OT: The Radioactive Boy Scout

ShortBit is intentionally stupid.

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m, rather more successfully, probably because they were a whole lot smarter .

erials suggests that he wasn't all that clever

ugh.

When I was a graduate student, some of the other graduate students were rat her careless about handling radioactive sources. Graduate students are tole rably mature, and tolerably bright, but the casual ones did seem to be less clever than the rest of us.

Tabb's mileage may vary.

would fit better with his dubious social relationships.

When I worked at EMI Central Research, which was something of a patent fact ory, I got my name on two patents in three year. One of my colleagues famou sly generated more patent queries than anybody else in the building (and th e staff included Godfrey Hounsfield at the time). Nothing seemed to have co me of any of them.

Wanting to invent something isn't a great way of coming up with the kind of patent that pays off. Most don't. Socially awkward loners have their uses, but research environments are more about cooperation than individual inspi ration, and cooperative idea-swapping - sometimes formalised as brain-storm ing - is rather more productive than the isolated genius solving a problem that he come up with on his (or her) own. I have solved a couple of problem s a few years before my colleagues were prepared to recognise that these we re problems that needed solving, which meant that any suggestion that we mi ght have spent thousands patenting my solutions wouldn't have got anywhere (not that my solutions were all that patentable, though the EMI Lawyers mig ht have worked something out, if I had still been at EMI at the time.

Some are just bad at social interactions. One has to suspect autism spectru m in some cases.

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an easier life of it if they pick other hi-iq-ers to socialise/date with.

Rubbish. Smart people find interacting with other smart people more rewardi ng in some ways, but having to take the time to explain intellectual points in more detail is no big deal. My interactions with skilled machinists wen t the other way - they had to spend more time explaining practical points t o me in more detail than they were used to, which didn't seem to worry them .

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aterials suggests that he wasn't all that clever

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Autism spectrum people find interacting with other people difficult. There seems to be some kind of specific brain defect involved, and researchers ar e working on teasing out what goes wrong, and how.

Apparently autism is just as common in females as males, but women have - or are taught - better social skills than males, and compensate better.

an easier life of it if they pick other hiqers to socialise/date with.

ppen. You can't have any genuine relationship between people that routinely misunderstand each other at every level.

A 115 to 140 IQ gap doesn't generate that kind of misunderstanding of itsel f.

I had a mathematician friend who sometimes spent time telling me about stuf f he was working on without giving me enough back-ground material to let me understand what he was going on about - which was the geometry of algebrai c fields. He wasn't all that good at breaking it down for explanation to ou tsiders, and I rapidly learned to wait until he had said "and it generalise s" after which he'd move back to matters of general interest.

I'd completed theory of computation part 1 by then, so I did know what a Ga lois field was

but Brian - at that stage - hadn't had enough practice in talking about his work to outsiders to tell us what was actually going on, or why it mattere d.

The defect is in your understanding, not his.

"People just don't understand me!" = "People don't kiss my ass and tell me how great I am all the time"

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to happen. You can't have any genuine relationship between people that rout inely misunderstand each other at every level.

The "misunderstood genius" we had to put up with (though he wasn't actually a genius, though pretty bright) was perfectly well understood - he just di dn't like dealing with other people. If you could shut him in a room with c ircuit problem he could deal with in isolation he was just fine, but very f ew of the problems we had to cope with were like that, and most involved lo ts of talking to the people who were going to sell the gear, assemble it, c alibrate it and so forth.

It wasn't design by committee but there were mostly lots of people interest ed in any given design, who all liked to know what was going on, and liked to think that their particular problems were going to dealt with (as they m ostly were).

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to happen. You can't have any genuine relationship between people that rout inely misunderstand each other at every level.

How would krw be able to work that out? Except to his own satisfaction, of course.

In fact the problem here is that NT has some silly ideas about clever peopl e having problems communicating with less clever people (which isn't a prob lem I've seen) and seems unwilling to accept that border-line autistics can look cleverer than they are because they concentrate on the problem they h ave been given and won't pay attention to anything else.

it doesn't surprise me that bill is as daft as you

Apart from breathing in alpha emitting dust from the mineral sources and HV for the Geiger counter the kit didn't really pose any great threat.

Uranium intensifiers for photography were on sale back then and war surplus radium painted aero meter needles were not hard to come by.

The Ilford In-5 recipe was sol A ~2% uranium nitrate. But if you think that is bad look at Monckhoven's Intensifier In-4 just above it!

DIY cloud chambers using alcohol and black velvet over dry ice were popular teenage geek experiments in the 1970's C.L Stong's Amateur Scientist column detailed how to make one (and it worked). I knew someone who built the Van de Graff part of the atom smasher project. We also did spark coils, Geissler tubes and big Tesla coils.

It doesn't surprise me that NT thinks that. Around here, he seems to operate at about the same level as krw. Daftness would be an aspiration for him, rather than anything he could hope to achieve.

Yeah, the American philosophy is that it's better to invest heavily in dreamers and "can-do" attitude and be suspicious of "experts" with proven track records.

It pays off sometimes, but most of the time the "can-do" wunderkinds are kinda full of shit, their main expertise being understanding American psychology and knowing how to exploit it effectively via high-octane self-promotion.

The reason most Americans make lousy friends and employers is for a similar reason; employers that start taking their long-time employees for granted and even becoming suspicious of them but will fall all over themselves to grab the attention of new blood that's never done shit for them but give them a passing glance are pretty common

I bought some radioactive paint to make my watch hands glow in the dark. My college supervisor was peeved when he discovered I was keeping it in a lab drawer at crotch height...

Mike.

torsdag den 26. april 2018 kl. 01.51.25 UTC+2 skrev Jeff Liebermann:

ves "cold" fusion.

he

this scammer got 26million and it still doesn't work

peas in a pod.

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ng to happen. You can't have any genuine relationship between people that r outinely misunderstand each other at every level.

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Krw has a simple classification scheme - either you agree with his silly id eas or you don't. Anything more complicated would stretch his limited cogni tive capacity beyond it's very narrow limits.

Bitrex and I are both smarter than krw - not exactly an ambitious claim - s o we look identical to him. A more discriminating viewer might notice diffe rences.

This does take us back to the proposition that intelligent people find it d ifficult to interact with the less intelligent. In reality it isn't in the least difficult, but why would one bother? There are plenty of moderately i ntelligent people around to interact with, so krw and NT can sit on the she lf, where they belong.

ves "cold" fusion.

he

Yes, if you believe something can't be done, then you have a pretty close t o zero chance of ever doing it.

Rick C.

When an expert claims something is impossible, there's a good chance he's right, examples to the contrary notwithstanding.

Jeroen Belleman

I get your point and pretty much agree but for pretty much every breakthrough, there has been an "expert" who claimed that it was impossible. When the issue involves physics as it's currently known, the contrarians are less reliable, however. ;-)