Visualizing

But you could sleep for those two hours!

I went to one of the first fw "magnet" schools in the USA, with IQ and achievment tests to get in and they required minimum grades (72 average) to stay in.

The freshman washout rate was about 20%.

I was great at math and science, terrible at english, and basically helpless in French.

I know for a fact that the staff met and fudged grades to retain the kids with asymmetric talents.

It's tragic to force kids to do things they can't, and tell someone that they are a failure because that don't understand the symbolism in Moby Dick, when they could be dynamite engineers or airplane mechanics.

I used to work on ships, designing control systems and for a while going out and maintaining them.

The steam plants were especially dangerous. A welded pipe joint might leak an invisible jet that would cut you in half. The crew would test a joint by waving a broomstick around it, and see if the end would be sliced off and fall to the deck.

We like to leave the door open at our new office. We get fresh air and neighbors and kids and dogs and fruit flies.

These really work:

There is also visual recall of something you have seen which is slightly different. Eidetic memory is the most extreme form.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory

I have always assumed that most people can do it to some extent. The next level up is being able to look at something (or imagine it) and then carve it or construct one in 3D. Very few people can do that.

Using visual memory is one way to beat a classic Alzheimer's test by imagining an apple, balanced on a ball sat on a chair. It doesn't seem to suffer the same degradation as normal short term abstract memory.

Indeed. The people who I admire the most are composers who can image roughly what an entire orchestra will sound like playing their newly written score. That takes an incredible amount of aural imagining.

We also have no way of knowing if what I experience for red colour is the same as what you see for red. Some colour blind people really do see the world differently (most common red-green colour blindness). But the ones with slightly extended near IR vision through 4 types of cones had advantages in warfare since they can distinguish growing vegetation from cut and dying vegetation that has been used for camouflage.

Some people can "see" equations flow. Probably Phil can.

I can visualize a circuit and see the voltages and the current flowing around, but that falls apart at any great complexity, and I can forget, so it helps to scribble the ideas in a bedside notebook.

Some look great in the morning and some really don't.

Some ideas happen in the shower so they are harder to scribble down. I recall that someone once sold a waterproof sketch kit or whiteboard or something.

But you can make yourself understood here, which doesn't entirely work to your advantage. Your English expression is fine, but what you have to express is somehwat superficial.

Actually it is merely stupid to try to force kids to do thing that they can't.

Good teachers don't work that way - they offer less able kids less demanding tasks, that they can manage, and can frequently get them quite a long way by progressively making the tasks more demanding as the kids get more competent.

I doubt if anybody has been locked out of a career in a practical subject because they couldn't understand the symbolism in Moby Dick, but then again it never featured in any class in any school I went to. I have read the book, but wasn't all that impressed.

Thomas Love Peacock is more to my taste.

I suppose that being nearsighted has social-evolutionary advantages. Some people shoot arrows, some people make arrows.

You sound like me. I tried French and Spanish and just barely got by.

In jr high I wanted to play the drums but there were 4 others that had some previous training. I then mentioned another instrument but could not play it due to having braces and could no blow correctly. I was forced to take up an instrument for 2 ears that I really hated but got by. Gave it up in high school as we did not have to take band or chorus. The band was more interested in putting on a good show instead of actually teaching.

I went to a tech school and did well.We had an english course or two but it was to teach technical writing and public speaking no reading of novels that I had no interest in.

?????

I design electronics and sell it. Is that superficial? What do you do?

NIF just discovered a new fusion trick, inertial confinement in a diamond sphere. Maybe we helped.

I met a guy on this forum, who teaches a 2-year course in industrial automation at Sierra Collage. We dropped in on a class at the campus in Truckee. The course is very cool and very hands-on and his graduate placement rate is 100%. His grads run enormous factories.

Having extreme visual acuity was highly prized back in the days before there were optical aids. Roman centurions had an eye test for lookouts based on splitting the close double epsilon Lyra (which is at the limit

A very small number of children and young adults can see the Galilean moons of Jupiter at greatest extension from the planet (a feat that most people need a telescope or binoculars for hence Galileo's discovery). Seeing them against the planet's glare requires both good optical figure lens and very clear fluid gel in the eyeball.

Splitting Alcor & Mizar in the plough is easy by comparison (anyone with

Sounds like the old sales motivation: "Visualize Success!"

Joe Gwinn

Space Pen and waterproof surveyor's field notebook?

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Waterproof markers are also used. Many will write underwater.

Joe Gwinn

I was surprised when my 3-year old son described venus as a 'little moon'. To my unaided eyes, it was just an unusually bright pinpoint.

Jeroen Belleman

So can I, as long as it's rod knock or a hard miss. ;)

Telling a plugged cat from clogged injectors from retarded timing, not so much.

I've taken two engines apart to varying degrees. One was a complete rebuild (oversize pistons, align bore, half-race cam) of a 1973 Fiat.(*)

The other one was a 1978 Triumph that needed a head gasket. It was a lot easier back when you could open the hood and see at least a bit of pavement.

And the Navier-Stokes equations are for incompressible flow, which is only the first-order model for aeronautics. (Jet engines need thermodynamics, which N-S doesn't do.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) No, it wasn't the good one, i.e. the 124 Spyder--it was a 1100 cc Model 128 sedan. Yes, that's completely stupid, but hey, I was 18, so cut me some slack. Nowadays my stupidity comes out in far more sophisticated forms. ;)

Or just write on the tiles with a nice black grease pencil. (Staying married afterwards is left as an exercise for the reader.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

You want stupid? I had an Austin-Healy Sprite, it got crushed between two giant American uglies, so I took the insurance money and bought a new MG Midget.

Here is is now:

Well, at least you both more or less survived. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs