Bubbles in the Brain

IQ; UQ; We all Q!

So I’m feeling a little bummed today. Y’see, I’m reading this book called Outliers, and one section discusses innate genius. The example is a man who blew the top out of the standard IQ test – he was literally off of their charts – and had to be given another one developed specifically to measure IQs above the range of the standard test. He got every question right except this one: Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to…?

Now, I knew the answer as soon as I read the question, and that’s what brung me low. Apparently I possess the knowledge to be able to answer esoteric questions built on obscure idioms, and the skills to sort and apply them, but this doesn’t translate into people beating down my door to hire me. (I’m not claiming that I would do as well on the rest of the test, by the way – pride goeth and all that; this just happened to be a question I could answer.)

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Famous Cats in History

Saw this blog post today:

The Cat who started the Civil War

After General Nathanial Greene’s death, a young Yale University graduate, Eli Whitney, came to Savannah to take a tutoring job. Whitney began working for Greene’s widow, Catharine, and it was at Mulberry Grove that Whitney invented the cotton gin, the machine that revolutionized the production of cotton.

In fact, Whitney met Mrs. Greene on a ship from Rhode Island to Georgia when he was moving to take the teaching job and she was going to remarry. They struck up a friendship, and when he discovered that the pay for the teaching job was half what he had been promised, she offered to let him live at Mulberry Plantation while he decided what to do next.

At Mulberry Grove, much of the evening conversation was about the difficult economic situation plantation owners faced. At that point in US history, slavery was a dying enterprise. Slaves were expensive to keep and there was little profitable work for them to do. The market for local crops, indigo and rice would not support large plantations, and though growing cotton was a possibility, it was too expensive separating the cotton seeds from the fiber to make the crop profitable.

A few days later, Whitney was in the plantation barnyard watching a cat try to catch a chicken through a wire fence. Each time the cat would reach through the fence for the chicken, all he would bring back was a paw-full of feathers. This lit the bulb in Whitney’s imagination and he realized that folks were trying to solve the wrong problem with cotton. The solution wasn’t separating the seeds from the cotton fiber; it was separating the fibers from the seeds. He devised a screen-wire basket in which a roller with small picks would pull the fibers through the screen, leaving the seeds on the other side. This became his Cotton Engine, and it was an immediate success throughout the cotton-growing regions of the south. This drove a huge demand for field labor in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and led to a great transfer of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas, greatly upsetting slave families and leading to the upheaval that led to the Civil War some sixty years later.

Had Whitney not seen that cat, who knows what would have happened in American history? This is why a cat should be credited with starting the Civil War.

It was a cute post, but ignores the fact that slavery was not the underlying cause of the War of Northern Aggression.

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From the Mailbag

(Whose robots would you rather have send you e-mail, Tyrell’s or Skynet’s? )

While I understand and appreciate the frustration people are feeling with their elected public serpents, sentences like this:

“We believe the Federal Reserve together with the above financial elites covertly manufactured the credit and real estate bubble to enhance continued foreign investment in their Treasury debt Ponzi scheme while generating obscene profits for Wall Street at the expense of the American people.”

encroach on tinfoil hat territory. The sheer number of people that would have had to be involved in this “scheme” ensures it wouldn’t remain secret. They have a legitimate gripe, though, since we’re all losing lots of money. Apparently, they are now too poor to even be able to afford commas.

It’s easy to dismiss them as goofballs, but they at least know their way around the amendment process, wanting to convene a National Convention to avoid the rigged system that is Congress. I wish them success in a spunky, underdog kind of way, but I was immediately reminded of this quote from Neal Stephenson’s novel, Interface:

“It was just a matter of time before some politician actually became stupid enough to mention forgiving the national debt.”