Intel weren't competing in which helped make Apple profitable. The iPhone and iPad are products that make me jealous but they aren't a replacement for a laptop so the iPad is an area where Apple can be first but it won't replace desktops or laptops. I look back at the chips in the Amiga and they are thick chips compared to the smaller nanometer technology used to design intel chips. Smaller chips mean less material used and less material you have to pay for which sometimes translates into cheaper products which means that the big boys have an advantage and where Apple couldn't previously compete.
I am on a board that is creating an Amiga hardware emulator to go beyond what was ever created and compared to what we have today, their creators are calling it a toy. I respond by asking, "How much computer do you really need?" Today people buy a computer and throw it away after two or three years. I did word processing on my old computer and it lasted ten years so those who buy a computer just to throw it away every three years isn't economical when I'm just doing word processing.
You have to give Apple some credit because they entered the educational market and were accepted in a lot of schools and I personally liked the Apple IIe. It wasn't a bad computer.
Chuckz, nobody in their right mind thinks Woz couldn't have designed with more modern processors. What I'm saying is that he didn't want to. What got Woz out of HP and into Jobs' garage was the challenge of doing something that was widely regarded as impossible. The Apple II has Woz's fingerprints all over it, from the wacky but brilliant video system to the floppy disk controller that was the first in the industry not to use a dedicated (and expensive) floppy disk controller chip. By the time they created the Mac Apple didn't need that kind of wizardry; the tech was so much more powerful and cheaper that the original Mac was really a very pedestrian bit of hardware. Anybody could have built it, not just the Great and Mighty Woz. There was no challenge and no sense of triumph to be felt out of success. And I think that's why Woz found something else to do; it wasn't that he couldn't adapt but that he found it boring, and when you have a billion dollars and you're world famous you don't have to spend your life doing boring things.
localroger said...
By the time they created the Mac Apple didn't need that kind of wizardry; the tech was so much more powerful and cheaper that the original Mac was really a very pedestrian bit of hardware. Anybody could have built it, not just the Great and Mighty Woz.
I'd debate that. Do some research on Burrell Smith (the hardware wizard behind the original Mac). It was an inspired piece of engineering, and very much inspired by Woz's engineering style.
Now, the current slush of hardware are just mish mash's of pedestrian components, but the original Mac was still a real bit of "clever" (both hardware and toolbox - Andy Hertzfeld wrote some cool code)
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"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"
Roy Eltham said...
sylvie369: One thing that does happen to very high IQ children is that they get treated differently. Often segregated in school to being only with other high IQ kids, and treated special by adults, things like being told how smart they are all the time. This different treatment can lead to problems socially, which I think can be a big weakness. Of course, this varies pretty dramatically from one culture to the next.
I know that I have a much harder time socially because of exactly that kind of treatment. I still struggle with it often at 40 years old. I also know, or have known, a lot of people just like me in this regard.
However, I generally agree with your point if you exclude culture/social factors. Your IQ doesn't determine if you are tall, short, skinny, fat, cute, ugly, strong, weak, or have some defect or disease.
I think you're probably right, for the most part.·But notice how different that is from the notion that having a high IQ is compensated in the individual by shortcomings in other areas. The social exclusion is a matter of how you're treated, not of some shortcoming in yourself. Frankly, it's a lot more fair to say that it's the result of shortcomings in everyone else. I know, it's terribly non-PC to say that, and people in general take great comfort in the "smart people are socially inept" tale, but it doesn't have a basis in reality.
At the same time, overall, high-IQ people are more likely to be socially successful than are people in general. It's easy to think otherwise, because it seems so easy for stupid people to find company, and here in the U.S., at least, high-IQ carries social stigma. But _everyone_ is stigmatized by someone, and there are plenty of stupid people who find it hard to meet people as well. We just tend to largely overlook that.
Having had some relationships - and the inevitable relationship issues - I've often wondered how low-verbal skilled people manage in that setting. It seems so important to be aware of exactly how your words will be heard by the other person, and many of the people I know have no chance in the world of understanding that. I'd think a relationship would be absolute hell under those conditions.
I have no idea what my I.Q. is...And I don't really care either.
The most clever thing I did was when my wife's car kept blowing the fuse for the electric windows.
It would blow at random times, sometime every day, sometimes not for months.
We took it to the dealer, but they kept saying they couldn't find any problem.
I got smart and connected a 12V buzzer across the fuse. When the short happened, the fuse would blow and the buzzer would sound.
It took a couple days, but we found the problem. If the car was running (key on) and you opened the back door ALL the way it would pinch the wire and blow the fuse.
A little black tape and the problem that plaged us for a year was solved.
Bean
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Use BASIC on the Propeller with the speed of assembly language.
PropBASIC thread http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=867134
March 2010 Nuts and Volts article·http://www.parallax.com/Portals/0/Downloads/docs/cols/nv/prop/col/nvp5.pdf
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There are two rules in life: · 1) Never divulge all information
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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. [noparse][[/noparse]RUSH - Freewill]
~S!~
I don't considered myself either smart or stupid..just different.
I have two kids. One is very smart and one that is very good with his hands.
Its funny, they are jaleous of each other for what they can accomplish!
I'm watching them both and trying to tell each of them to just be yourself and never mind others, and do best at what you can do best.
I see them as an engineer and the technician! They need each other!
Last US IQ test, just above 100...
International IQ over 160
Tested for a company (US Base) and hit a low 80. Hummm. I asked for a Standard non US Test, got 128.
Most test I've seen are based on BIAISED environment. Which is not helpfull.
My friend (BLIND) took the same test. Which I sat beside him to get the puzzle and reading.
He hit close to 200 . But based on my explanation and ability to describe the definition, and we are close buddies and laughed all the way of the test, the stress was not so high for him , so why so high?.
Someone that can recite a book, has no meaning to me. I see it more as, within your environment, can you resolve a problem!
Like a Mcgiver or a Beam me up Scotty!
Show me on a blackboard what is it! a book is dead weight paper to me. Like you can not show someone how to drive with a book.
But you can put in a book "AID, rules and definition". On the road, that is a different story!
That is mostly why "RTFM" has no effect. useless to me. Book would show me the pin numbers only and the meaning. Not the "HERE IS HOW"... And I'm good at taking couple HOW, and combine them to do a new HOW !
sylvie369, my experience is that childhood is a finite resource and time you spend learning one thing is time you didn't spend learning something else. I have noticed, in observing people who aren't like me closely for 25+ years, is that people who aren't "smart" have an extraordinary amount of knowledge and skill which smart people tend to discount as nonexistent or useless. I have noticed that smart people are extremely likely to be social misfits, contrary to your assertion, and I'd credit that both to a total disinterest in learning the complicated and arbitrary methods of courtship and socialization and to the ostracism Roy mentions, which only reinforces this disinterest. That leaves the smart child plenty of time to read the encyclopedia and get even "smarter" when the tests are done.
I do suspect there are extremely rare people who manage to "do it all" but I'd guess they are even more rare than their IQ results would suggest, since they will score on tests equally with people who decided social life was a waste of time and spent their childhoods building computers. I would also guess that most of these people were very well nurtured by intelligent and loving parents and friends, well educated by methods that did not kill their interests, not abused or mistreated, and they will be thoroughly shocked if they ever have to deal with normal people at how nasty, stupid, and brutish humans can typically be.
localroger said...
.... The thing is, for a smart person, learning to appreciate average people is like learning to like the taste of wine; it requires a certain amount of effort, but is worth it in the end. ....
localroger said...
sylvie369, my experience is that childhood is a finite resource and time you spend learning one thing is time you didn't spend learning something else. I have noticed, in observing people who aren't like me closely for 25+ years, is that people who aren't "smart" have an extraordinary amount of knowledge and skill which smart people tend to discount as nonexistent or useless. I have noticed that smart people are extremely likely to be social misfits, contrary to your assertion, and I'd credit that both to a total disinterest in learning the complicated and arbitrary methods of courtship and socialization and to the ostracism Roy mentions, which only reinforces this disinterest. That leaves the smart child plenty of time to read the encyclopedia and get even "smarter" when the tests are done.
I do suspect there are extremely rare people who manage to "do it all" but I'd guess they are even more rare than their IQ results would suggest, since they will score on tests equally with people who decided social life was a waste of time and spent their childhoods building computers. I would also guess that most of these people were very well nurtured by intelligent and loving parents and friends, well educated by methods that did not kill their interests, not abused or mistreated, and they will be thoroughly shocked if they ever have to deal with normal people at how nasty, stupid, and brutish humans can typically be.
Hmm. I disagree with you on a number of counts. First of all, it's pretty rare for smart people to "discount as nonexistent or useless" the skills of people who aren't considered smart. It seems pretty clear, in fact, that quite the opposite is true - we have a cultural assumption that people who lack intelligence must necessarily make up for it with other skills, and smart people seem to be almost as susceptible to that assumption as people in general are. I've been a college professor for more than 20 years, and I know a lot of very smart people - I could count on the fingers of·one hand the number of them who are dismissive about the skills of people who score low on IQ tests, while many of them seem to have fallen for that cultural assumption that there must be some kind of compensation. People who score low on IQ tests seem pretty eager to _assume_ that the high scorers look down on them, but that dismissiveness isn't all that common in reality.
I'm sure that you have "noticed" that smart people are social misfits, because, of course, that's one of our cultural assumptions, and so we've become quite good at finding confirming evidence for it and dismissing disconfirming evidence. But it's not generally true: in general, highly intelligent people are also more socially successful than people of lower intelligence. I know that's hard to swallow, because it violates a pretty pervasive stereotype about smart people AND it makes it harder to maintain that assumption that there are compensations for being less intelligent.
It might help you to think about it the other way around. Imagine that you someone went out and collected all of the social misfits where you live, without paying attention to their intelligence. Now imagine that you gave them all IQ tests. It should be easy, if you think about it in that direction, for you to realize that this collection of people would have a relatively low average intelligence, right? I'm sure that you can think of examples of intelligent people who are socially unsuccessful, but don't forget about all of those less-intelligent people who are also socially unsuccessful. Now, if you were just to take a collection of intelligent people and an collection of less-than-intelligent people, you'd find a range of social success in both groups. It certainly wouldn't be true that you'd have any difficulty finding social success among the intelligent ones. In fact it would be quite easy - it's the norm.
Of course I don't expect to convince you. The cultural assumptions I mentioned are pretty pervasive and deeply ingrained.
In college, my political science teacher was trying to get us to become polyholic (political-aholic) and what he wanted us to do was ask our parents, our grandparents, people that were old for their viewpoints;· Wht ask a generation that might seem obsolete?· Because they've heard everything and they've been around for a while.· He basically said that even dumb people aren't stupid.· I find that older people can tell me things I've never heard before and I can learn different viewpoints that no one shares or·has told me.
My parents wouldn't allow us to call anyone weird.· We were supposed to use "different".
I'm weird to some of my relatives and friends because I like to spend my money on computers or learning instead of entertainment or beer.· I wish to not waste what I have so I want to invest it in learning.
I'm curious, all this talk of IQ tests - how many of you have taken a real IQ test? I ask because in the past when I have talked with people who have taken an IQ test I end up discovering that they really didn't. What they did do was take one online or in a magazine etc..
I'm told that I took an IQ test in early elementary and that I scored very high, my mom cannot remember the number. It was part of some study that some college was doing and I was one of the kids selected to take it. I have taken a few online tests and my scores vary wildly depending upon the flavor of test. Not very useful. The very fact that I have taken an IQ test online has surely cost me several points.
W9GFO: I took an IQ test when I was 19 (back in 1988). It was the test required for getting into Mensa. I had a friend that was in Mensa and he got it for me and tried to get me interested in Mensa (I really didn't (and still don't) care about Mensa at all.). I didn't prepare at all and my score was 143. I never went any further than that though with Mensa, my friend was disappointed. So that would be as close to a real IQ test as I have gotten. Since then I have taken online IQ tests and scored both lower and higher (one was like 155, and one was like 135, if I recall right), but those tests are really not very good.
The thing that got me treated differently in school was taking the standard California tests in grade school and being rated as junior and senior in high school. They almost skipped me ahead a grade or two, but decided against it "for social interaction reasons" (at least that's what I was told later) which ended up being a problem anyway.
I don't really consider myself to be all that smart. Some of the people I work with are way ahead of me in that department.
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Check out the Propeller Wiki·and contribute if you can.
I took a few IQ tests in grade school at various levels, and I took one for entrance to Mensa as well. I tend to score higher on the online ones, but I suspect they make them easier to entice people into them. (Kind of like "vanity sizing" of garments)
As I said, I took a test in Middle School and got a 122.
A few days later, after we got the test results, I kept
asking to see the test again and the correct answers
for the questions I missed. Finally they let me see it and
I studied the questions I had missed until I fully understood
them. Later in High School when I took another test my
score was a good bit higher. But I think those results were
meaningless because I had insight into the kind of questions
that were being asked. I went quickly through the test answering
the easy Q's and then settled down to ponder the hard ones.
I can tell you that this method of attack will raise your
IQ score considerably! But what does such a score then mean???
I think that only my score on the first test has any value as
a measure of intelligence. No such test I would take now would
mean anything.
Erik Friesen said...
There is a very interesting list of people with these types of "disorders", and most happen in the same part of the brain, aspergers, dyslexia, ocd, add, etc.
Von Braun, Edison, Tesla, and many others.
I'm not ever going to be in danger of measuring up to the people you listed....wish I could
BTW: My OCD does not take the form of being afraid of germs like many
people with OCD are. Thank heavens for that! I went to a group for people
with OCD for a while and many of them had bottles of hand sanitizer with
them and you kept seeing them squirting it on their hands and rubbing
them together....ick
My OCD causes me to constantly count things and look for patterns... I waste a lot
of precious time doing that silliness. One girl in our group was so afraid of hitting
someone while driving that she let her license lapse so she would not have to
deal with it any more. One guy was afraid to touch doorknobs and kept
a pack of tissues in his pocket that he would use to open doors...then of course
the tissue was soiled so he would have to throw it down, leaving a trail of
tissues where ever he went. Many with OCD repeatedly do things like checking
to see if they turned off the burners on the stove... worried that they might
cause the house to burn down and hurt someone. I don't have that checking
behavior but I am terrified that I will say something that could hurt someone's
feelings...I can break out in a cold sweat worrying about that. I take 20mg of
a medicine called Paxil every day, it seems to help a little. My fear of hurting
someones feelings makes it impossible for me to be in charge of anything since
I could NEVER bring myself to criticize their work...that's a real handicap. Also,
some guys seem a bit put out if I (a girl) come up with a solution to a programming
problem at work. I'm so afraid of making them feel bad that I constantly have
to say things like "You would have come up with the idea soon anyway" This
takes a lot of the joy out of being clever :-( Another odd thing I do that I think is
related to my OCD is I hate to type long sentences when I create a document.
It may have its origin in the fact that long lines in your programming code look
terrible if you print the listing on paper. If you look at all my posts you will see
that I break off all the lines short...lol
sylvie369 said...
Of course I don't expect to convince you. The cultural assumptions I mentioned are pretty pervasive and deeply ingrained.
I don't think this is related to cultural assumptions. I think this is based on personal experience. If you have this mechanical/technical bent, you will understand.
I think it takes a certain effort to learn any given thing, perhaps somewhat less for "smart" people. In the end, time is the limiting factor, and all things cannot get the same attention. It comes down to priorities.
How much of intelligence is just plain hard work? I have an uncle who learns languages well. He doesn't really appreciate when people say he has a gift for learning languages. In a certain sense they are dismissing the real effort in learning it.
I know a old nasa electrical engineer who had a professor in college tell the group of engineers that they were going to be better than the average person on the street.
IQ is but one aspect of a person, like height or eye color.· So genious, in and of itself, has no real extrinsic value.· It's just one aspect of·the composite person.
On the other hand, resourceful ingenuity, a trait·that can be developed, can be of nearly immeasurable value (to which Bean's wife will attest, I'm sure).
Concerning Mensa, I concur with Groucho Marx.· I'd never join a club that would have me as a member.
LOL ElectricAye I once wrote an essay making the case that Lecter was a transhuman character who was not so much evil as had simply undergone a metamorphosis into another, by most metrics better than human, form. He doesn't kill to create terror but because he can, and for the same reason we kill rats and cockroaches, to make the world a better place. Or as Starling puts it in Hannibal, "he only eats the rude."
In any case I don't think you're right; I think the quote you're thinking of was one about appreciating certain people (or organ meats, I'd have to look it up) WITH a certain wine, which is a bit different. Hannibal pretty much has the exact opposite of my attitude toward ordinary people; he appreciates them effortlessly, and all too well, and sees very little of value which would cause him to hesitate if one of them annoys him.
sylvie369 said...
Hmm. I disagree with you on a number of counts. First of all, it's pretty rare for smart people to "discount as nonexistent or useless" the skills of people who aren't considered smart. It seems pretty clear, in fact, that quite the opposite is true - we have a cultural assumption that people who lack intelligence must necessarily make up for it with other skills, and smart people seem to be almost as susceptible to that assumption as people in general are. I've been a college professor for more than 20 years, and I know a lot of very smart people - I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of them who are dismissive about the skills of people who score low on IQ tests, while many of them seem to have fallen for that cultural assumption that there must be some kind of compensation. People who score low on IQ tests seem pretty eager to _assume_ that the high scorers look down on them, but that dismissiveness isn't all that common in reality.
Well my father was a college professor, so I know what you're talking about. There is a college mindset which is loathe to come out and say a person is worthless, stupid, or can't be saved, no matter how much evidence there is for such a conclusion. I would say that any honest smart person would be tempted to say that memorizing every single episode of Everyone Loves Raymond is a massive waste of time and neurons. And this is the kind of thing ordinary people occupy themselves with instead of learning Calculus. You can obviously make a case that learning Calculus is a lot more useful, but for many people memorizing the TV series is a lot more personally fulfilling. Appreciating that latter fact is not the same as thinking the two accomplishments are equally useful.
Blue collar people are -- let's say refreshing -- when it comes to this kind of thing. They aren't afraid to call someone stupid or worthless, largely because instead of trying to save the world they're trying to get a certain amount of work done by someone who's being paid $9.00 an hour and it doesn't get done if they're listening to Everyone Loves Raymond on their iPod while they are pretending to drive a forklift. This is the world where I live, and I can honestly say every single person I have ever met in RL who is comparable to me is considered extremely weird. But that's because we're being judged not by college people but by the folks who memorized every episode of Everyone Loves Raymond, and while they notice we get paid better than they do they just can't figure out why anybody in their right mind would inflict all that math on themselves.
I'm not saying that these people who learned TV instead of math made a good decision; by any objective standard they didn't, and anybody who is capable of noticing that but unwilling to state it forthrightly isn't being true to themselves. But by the same token a lot of this "useless" information isn't in fact useless when you have to interact with people who consider it important.
And this is the point I was trying to make; there is a tremendous amount of effort that people put into pop culture and socialization, and if you don't put in that tremendous amount of effort yourself you will be at best an outsider like me who has learned to fake it. College is like the honors clique my schedule isolated me with in high school; the people you meet there aren't typical. The rituals and expectations are different. The problem which I saw as soon as I escaped from my college/honors bubble into the real world is that one of those rituals is a pretense that everyone is potentially college material, and that asserting otherwise is somehow disrespectful.
But not everyone is college material; many have wasted years they needed to spend learning core skills learning to style hair, and many don't want to join such an unfamiliar and cold world. They like TV, sports, fashion, and complex flirting rituals. You're not going to recruit them not because they're not up to your standards but because your world-view is totally uninteresting to them.
My mother is one of the people I'm talking about (which makes her 40 year marriage to my college professor father an interesting thing) and she recently told me she hated TV shows like Caprica and Stargate: Universe because they make her think too much. I was in the process of telling her how much I like them for exactly the opposite reason, and my Dad was obviously (but not overtly) finding it hilarious.
The thing is, people like Mom are more common than people like me. They are the ones who make the world I have to live in. This is why I pay attention to ordinary people; it's not that I think they have some hidden potential waiting to be unleashed. I've seen that I don't fit in with them, I've observed the results, I've adapted my behavior so that I can do my job and not get killed because I walked in on a bunch of rednecks in a shack on the shore of an isolated bayou stuffing brochures for David Duke and said something really unwise. (Which really happened BTW. Louisiana. Fortunately I had a clue by then, and didn't say anything stupid.)
Or to put it another way, people like Robert Oppenheimer may have built the atomic bomb, but it was people like Curtis LeMay who dropped it.
Some of you guys almost make it sound like smart people are "better" than the normal people. I would say that everybody has a certain aptitude for something. If it be electronics or reciting movie lines; it is still a skill. Look at artists, for instance. I stand amazed by their great attention to detail. If somebody asked me to draw something as simple as a cube, it would look like my seven-year-old sisters scribblings. People are just different. Are some people overall more beneficial to society? Yes. But they may have a stronger talent elsewhere. I think localroger hit the nail on the head, with his closing line. Yep, a brilliant dude made the bomb, but a soldier was the one to wield it. Another analogy. It is like the difference between an astronomer and a astronaut. One looks into the galaxy from the safety of his couch, while the other is actually out among the stars. I don't consider myself to be a genius. In fact, i probably spend more time thinking about girls, than electronics. So, i guess i am "Multi- Talented".....HEHE
BTW, LocalRoger. That thing about the rednecks was hilarious. What did you actually say to them?
Comments
Not if clothespins are involved. That's why they were invented, you know!
On the Flip side Not being able to write a full paragraph can label one as Stupid . I also have dysgrapha ..
I would read college Electronics books in my free time in middle school learning so much but never able to Use it on paper and "look smart " to a average person ..
this was My case in grade school , I had to get by doing useless stuff that I will never use !
Mind I had my carerre path planed at the age of 13 ..
I still struggle on documentation ! in fact I will admit this forum has had a huge place in forceing me to document my BS2 MCU projects .
thankfully with modern things like computers and Photos and videos I can overcome the Docu issue ..
DORTHY is one of my first projects that Iam doing compleat full BEFORE I build documentation..
Hence why I have posted so many updates to the thread ...
Peter KG6LSE
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"Carpe Ducktum" "seize the tape!!"
peterthethinker.com/tesla/Venom/Venom.html
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
LOL
The reality in this world is that most of us are simply smart enough. Really, that's where I got to on it. IMHO, the struggle is often with our own selves, more than it is anything else. Become secure in that, humble, friendly, loyal, and the world opens up one good person met at a time.
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
8x8 color 80 Column NTSC Text Object
Wondering how to set tile colors in the graphics_demo.spin?
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
Post Edited (potatohead) : 6/1/2010 5:29:30 AM GMT
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
8x8 color 80 Column NTSC Text Object
Wondering how to set tile colors in the graphics_demo.spin?
Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!
Why he never designed another computer after apple?
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www.fd.com.my
www.mercedes.com.my
The real story is the stockholders control the company and when Steve Jobs hired John Sculley,·John sometime later·fired Jobs.
Apple didn't make the 6502 and as far as I know didn't own a chip company until they bought PA Semi.· I look at the head of Commodore and I don't think he risked his fortune to save Atari.
You can't predict the future of computing two or threee years out from now.· Granted, some things stay the same but you are competing against companies that spend billions in research and the making of computer chips create hazardous waste.· Commodore had a tank that leaked causing the EPA to fine them $1 million dollars and it costs a lot to remediate the property.· I think that is the reason why people throw so much money into FPGA design because the average person isn't going to get the opportunity to bake their own chip.
The bottom line is that you need massive amounts of money to run a company, people aren't willing to risk their personal wealth, you can't predict the market after one or two years and most people don't have a billion dollars to invest in research to compete with the big boys and win.· Regardless of the real reason, that is the reason Woz is enjoying his life.
·
You are kidding, right!?
You make perhaps the finest post in a thread that by it's nature
is drawing in some very bright people and you consider yourself
slow??
BTW: I finished the iWoz book. I can recommend it highly!
Think about that. A guy with a billion dollars and an IQ of 200 WENT BACK TO COLLEGE. I seriously doubt he did that because he needed an education.
I have no problem answering questions.· I asked a lot of them myself when I was starting out, and many here (and a few other places) were kind enough to answer my silly n00b queries.· It's payback time.
Jason
·
I don't think the Apple III problem was all his doing. And what do you mean that Woz isn't an engineer? He worked for HP and I think creating the Apple IIe with 80 columns and making it a billion dollar business counts for something. It at least counts for life experience towards college credit. Who else doesn't have a college degree? Bill Gates dropped out of college.
Apple was losing money. 6502 and 68000 products couldn't compete. Apple fired Jobs. Jobs started his own company. Apple was bleeding money because it couldn't compete. Apple hired jobs back and it was a product like the iPod which is a product where IBM and Intel weren't competing in which helped make Apple profitable. The iPhone and iPad are products that make me jealous but they aren't a replacement for a laptop so the iPad is an area where Apple can be first but it won't replace desktops or laptops. I look back at the chips in the Amiga and they are thick chips compared to the smaller nanometer technology used to design intel chips. Smaller chips mean less material used and less material you have to pay for which sometimes translates into cheaper products which means that the big boys have an advantage and where Apple couldn't previously compete.
I am on a board that is creating an Amiga hardware emulator to go beyond what was ever created and compared to what we have today, their creators are calling it a toy. I respond by asking, "How much computer do you really need?" Today people buy a computer and throw it away after two or three years. I did word processing on my old computer and it lasted ten years so those who buy a computer just to throw it away every three years isn't economical when I'm just doing word processing.
You have to give Apple some credit because they entered the educational market and were accepted in a lot of schools and I personally liked the Apple IIe. It wasn't a bad computer.
Chuck
I'd debate that. Do some research on Burrell Smith (the hardware wizard behind the original Mac). It was an inspired piece of engineering, and very much inspired by Woz's engineering style.
Now, the current slush of hardware are just mish mash's of pedestrian components, but the original Mac was still a real bit of "clever" (both hardware and toolbox - Andy Hertzfeld wrote some cool code)
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"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"
At the same time, overall, high-IQ people are more likely to be socially successful than are people in general. It's easy to think otherwise, because it seems so easy for stupid people to find company, and here in the U.S., at least, high-IQ carries social stigma. But _everyone_ is stigmatized by someone, and there are plenty of stupid people who find it hard to meet people as well. We just tend to largely overlook that.
Having had some relationships - and the inevitable relationship issues - I've often wondered how low-verbal skilled people manage in that setting. It seems so important to be aware of exactly how your words will be heard by the other person, and many of the people I know have no chance in the world of understanding that. I'd think a relationship would be absolute hell under those conditions.
The most clever thing I did was when my wife's car kept blowing the fuse for the electric windows.
It would blow at random times, sometime every day, sometimes not for months.
We took it to the dealer, but they kept saying they couldn't find any problem.
I got smart and connected a 12V buzzer across the fuse. When the short happened, the fuse would blow and the buzzer would sound.
It took a couple days, but we found the problem. If the car was running (key on) and you opened the back door ALL the way it would pinch the wire and blow the fuse.
A little black tape and the problem that plaged us for a year was solved.
Bean
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Use BASIC on the Propeller with the speed of assembly language.
PropBASIC thread http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=867134
March 2010 Nuts and Volts article·http://www.parallax.com/Portals/0/Downloads/docs/cols/nv/prop/col/nvp5.pdf
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There are two rules in life:
· 1) Never divulge all information
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If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. [noparse][[/noparse]RUSH - Freewill]
I don't considered myself either smart or stupid..just different.
I have two kids. One is very smart and one that is very good with his hands.
Its funny, they are jaleous of each other for what they can accomplish!
I'm watching them both and trying to tell each of them to just be yourself and never mind others, and do best at what you can do best.
I see them as an engineer and the technician! They need each other!
Last US IQ test, just above 100...
International IQ over 160
Tested for a company (US Base) and hit a low 80. Hummm. I asked for a Standard non US Test, got 128.
Most test I've seen are based on BIAISED environment. Which is not helpfull.
My friend (BLIND) took the same test. Which I sat beside him to get the puzzle and reading.
He hit close to 200 . But based on my explanation and ability to describe the definition, and we are close buddies and laughed all the way of the test, the stress was not so high for him , so why so high?.
Someone that can recite a book, has no meaning to me. I see it more as, within your environment, can you resolve a problem!
Like a Mcgiver or a Beam me up Scotty!
Show me on a blackboard what is it! a book is dead weight paper to me. Like you can not show someone how to drive with a book.
But you can put in a book "AID, rules and definition". On the road, that is a different story!
That is mostly why "RTFM" has no effect. useless to me. Book would show me the pin numbers only and the meaning. Not the "HERE IS HOW"... And I'm good at taking couple HOW, and combine them to do a new HOW !
Cheers
Yosh
I do suspect there are extremely rare people who manage to "do it all" but I'd guess they are even more rare than their IQ results would suggest, since they will score on tests equally with people who decided social life was a waste of time and spent their childhoods building computers. I would also guess that most of these people were very well nurtured by intelligent and loving parents and friends, well educated by methods that did not kill their interests, not abused or mistreated, and they will be thoroughly shocked if they ever have to deal with normal people at how nasty, stupid, and brutish humans can typically be.
Didn't Hannibal Lecter say something like that?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Lecter
I'm sure that you have "noticed" that smart people are social misfits, because, of course, that's one of our cultural assumptions, and so we've become quite good at finding confirming evidence for it and dismissing disconfirming evidence. But it's not generally true: in general, highly intelligent people are also more socially successful than people of lower intelligence. I know that's hard to swallow, because it violates a pretty pervasive stereotype about smart people AND it makes it harder to maintain that assumption that there are compensations for being less intelligent.
It might help you to think about it the other way around. Imagine that you someone went out and collected all of the social misfits where you live, without paying attention to their intelligence. Now imagine that you gave them all IQ tests. It should be easy, if you think about it in that direction, for you to realize that this collection of people would have a relatively low average intelligence, right? I'm sure that you can think of examples of intelligent people who are socially unsuccessful, but don't forget about all of those less-intelligent people who are also socially unsuccessful. Now, if you were just to take a collection of intelligent people and an collection of less-than-intelligent people, you'd find a range of social success in both groups. It certainly wouldn't be true that you'd have any difficulty finding social success among the intelligent ones. In fact it would be quite easy - it's the norm.
Of course I don't expect to convince you. The cultural assumptions I mentioned are pretty pervasive and deeply ingrained.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 6/3/2010 2:34:19 AM GMT
In college, my political science teacher was trying to get us to become polyholic (political-aholic) and what he wanted us to do was ask our parents, our grandparents, people that were old for their viewpoints;· Wht ask a generation that might seem obsolete?· Because they've heard everything and they've been around for a while.· He basically said that even dumb people aren't stupid.· I find that older people can tell me things I've never heard before and I can learn different viewpoints that no one shares or·has told me.
My parents wouldn't allow us to call anyone weird.· We were supposed to use "different".
I'm weird to some of my relatives and friends because I like to spend my money on computers or learning instead of entertainment or beer.· I wish to not waste what I have so I want to invest it in learning.
Chuck
I'm told that I took an IQ test in early elementary and that I scored very high, my mom cannot remember the number. It was part of some study that some college was doing and I was one of the kids selected to take it. I have taken a few online tests and my scores vary wildly depending upon the flavor of test. Not very useful. The very fact that I have taken an IQ test online has surely cost me several points.
Rich H
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The Simple Servo Tester, a kit from Gadget Gangster.
The thing that got me treated differently in school was taking the standard California tests in grade school and being rated as junior and senior in high school. They almost skipped me ahead a grade or two, but decided against it "for social interaction reasons" (at least that's what I was told later) which ended up being a problem anyway.
I don't really consider myself to be all that smart. Some of the people I work with are way ahead of me in that department.
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Check out the Propeller Wiki·and contribute if you can.
A few days later, after we got the test results, I kept
asking to see the test again and the correct answers
for the questions I missed. Finally they let me see it and
I studied the questions I had missed until I fully understood
them. Later in High School when I took another test my
score was a good bit higher. But I think those results were
meaningless because I had insight into the kind of questions
that were being asked. I went quickly through the test answering
the easy Q's and then settled down to ponder the hard ones.
I can tell you that this method of attack will raise your
IQ score considerably! But what does such a score then mean???
I think that only my score on the first test has any value as
a measure of intelligence. No such test I would take now would
mean anything.
I'm not ever going to be in danger of measuring up to the people you listed....wish I could
BTW: My OCD does not take the form of being afraid of germs like many
people with OCD are. Thank heavens for that! I went to a group for people
with OCD for a while and many of them had bottles of hand sanitizer with
them and you kept seeing them squirting it on their hands and rubbing
them together....ick
My OCD causes me to constantly count things and look for patterns... I waste a lot
of precious time doing that silliness. One girl in our group was so afraid of hitting
someone while driving that she let her license lapse so she would not have to
deal with it any more. One guy was afraid to touch doorknobs and kept
a pack of tissues in his pocket that he would use to open doors...then of course
the tissue was soiled so he would have to throw it down, leaving a trail of
tissues where ever he went. Many with OCD repeatedly do things like checking
to see if they turned off the burners on the stove... worried that they might
cause the house to burn down and hurt someone. I don't have that checking
behavior but I am terrified that I will say something that could hurt someone's
feelings...I can break out in a cold sweat worrying about that. I take 20mg of
a medicine called Paxil every day, it seems to help a little. My fear of hurting
someones feelings makes it impossible for me to be in charge of anything since
I could NEVER bring myself to criticize their work...that's a real handicap. Also,
some guys seem a bit put out if I (a girl) come up with a solution to a programming
problem at work. I'm so afraid of making them feel bad that I constantly have
to say things like "You would have come up with the idea soon anyway" This
takes a lot of the joy out of being clever :-( Another odd thing I do that I think is
related to my OCD is I hate to type long sentences when I create a document.
It may have its origin in the fact that long lines in your programming code look
terrible if you print the listing on paper. If you look at all my posts you will see
that I break off all the lines short...lol
I don't think this is related to cultural assumptions. I think this is based on personal experience. If you have this mechanical/technical bent, you will understand.
I think it takes a certain effort to learn any given thing, perhaps somewhat less for "smart" people. In the end, time is the limiting factor, and all things cannot get the same attention. It comes down to priorities.
How much of intelligence is just plain hard work? I have an uncle who learns languages well. He doesn't really appreciate when people say he has a gift for learning languages. In a certain sense they are dismissing the real effort in learning it.
I know a old nasa electrical engineer who had a professor in college tell the group of engineers that they were going to be better than the average person on the street.
On the other hand, resourceful ingenuity, a trait·that can be developed, can be of nearly immeasurable value (to which Bean's wife will attest, I'm sure).
Concerning Mensa, I concur with Groucho Marx.· I'd never join a club that would have me as a member.
In any case I don't think you're right; I think the quote you're thinking of was one about appreciating certain people (or organ meats, I'd have to look it up) WITH a certain wine, which is a bit different. Hannibal pretty much has the exact opposite of my attitude toward ordinary people; he appreciates them effortlessly, and all too well, and sees very little of value which would cause him to hesitate if one of them annoys him.
Well my father was a college professor, so I know what you're talking about. There is a college mindset which is loathe to come out and say a person is worthless, stupid, or can't be saved, no matter how much evidence there is for such a conclusion. I would say that any honest smart person would be tempted to say that memorizing every single episode of Everyone Loves Raymond is a massive waste of time and neurons. And this is the kind of thing ordinary people occupy themselves with instead of learning Calculus. You can obviously make a case that learning Calculus is a lot more useful, but for many people memorizing the TV series is a lot more personally fulfilling. Appreciating that latter fact is not the same as thinking the two accomplishments are equally useful.
Blue collar people are -- let's say refreshing -- when it comes to this kind of thing. They aren't afraid to call someone stupid or worthless, largely because instead of trying to save the world they're trying to get a certain amount of work done by someone who's being paid $9.00 an hour and it doesn't get done if they're listening to Everyone Loves Raymond on their iPod while they are pretending to drive a forklift. This is the world where I live, and I can honestly say every single person I have ever met in RL who is comparable to me is considered extremely weird. But that's because we're being judged not by college people but by the folks who memorized every episode of Everyone Loves Raymond, and while they notice we get paid better than they do they just can't figure out why anybody in their right mind would inflict all that math on themselves.
I'm not saying that these people who learned TV instead of math made a good decision; by any objective standard they didn't, and anybody who is capable of noticing that but unwilling to state it forthrightly isn't being true to themselves. But by the same token a lot of this "useless" information isn't in fact useless when you have to interact with people who consider it important.
And this is the point I was trying to make; there is a tremendous amount of effort that people put into pop culture and socialization, and if you don't put in that tremendous amount of effort yourself you will be at best an outsider like me who has learned to fake it. College is like the honors clique my schedule isolated me with in high school; the people you meet there aren't typical. The rituals and expectations are different. The problem which I saw as soon as I escaped from my college/honors bubble into the real world is that one of those rituals is a pretense that everyone is potentially college material, and that asserting otherwise is somehow disrespectful.
But not everyone is college material; many have wasted years they needed to spend learning core skills learning to style hair, and many don't want to join such an unfamiliar and cold world. They like TV, sports, fashion, and complex flirting rituals. You're not going to recruit them not because they're not up to your standards but because your world-view is totally uninteresting to them.
My mother is one of the people I'm talking about (which makes her 40 year marriage to my college professor father an interesting thing) and she recently told me she hated TV shows like Caprica and Stargate: Universe because they make her think too much. I was in the process of telling her how much I like them for exactly the opposite reason, and my Dad was obviously (but not overtly) finding it hilarious.
The thing is, people like Mom are more common than people like me. They are the ones who make the world I have to live in. This is why I pay attention to ordinary people; it's not that I think they have some hidden potential waiting to be unleashed. I've seen that I don't fit in with them, I've observed the results, I've adapted my behavior so that I can do my job and not get killed because I walked in on a bunch of rednecks in a shack on the shore of an isolated bayou stuffing brochures for David Duke and said something really unwise. (Which really happened BTW. Louisiana. Fortunately I had a clue by then, and didn't say anything stupid.)
Or to put it another way, people like Robert Oppenheimer may have built the atomic bomb, but it was people like Curtis LeMay who dropped it.
BTW, LocalRoger. That thing about the rednecks was hilarious. What did you actually say to them?