The Surprising Dignity in a Middle Name

It is not surprising that, as the first son of two parents with southern roots, I would end up with the nickname of 'Junebug'. The name is a southern corruption of "junior", which my being named after my father, is what I am.

I was very comfortable with the name at home, because it was the only name I had ever known until I started going to school. I found that after beginning kindergarten, I was extremely uncomfortable with and embarrassed by the name outside of home and neighborhood. (Chalk up the ‘why’ of this embarrassment I felt to the cruelty children in the same less-than-ideal circumstances often display to one another.)

In fact, I would keep a name secret from my school friends (and later, college and work) until I was at least twenty-five!

At school, as 'Curtis', I was shy, withdrawn, and very, very quiet. At home, as 'Junebug', I was a lot more talkative, hyperactive, and with a non-stop, steady stream jokes (mostly bad) that my father encouraged by laughing at every single one. These two personas would not merge for many, many years, only when I was finally comfortable with my home life and public life both being me, and I was not uncomfortable with people from those two environments finding out about the other 'me'. My being comfortable with all of aspects of my own personality was a  very important lesson, was one that my uncle Mac Willie helped me learn.

Because of him, each of us had another personality, one of surprising dignity, which he foisted on us with quiet force whenever he came to visit.

How did he do this? Mac Willie insisted on referring to us only by our middle names.

First let me digress: One of my earliest memories of starting school for the first time (not referring to my hysterical crying and clinging to the teacher's desk leg) was learning that my real name is actually 'Curtis' and not 'Junebug'. This revelation was something of a personal shock, one with which I was forced to contend. As I was always terrified at school while being called 'that name', I became withdrawn, and a new personality was invoked whenever it was used. At home, of course, I was still called 'Junebug', where I was much more comfortable, so that became an identity separate from the one I had at school.

Mac Willie called me 'McKinley', my middle name, and with that name came still another personality, one that he fostered and moreover, expected. When Mac Willie came over, the running, jumping around, and giggling had to stop. Shirts had to be tucked in (even if he had to do it himself), hair had to be combed, faces clean, and postures erect.

Responses had to come quickly, audibly (no mumbling!), and spoken correctly, or tickling (exclusively for me, since I was very ticklish) and shoulder punches (for my brothers) resulted, if you were a boy, with strong admonishments for the girls. (Mac Willie, actually an average-sized, spare man of slight but energetic build and dark skin, had also been known for his extraordinarily strong grip, something that, as impressionable young boys, amazed my brother and me.)

By treating us in this fashion, and using only our middle names, Mac Willie gave us a quiet, calming level of dignity.  These strange names baffled us, so much so that each of us had to run to our quietly amused parents, always hovering in the background, to ask who 'McKinley', 'George', or 'Howard' was. My father would laugh, get down on one knee at 'kid' level and say, "That's you, Junebug. McKinley is your middle name."

Being called by this strange name ‘McKinley’ made me feel strange in return. Not like silly Junebug, or shy, withdrawn Curtis, but something else, something somehow more important, more dignified, special and most of all, more mature. It gave me something I had lacked, the confidence to express all of the (creative?) voices growing inside me.

After his initial inspection, Mac Willie would relax, laugh, talk loud, and tell old stories about our parents that had occurred in a time incomprehensibly before we existed. He talked (if only a little bit) about his own life, but never his own children. (In fact, we didn't even know he had any until we were young adults. Mac Willie did not share the close relationship with his own family that he did with us.)

The 'middle name' thing continued until we were all adults, well past the trauma of the 'Hundred Dollars'. (That's another story.)

By the end of his life, Mac was bitter, old, and, not surprisingly, abandoned by his own adult children. Oddly, the two groups of us (his children and my siblings and I) though related, have never met, not even at his funeral. We were unaware if they knew about us, and if they did, were they or had they been jealous, resentful, or not. Our parents never did give us too much detail about Mac's own family, other than that he had had a falling out with their mother many years previously.

The nursing home he spent his last days in was on 18th street, not far from the condominium I used to live in downtown.  Every Saturday, I would walk down there and visit him, and each time it took him quite a while to recognize me, but he still had that hellishly strong grip. I would take him magazines to read, which he never touched, and a chess set, but he didn't want to play any longer. On some Saturdays, my father and brother would accompany me, and in his dark, depressing room, we would sit with him for a few hours, where we would do all of the talking. Mac would just stare out of the cloudy window of his small dark room, a room that smelled of sadness, capitulation, despair. Basically, he’d just given up on life.

One day, I had to call my folks to tell them that Mac Willie had passed. (I'd gone down to visit him, and his room was being cleaned.) The day Mac Willie died was a sad day for all us, but especially for my brother Nate and me. Mac had a profound influence on us in many, many ways, especially on me, because Mac and I had had a lot in common. (Mac, who was ‘bookish’, had encouraged me to read even more than I already did, learn to play chess, and to study calculus as a pastime.) He also gave me my very first set of books – the old Time Life Natural Library and Science Library series.) He taught me it was okay to blend all my personas in to one, and, more importantly, that it was OK to be me, and defend myself against all comers. He also taught me it was okay to be strong, and even loud and outspoken from time to time!

I think of all my siblings, my brother and I miss Mac Willie the most.

The Summer of Rage

Child psychologists and teachers refer to the intense learning cycles of extremely precocious and highly motivated children as a phase known as the ‘rage to master’ or ‘rage to learn’. During this time, new, complex skills are attained during an unusually brief and intense learning phase, and at an unusual and accelerated rate.

This ‘rage’ is all-consuming, and usually results in a near perfect and (most importantly) early mastery of difficult mental and physical tasks that seem far beyond the abilities of not only ‘ordinary’ children, but their adult counterparts as well.

‘Rage’ is a good word to describe the single-minded intensity of this phase in children. I should know, because I was one of them.

***

For me, it began during the late summer of 1973. That was the year I finally persuaded my parents to let me take violin lessons. (I had seen the movie, Humoresque, starring John Garfield and Joan Crawford, and had immediately decided that I wanted to play the violin, and learn the title piece.)

They relented, but only if I agreed to some conditions:

1.       I had to stick to it for longer than a few months.

2.       I had to find a teacher they could afford.

3.       I had to find an instrument they could afford.

4.       I had to practice every day.

Because this was many years before the Internet, I had to find the teacher and the fiddle by the only means available in those days, the yellow pages, and free trade newspapers.

For the violin, my parents and I found a place that rented ‘school grade’, instruments by the month for $14.00. Even though that amount does not sound like much money now, it was a sizable monthly investment on my parents’ part back then, because they still had eight others in the family to provide for, including themselves (plus two dogs) and they had no way of knowing whether I would ‘stick to it’ or not.

I eventually found a teacher in a free newspaper (in those pre-Internet days) called The Learning Exchange.

So, with violin rented, and a teacher engaged, the lessons began. My new teacher was imminently patient, and warned me that, as new students go, I was already ‘a bit too old’, (at age 16) to be starting a new instrument, especially one as supremely difficult to master as the violin. When I told him I wanted to be a ‘virtuoso’ and play like the lead character in Humoresque, (John Garfield’s Paul Boray), my new teacher smiled patiently and said, “We’ll see. . .”.(The actual fiddle parts of the soundtrack were laid down by none other than the late Isaac Stern, who, at the time, was my favorite violinist.)

At the time, neither my teacher nor I even knew how far I was willing to go to pursue this near unobtainable goal.

Fortunately for me, I did not have to wait long to play Humoresque by Dvorak. A simplified version of it was available in a beginner’s collection from the old Lyon & Healy Music Store, which used to sit at the corner of Jackson and Wabash in downtown Chicago, only a block away from where I took my lessons.

Lyon & Healy was right across the street from another music store of bygone days, Carl Fischer. I used to frequent each, right after my lessons to browse sheet music, and look at instruments.

Fortunately for me, there was also a Rose Records store a few blocks north of those two stores, down on Wabash and Adams, where I used to also go to browse through albums and cassette tapes. Across the street from Rose Records was a Kroch & Brentano’s bookstore. Between all those establishments, almost right in the middle was a Central Camera store (still there), which I used to window-shop for my photography hobby. For quite a long time, that little two block-by-one-block area was all that I knew of, or cared to see of Chicago’s downtown.

Like the boy in the movie (Robert Blake as the child Paul Boray), I practiced religiously daily after school, and on Saturdays after my violin lessons. And, like that character, I even practiced when my brothers and sisters ran outside to play with their friends.

My parents were not completely caught unawares by my sudden, intense dedication, because they had all seen it before with my artwork, my writing, and my fascination with the space program, AND my fanatical love of books and reading. I also use to keep what I used to call my ‘observation’ notebooks, filled with scientific notes and sketches, mostly of the local flora and fauna, and ‘stuff’ I dissected.

Still, playing the violin, because of the noise it made throughout the house, was a different thing altogether, because now, everyone in the family had an inescapable, front row seat to my growing obsession to learn and master that most difficult of instruments. They could not have avoided that sound if they wanted to. As anyone who has ever heard a beginning violinist attempt the impossible task of scraping music out of catgut and steel, they probably wanted to escape at some point.

Yet they did not have to wait long for my playing to improve. After a few months, I was playing Vivaldi (A Minor Violin Concerto), and simplified versions of orchestral excerpts and famous violin solo pieces, such as Brahms’ Hungarian Dance #5 and Czardas by Monti, typical student fare, albeit for someone with a few more years experience playing than I had at the time.

In fact, I practiced the violin so much, and in so many rooms of the house, the ‘culture’ of the violin somehow infiltrated the family lingo. I once heard my brother say to one of my sisters, who had been continuously calling him to get his attention, “That’s my name! Don’t turn it into a concerto!”

I kept my violin lessons a secret at school because I did not want anyone to know about it (in case I failed or flunked out at it), and because back then, our school had a band, but no orchestra, so it did not matter anyway. Even then, I had the habit of keeping the various aspects of my life strictly compartmentalized, a habit I retain to some degree to this day.

I played, practiced, and took lessons throughout the rest of that summer, and into the winter, the spring, and finally the next summer (1974) between my junior and senior years in high school.

***

Something strange happened when that summer, the summer of 1974 started, and school let out. I did the opposite of what my parents fully expected me to do, once school was out and all the kids of the neighborhood were free to run and play with no cares for almost three months. (Actually, my summers had never been filled with running and playing, more with reading books and comic books, going to the library, drawing, and occasionally visiting with one or two friends of like mind.)

For reasons that escape me now, I suddenly vowed to practice ten hours a day to master the fiddle so I could be a ‘real’ violin player when school started again. All my other summer activities were put aside.

This seemingly innocent, impromptu decision is how the rage began in earnest for me. Once it started, it was so intense, so all consuming, so mentally and intellectually mesmerizing that on my own, I would have never noticed the passage of time, the beginning or ending of the day, the need for food, water, or sleep. If not for my parents, my dog, and my siblings, I would have foregone all bodily needs and functions (all of them), merely to practice all day until my parents were ready to ‘shut down the house’, for the night. Then I grudgingly went to bed, exhausted. The next day, it started all again, for an entire summer.

·         I set upon a strategy and a seemingly impossible task, I would practice ten hours a day all summer, so I could audition for the All-City Orchestra when school started, then play violin in college after graduation later that year (1975).

·         (As previously mentioned, our school had a band, but no orchestra, however, I would still need the band instructor’s permission to audition for All-City Orchestra, which consisted of only the best high school students from top Chicago high schools, the ones that could afford to have an orchestra. The competition was stiff, with students who had played their instruments much longer than I had played mine.)

·         If there were ever a time that my parents realized I was different, this was definitely one of them. (In retrospect, I am certain they already knew, from the compulsive behavior I showed for my other interests, which were growing in number every year.)

·         I arose at 8:00 every morning so I could have two whole hours to get my chores done, and take care of my dog Damon.

·         I started practicing at 10:00AM, and would stop only for short breaks (at my parent’s insistence), meals, and walks for Damon. The daily sessions would last until 10:00PM every night, with no weekends off. (Sometimes I could to get one of my brothers to walk my dog Damon.)

·         During my breaks, I would lie on my bed and read 'The Glory of the Violin' by Joseph Wechsberg, or peruse sheet music of stuff I wanted to play. Sometimes, my best friend would come over and try to get me to come out of the house. He usually gave up after a few minutes, and would leave frustrated, but only after hitting my right arm attempting to knock my bow from the strings. (I also recovered playing with little or no interruption.)

·         I started each session with scales, then etudes. Then I practiced orchestral excerpts, short encore pieces (nothing too difficult, mostly pieces by Kreisler (Liebesleid and Liesbesfreud) and the Beethoven Romances), and the Vivaldi A Minor Violin Concerto, and ‘advanced’ student concertos by Mozart (3, 4, 5), Viotti, Vieuxtemps, the Bach E Major Violin Concerto, and Lalo (the first movement of Symphonie Espagnole).

·         Next I spent at least 3 hours practicing some of the ‘less difficult’ Bach Sonatas and Partitas, followed by more etudes, scales, book reading (to rest my arms and shoulders), and ‘forced’ meals. My dog Damon would come into the room occasionally to visit. Sometimes, he would stay, and sleep at the foot of my music stand, and sometimes he would get bored, and walk away. (I have since found that cats seem to tolerate the harmonics of violin music much better than dogs.)

·         The summer ‘raged’ on until school started. By that time, I had sustained a ten-hour a day practice schedule through rainy days, hot and humid days, holidays and summer barbecues, and family functions, which I skipped one and all. I developed muscle sprain, soreness and tension in my upper back and shoulders, knotted hand muscles, and a dark bruise under my chin and on my clavicle from holding the violin. My fingertips had calluses from playing double-stops, and sliding along the fingerboard hundreds of times a day, and I temporarily developed blurred vision.

However, it all resulted in the desired outcome, because soon after school was back in session, I was easily able to earn a spot in the second violin section of the All-City Orchestra, beating out students from other schools who had started to play their instruments ten or more years before I began my lessons. Because I was from a school without an orchestra, I realized I was representing our entire music department, and I wanted to do well.

***

In end, when I reflect on my so-called ‘summer of rage’, I realize that, as unusual as it may have seemed to some, it was a look forward and a preview of how I, even today, tackle all such big problems and projects, and how that ‘rage to master’, has never left me. It has merely been tempered by the adult need to have a job and other adult obligations (and other interests), and, of course, a social life.

It's possible that the phenomenon occurs with the young in part, because they have none of those obligations (other than a few family chores from which they may even be excused) and can dedicate most if not all their waking hours single-mindedly honing and mastering a skill, or several of them.

***

Once, several years ago when my parents were both alive, I asked them about that summer and what they thought of it at the time. Their response was that, even thought it had been somewhat unusual to them, it had also been actually considered typical for me, and not the first time I had done something like that. (Apparently, and unknown to me at the time, I did it every time I discovered a new skill or hobby, such as with my writing, my artwork, my photography, and my tinkering and building, and the notebook keeping and dissecting.)

They also said that they would have worried had been anybody else (among my siblings) but me.

***

The rage to master and learn never goes away merely because one gets older; it reawakens every time there is a new skill to learn, especially a new hobby, or something so intriguing it switches that rage on to full burn.

The difficult part, for me, is turning it back off again.

Polymaths, Polyglots, and Autodidacts

'Prince' Rogers Nelson
(1958 - 2016)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756 - 1791)

Polymath (is) a person whose expertise spans a significant number of various subject areas. “Renaissance Man” was first recorded in written English in the early 20th century. It is now used to refer to great thinkers living before, during, or after the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man; a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination." (Excerpt from https://en.Wikipedia.org/Polymath)

Polyglot (is) a person who speaks several languages fluently.

Autodidact (is) a self-taught person.

***

I am the best teacher I know.

I can say this without false pride, ‘humble bragging’, or misplaced humility.

I have taught many subjects successfully, usually to what must be the best student I know.

You also are probably the best teacher you know, for all the same reasons.

The bold statements made above are true about most people, given a simple condition: That pupil and student must be the same person, you (or in my case, me.)

We are the best at teaching ourselves because we know our own strengths and weaknesses, we know what we ‘know’, and what we do not know, and we understand what we do not understand. That makes each of us suitably qualified to teach ourselves almost anything we care to learn, almost.

If you or anyone you know has a hobby or a pastime, one on which a much time has been invested, it is probable that that person taught that hobby to himself or herself, and enjoyed the teaching and the learning process immensely, thus significantly adding to their level of expertise and facility.

Now, I can also state that I am an equally good teacher with others, again, the best that I know. I say this, too, without too much bragging, humble or not, because I know it to be true, and those who I have taught also know it.

However, I cannot say it for you, because only you (or your students) would know whether you are a good teacher of others.

Many are not, especially among those with high IQs.

In fact, though knowledge is the acknowledged ‘coin of the realm’ for sentient species the world over (and at present, we are the only ones we know that all into that category), we are generally and as a group not very efficient at passing on that knowledge to one another. It happens eventually, but not very efficiently, and certainly not without some pain and frustration felt by both the teacher and the (hapless?) student.

There are several possible reasons human beings are generally (but not always) not very efficient as teachers. Some of those reasons are impatience, ego, temper, temperament, lack of empathy, lack of sympathy, and most importantly, little or no understanding of the learning process, often a symptom of the highly intelligent, since high IQ individuals who may not be aware of how they acquired the very knowledge they are attempting to pass on in the first place.

Because of these and other roadblocks, many people fare better with themselves as both teacher and student, even exceptionally bright-to-brilliant ones.

Most people tend to do well when they teach themselves.

Above average people do even better, with an exponentially greater degree of success.

The most prolific among that select number do not stop at teaching himself or herself merely one subject. Their thirst for new skills and new knowledge is not limited to one field of endeavor, so they often gain an equal or greater expertise in many others, some interrelated, and some among several widely differing disciplines.

The greatest minds known to human history, the very greatest geniuses our species has yet produced, have, without equivocation, all been largely if not  completely self-taught.

The ‘why’ of this fact is obvious: Genius cannot be externally absorbed, taught or obtained from an outside source. Genius beyond intellect is only accomplished by an almost arcane, deeply personal internal process, one that begins and ends with both student and pupil self-contained in one entity. It has never been accomplished any other way.

To be sure, ‘external’ teachers such as music instructors may start the process; they may guide the first tentative, early steps on the road to the acquisition of skill and knowledge, but the final level of achievement beyond the ordinary, where most pupils plateau, peak, or drop away, can only be achieved alone. This journey, for some, is, by necessity, a long and lonely one, for others, it can be accomplished as quickly, painlessly, and as naturally as intuition. However, the end of the journey is always the same for those few who can achieve such heights. For a small subset of that august group, being fluently across many languages adds another dimension to both the intellectual achievement, and the level of cultural variety in their experience.

The final product is often a lifetime of brilliant intellectual, artistic, and scientific revelation, not only for the individual, but also for all humanity, however long it takes the rest of the world to recognize that genius.

The most profoundly developed minds of the species are self-taught (autodidact) in several disciplines and fields (polymath). The names of some of these individuals, Such as Da Vinci and Tesla, are well known. Others are not, either because their work has been largely forgotten outside of their fields of endeavor, or because of the highly specialized nature of those fields.

Abhinavagupta

Abraham Lincoln

Albert Schweitzer

Al-Khwarizmi

Al-Kindi

Archimedes

Aristotle

Averroes

Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Franklin

Bertrand Russell

Salude El Dia

David Bowie

Dorothy Dunnett

Erwin Schrödinger

Frank Lloyd Wright 

Galileo Galilee

George Washington Carver

Gottfried Leibniz

Granville T. Woods

Harlan Ellison

Herman Melville

Hildegarde Von Bingen

Howard Hughes

Hypatia

Iannis Xenakis

Ibn al-Haytham

Imhotep

Isaac Asimov

J.R.R. Tolkien

Jacob Bronowski

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

John Von Neumann

Leon Battista Alberti

Leonardo da Vinci

Lewis Mumford

Malcolm X

Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Marilyn vos Savant

Matteo Ricci

Michael Faraday

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Mikhail Vasilyevich

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi

Nicola Tesla

Nicolas Copernicus

Noam Chomsky

Noël Coward

Omar Khayyám

Orson Welles

Paul Robeson

Prince Rogers Nelson (a.k.a. ‘Prince’.)

Pythagoras

Ray Bradbury

Shen Kuo

Sir Isaac Newton

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Thomas Jefferson

Trotula of Salerno

W. E. B. Du Bois

 Walter Pitts

William James Sidis

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Curt's 30 Postulates Of Problem-Solving

I am in a constant state of flux.

I hate it when stuff doesn’t work.

I am ‘unhappy’ when it does work.

Let me explain:

Solving certain types of problems, for me, is a hobby, rather like avoiding them is for other people.

Although I like theoretical conundrums, brain-twisters, and other contortions of pure logic, my first preference is for real-world problems of a technical, technological, and logistical nature. The more mysterious the issue, the more intriguing it is for me – and the more addictive.

I actually did not realize this until a friend noticed that I was never as happy with ‘stuff’ working as I was with the same stuff when it was not working. I would then, of course, be at pains to fix it – even though I often complain loudly and bitterly, I was, apparently and paradoxically, much more content.

I consider ‘impossible’ demands from, uh, ‘technologically naive’ Upper Management types an outright challenge and a slap in my face – almost daring me to achieve it. In addition, I delight in figuring out how to make ‘it’ happen, even when ‘it’ seems, at first, to be unattainable.

Frankly, mysterious, unexplained systemic failures make me go all giddy.

Every now and then, this obsession with the difficult yields contraptions, such as my most recently completed project, The Beowulf Plateau Prototype. (See link at the end of this article.)

During a rather long career of purposely seeking out and tackling such mysteries head-on, I have compiled an informal list of sorts, which I call “Curt’s 30 Postulates of Problem-Solving”. These are truisms that I have found occur repeatedly while tackling some of the most onerous and confounding issues, from the deceptively simple to the sublimely complex.

Call them postulates, theories, maxims, or hypotheses, but do not call them ‘rules’, or foolproof. They are not presented as such, nor are they the last word in problem-solving or universal panacea. In addition, it’s quite possible the ideas presented in the list are not 100% original. It is also quite probable that they will not and do not apply to every situation, or field of endeavor, so no guarantees are implied or promised. Whether or not they work for anybody else but me is for the reader to decide – keep the ones that work, and discard the rest.

Without further ado, I present my 30 observations of the problem-solving process. I hope that some few of them will prove to be useful.

Curt's 30 Postulates of Problem-Solving

1. After all the research, things usually turn out to be a lot simpler than they first appeared.

2. Sometimes, the actual solution is one of the very first things you find, but you do not realize it until you find it again - a few more times.

3. Re-inventing the wheel (just so you can truly understand how it works), is sometimes the only way you will find the solution.

4. The problem that you are researching or trying to solve is often just the tip of a very large iceberg, which was always there - even though nobody ever even knew that there was a problem in the first place.

5. If it’s a new problem, more than likely it was something caused by the solution of another issue somewhere back down the line.

6. Related to the previous statement: Being able to recall or record every single thing you did leading up to the problem will often solve the issue, or at least reveal why it keeps occurring.

7. Sometimes, the so-called 'jury-rigged', temporary and inelegant solution is the only one you are going to find.

8. Staying up too late, or working too closely on a problem too long - is one sure way to miss the obvious and apparent solution.

9. The solution will often, immediately and spontaneously reveal itself to your mind once you step away from the problem and 'call it a night.'

10. Brilliant flashes of insight can only happen (sometimes) in the midst of a crisis.

11. Not stopping to keep notes is the surest way to forget everything you have accomplished or learned up to date.

12. Being too proud to admit that you are stuck and then not seeking help because of that pride - is the surest way to stay stuck.

13. The less informed a person is, the harder it is to convince them that they do not know what the hell they're talking about. (This one almost always refers to bosses who are not knowledgeable in the field of the very departments they head up!)

14. The solution that worked 'last night' often will not work the next morning.

15. Sometimes, the 'theoretical, proven method' is neither proven, nor soundly theoretical. It is just the one that everyone talks about and passes on without trying it themselves.

16. Sometimes, that 'little nagging issue that you keep promising to fix later' turns out to be a MAJOR issue!

17. 'Big bosses' often don't know anything, but they often make unrealistic demands based on that very lack of knowledge, and then are still too clueless to appreciate when you've done the impossible and pulled off a miracle.

18. Forget about trying to 'break it down' to them: You will either draw blank stares, or spend the rest of your tenure trying to explain it to them again in simpler and simpler terms.

19. Oftentimes, the solution will occur to you after you look at two or three totally unrelated things out in the real world.

20. It is quite possible to walk away from a problem in utter defeat and come back years later for a 'final battle' where the solution is summarily found.

21. Sometimes, your math is perfect, but the steps you do your equations in are all wrong, or, at least, not optimized for the solution you are after. (This one refers more to low-level programming.)

22. If you don't keep a notebook of your variables and constants, or deal with them all day every day at work and at home, you are bound to forget some of their values. Same thing goes for nested arrays!

23. Some of the most knowledgeable people give the worst, most misleading advice. This will trip you up for months if you let it!

24. Sometimes, the best way to boost your project or solve your problem is to bring in a new person with a new perspective. They will often see the solution immediately,simply because they have not been saturated by the problem, which often blinds one to the obvious solution.

25. More elegant solutions are oftentimes only accessible or made more apparent by the winnowing down of big, fat, ugly solutions!

26. That problem that you've been avoiding because of its size and complexity is often not that intimidating, once you sit down and really face it.

27. Is 'it' even plugged in or on? You would be surprised how often this final, desperate and obvious solution, discovered hours later, is all that was required in the first place.

28. If you are afraid to go beyond 'thinking outside the box' straight into the hellish realm of the 'unorthodox and unheard of', you will never solve some problems, and you will certainly never amaze and dumbfound your peers!

29. If you do not believe in your solution/theory 100%, you will never be able to defend it against those self-same peers.

30. A solution to the most heinous and baffling problem, one that stumped the best minds for years, will seem so apparent and so easy to understand by almost anyone, even laypersons and children, after its been finally discovered.

For the curious, a shameless plug for the Beowulf Plateau Prototype:

http://contest.techbriefs.com/2013/entries/electronics/4254

also

http://www.curtisharrelljr.com

Aliens Among Us

The recent discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 System, a relatively close group of planets (thirty-nine light-years, or twelve parsecs away from Earth) revolving in a tight, almost elliptical orbit around a central sun-like star, has put the possibility of alien contact back in mainstream news. The Internet, (including respected scientific portals as well as fringe sites), is all afire with talk of what we might find there, usually meaning some type of alien life-form, quite possibly intelligent.

(That life-form would have to be vastly different from ours, because of the relative tightness of its satellite’s orbits, our idea of a ‘year’ passes in about three Earth weeks there.)

Some prominent ‘Big Thinkers’, such as Stephen Hawking, think we should be cautious, even fearful of attempting to establish any contact with an unknown, sentient species. The concern is that they will do to us what we have so often done to each other (when one race of humanity has met another in the past) only worse, if worse is possible, and ‘worse’ is always possible.

Others believe we should greet these aliens with open arms and offerings of peace. Unfortunately, some also think our highest office politicians should do the greeting.

A few things we can all agree on are:

a.) We don’t know what to expect, and...

b.) We have no previous experience in communicating with another nonhuman intelligence of possibly alien origin.

c.) We really need to develop a well thought out series of communication protocols based on what we can garner from communicating with the only nonhuman species currently available to us.

To assume that another intelligent species would communicate as we do could be disastrous.  For example, how would an intelligent alien species react to our custom of baring our fangs and barking maniacally like rabid hyenas (laughing)?

And what about our habit of unexpectedly launching biologically based microbial attacks (sneezing), or seeming to die suddenly and unexpectedly every few hours (sleeping)?

And perhaps most startling to non-Earth dwellers, the fact that some of us occasionally carry other people around inside us, and all of us conceal internal sacks of virulent waste products and other contaminants, if punctured, are deadly enough to kill the host body.

Obviously, we need practice in both communication and presentation, and we need to try to set some protocols.

***

Yet, surprising as it may seem, that inexperience should not exist, for there are, indeed, ‘alien’, (as in ‘nonhuman’) intelligences already among us, and have been for all our existence on this small planet we call home. Why haven’t we learned to communicate with them?

The answer to that question is also the first step in the process: First, we need to acknowledge openly that these nonhuman intelligences exist in the first place.

Ignorance of our own planet is another problem we need to address. At present, we know less about it and it’s more exotic environments (and its inhabitants) than we know about space. We know less about vast reaches of the ocean floor than we do our solar system and the starry expanses beyond.

It’s no surprise, then, that we also know almost nothing about communicating with the other also communicative, ‘nonhuman’ species with which we share this planet.

Before we traipse off into the dark expanse of eternal night of space looking for aliens to talk with, maybe we should attempt to practice with those intelligences already here. Since we won’t have access to one of the Star Trek Universe’s ultimate time-saving plot devices, the ‘Universal Translator’, we should try to get some good practice in communicating with the other nonhuman, higher functioning, communicating species already here. (‘Higher functioning’ meaning goals that we, as humans, can readily perceive, and from which we can directly benefit.)

I’m talking, of course, about primates (such as chimpanzees), as well as elephants, dolphins, our family pets (dogs), birds, even bees, and other hive mind, highly organized species of insects. (These are singled out because of the information they readily share with each other about harvesting and flight paths.)

(Note: For the purposes of this blog, it’ll go easier if we pause to expand the meaning the word of ‘intelligent’ to include the specific communication techniques of nonhuman species among themselves. The purpose of this proposal, then, is to close the gap between their form of communication and ours, a predetermined series of protocols similar to the ones used by networks of dissimilar devices, which allows them to exchange mutually beneficial communication and information.)

It is well documented that each of these species, in their way, is highly communicative and has what can only be called ‘species specific’ intelligence. Granted, it is not the same as the human variety, but it has served each species well, and has probably evolved in ways that either will not, or cannot imagine. 

For example, dolphins and other large sea mammals (such as whales) have shown sophisticated communication and navigation skills to rival the best GPS navigation and sonar systems.

Primates exhibit a complex social structure mirroring ours, including complex peer groups and pecking orders, and negative ‘human’ qualities, such as revenge and retaliation, and even retribution and reconciliation, and yes, even compassion and grieving.

Dogs, by their long-term exposure to human habitations and communications, understand and can appropriately respond to an astonishing range of human facial expressions, words, sounds, gestures, and even subtler forms of communication. (Of all the nonhuman intelligences listed here, we communicate the most with dogs, as if they were human themselves.)

‘Birdbrain’ may be misleading, because many species of birds exhibit complex, higher functioning reasoning capabilities, including (but not limited to) having complex navigation skills over great distances, which we are only recently beginning to fully understand. 

Elephants have been observed mourning their dead, a sure sign of something approaching intelligence, while bees, highly social, are also proving to be much more ‘intelligent’ than anyone had previously assumed.

***

So why aren’t we practicing communicating with these?

By ‘communicating’, I’m not referring to striking up a conversation such as one might have with another human, but a ‘discourse’ based on the same thing that all valid communication should be based on, common wants, needs, and mutually beneficial goals.

In fact, these are actually the safest subjects to discuss when meeting a fellow human for the first time, outside casual social encounters or gatherings. (Sorry, pleasantries fall distinctly into the realm of human interactions, and hence, would have no use for this experiment.)

Such communications will be, by their nature, extremely ‘narrow’ of subject and focus, because, for now, we can assume (until proved otherwise) that such animal communications don’t include idle socializing or random ‘chit chat’. Although they may lack the range and random creativity of human patois, these animal communication systems are no less valid in their particular sphere of use.

We, as human beings, know enough about the ways and behaviors of the previously listed species to, if we wanted, craft a list of subjects to engage with each, and, taking what we know about their preferred mode of communication, begin a ‘dialogue’ (or, more precisely ‘data exchange’) with them.

Specifically, one can assume that all animal communication can be categorized and based on only four topics:

1.       Where food is

2.       The location of potential mates and rivals for those mates

3.       The location of predators

4.       The location of gathering and migration territories and watering holes

These simple topics, survival-based, illustrate why animal communication, by its very nature, would be extremely narrow of range, insofar as topics are concerned, and, of course, completely devoid of idle ‘chit chat’.

Although it may be amusing for Disney to imagine animals talking as if they were furry versions of people, with all the varied ranges of human style communication such as humor, wisecracks, complaints, and witty asides, the actual case is much more simple: animal communication is about one thing and one thing only: survival.

Doctors Dolittle (Eddie Murphy and Rex Harrison) shall not be required this time around.

Therefore, the human side of this ‘inter-species’ communication and discourse would be that of data miner, collecting important information beneficial to each species.

Still, if the idea of actually 'talking' to animals is too much to contemplate, consider it an "upload/download of data between two mutually beneficial systems (human and animal) using protocols that each understands, and from which each can benefit."

For instance, knowing how to communicate with dolphins would make it possible to share information on weather, locations of large schools of fish, and unknown masses above and below the surface of the water.

Learning how to communicate with bees (by their ‘waggle’ dance) might be helpful in preventing their extinction, and restoring them to their previous numbers.

Communication with elephants, also currently endangered, could help in tracking their movements, and the dangers they encounter on their long cross-continental treks, including known poacher hideouts.

One final consideration: It’s very probable that if a non-human species is capable of interstellar travel, that species may well be of a higher intelligence than we humans are currently used to. (After all, we are, at this point in our history, the only sentient species we know.) All the more reason to prepare a protocol, and at least begin to get ‘used’ to the idea of communication with something other than ourselves, something which we are still trying to get right between adverse nations, peoples, and cultures right here on our own planet.

So why aren’t we practicing?

Animal Systems of Communication (Edward Vajda)

Please, Don't Call Me That...

“Gifted…”

I hate that word.

Some think ‘hate’ is a strong word that should be avoided, or, at least, used with caution, and they are probably correct. However, as I writer, I have never shied away from the power of words to create or destroy ideas.

And I would really like to destroy the word ‘gifted’, or at least the current meaning it has when used to describe some people.

To my mind, it is self-serving and even a bit pompous. It is discriminatory in its exclusive ‘inclusiveness’, an accolade, if not self-bestowed, then all too readily accepted, one that is beneficial only to the one it is used to describe, and perhaps not even then, if no good use comes of the skills or abilities the label implies.

It also indicates that some of us are, by accident of birth alone, somehow ‘better’ than the rest of us, as if we were preordained or destined to be special. For all we know, ‘how’ we are may only be an accident of birth, and nothing else. I think the following exchange from the movie Troy (2004) best expresses how I feel about being called ‘gifted’.

Briseis: "Why did you choose this life?"

Achilles: "What life?"

Briseis: "To be [a great warrior?]" [gifted?]

Achilles: "I chose nothing. I was born and this is what I am."

***

I have several reasons for feeling this way, all from lessons hard earned, maybe even required.

When I was a child, my parents noticed that teachers would send me home regularly with admonishments and punishments for things that they knew I had not done. (I rarely spoke a word in school during my elementary years, preferring to keep my hands folded on my desk, and kept its as close to the teacher's desk as possible. Moreover, I always turned my assignments on time, usually before time.)

So why was I being so regularly disciplined? It was done to save me from the wrath of the other students, the so-called ‘non-gifted’ ones.

One of my teachers explained:

Having seen a far crueler type of punishment meted out to me on the playground during recess, she had decided that it was better to punish me with the rest of the class rather than single me out for my grades or other accomplishments, thus inadvertently belittling and most likely infuriating the other children. (I wrote my first short story before most of my classmates had even learned to read, I was also already an accomplished artist before most of them mastered writing their names.)

The teachers knew that, growing up around the Cabrini-Green area of Chicago's Near North Side during the hellish 60s must have been a particularly difficult ordeal for a quiet child who displayed such a wide range of ‘peculiar’ interests. This behavior could be especially dangerous in a neighborhood where standing out in such a manner would only result in retaliatory actions from ‘less accomplished’ classmates at the first opportunity.  (Less accomplished does not mean less human, just as being considered ‘gifted’ does not equate with being ‘more’ than human, special, or privileged.)

Unfortunately, for me, it would be several years before the full list of these ‘peculiar skills’ had fully revealed themselves to my teachers, my classmates, my parents, and me. Each newly discovered ability brought along with it another, darker ‘gift’, another reason I dislike the word. That dark gift was animosity, jealousy, miscomprehension and exclusion.

I learned early that being ‘different’ (I’m purposely avoiding using the world ‘gifted’ here), that being different should not be used to single out an individual, or to raise him or her above his or her peers.

Among the young, it antagonizes and provokes.

Among adults, it induces suspicion, envy, and barely concealed animosity, and most of all, intense jealousy bordering on hatred.

Singling someone out as ‘gifted’ does exactly that, singles them out, elevates, and ultimately ostracizes them from the ‘non-gifted’ majority. This type of elevation does not usually sit well with those 'normal' mortals left on the ground, and can make living and working with them difficult.

So I learned to avoid the label, whether it was administered as a compliment or not. I even began to hide certain things about me to avoid being branded with it, a moniker which I grew to regret.

In my opinion, this use of the word, especially in this context, is a perversion of the original concept. A gift of this type serves no one if it serves only one, and serves no one at all if the most important element of the gift is the label itself, and nothing concrete or practical comes of it. A ‘gift’ of this type, that only serves to single out and elevate certain (apparently random) individuals, unless accompanied by considerable accomplishment, is just an empty conceit, and an indulgence of the ego, and little else.

”When you’re smart, people need you. You can use your mind creatively.” Quote from Real Genius (1985)

***

My other problem with the word is way it is it bestowed, and how it is almost ‘greedily’ received, and how vainly displayed. Lifting oneself up as gifted above all others (or ‘some’ others) is also separating oneself from others, until there are no ‘others’ left from which to be separated.

For the label to have any real meaning, the gift should somehow, in some way large, small, or in between, manifest itself to the benefit of not just the recipient, but some other inhabitant of this world other than the one it is supposed to describe.

Only then is the word restored to its true meaning, by elevating a spirit, improving the human condition, or even just one other person in need of inspiration or hope.

I think I’d rather be called a contributor or ‘gifter’ than gifted.

https://evolution-institute.org/contributors/