Smart Smart People

A few weeks ago I ranted about dumb vs. smart people. I found one of the smart people. I’m willing to bet the guy on the left is someone you’ve never heard of. I hadn’t until last night. His name is Sanford Ovshinsky, and he’s one of the smartest smart people.

The Economist calls him the Edison of our age, which is a pretty safe statement. It’s not simply his brain power that makes him remarkable, it’s his sheer chutzpa. He founded a company called Energy Conversion Devices (ECD). One of the main focuses of ECD is bringing hydrogen power sources into the mainstream. Here’s the sticky part: He founded the company in 1960.

Stanford wasn’t singularly obsessed with hydrogen though. Over the years he has invented and holds patents on a few items you may have heard of; rewriteable optical disks, flat panel displays, non-volatile memory, thin-film solar cells, and the nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery. Oh yea, did I mention he never went to college? He had to drop out of school during the Depression to help support his family. He credits his learning to public libraries.

ECD has actually lost money for most of its existence. Not that Stanford gave a rip about that, because he was always looking out at the horizon and not at the bank account. At 84 years old he’s just now standing on the edge of what will truly change the world. He’s engineered how to make solar cells without silicon, no small deal, as the price of solar cells has risen 50% in recent years because of a crunch in industrial silicon. He has also transformed solar cells into thin, flexible, self-adhesives that can be rolled onto just about anything. According to The Economist, he has worked out how to manufacture it at over 200 feet per minute. But the truly huge promise of his work is that he believes he’s figured out a way to scale up his hydrogen storage system to the megawatt level. This holds enormous potential, as it could move us away from being at the direct mercy of the power grid.

I think I missed something big in my dissection of smart people. I think the biggest ingredient is that you have to really want it. You have to be willing to ride hard towards your objective, even if you’re not sure what the objective will look like. The toughest part is probably that you have to be willing to stay your course when common consensus is that you’re full of s***. Einstein didn’t know the mechanics of it, but just knew there had to be a better explanation. He took a ton of crap from everyone around him and got academically blackballed, but he kept swinging away and eventually came up with E-mc2. Michael Faraday had almost no formal education, got scoffed at for most of his career, and was ostracized by the Royal Society…..until they finally realized he was on to something. The more I look at it the more I think that drive counts as much as intellectual capacity.

Ares

My Unborn Child

YouTube is the biggest and best waste of time since the advent of cable TV. For today's blogshot I used the power of YouTube for good and not evil. Having only seen the commercial on TV once, I searched and quickly found what I was looking for. Anyone that has ever had or spent time around small children will appreciate this. For that matter, this one is pretty good too. I have a bad feeling that Mrs. Ares and I will be seeing a lot of this if we reproduce.

Ares

Holiday Greetings

Both of us here at Ares and Athena want to pass along holiday greetings...to all 5 of our readers. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyful Kwanzaa, Pleasant Boxing Day, Enjoyable Belated Ramadan, Exalted Festivus, and positive salutations to whatever holiday Buddhists celebrate.

In honor of the holiday we pass along this reimagined classic.

Financial Likeness

One of the most universally hated institutions in our country is credit reporting bureaus. Under the hate-the-game-not-the-player theory I tend to see them as a necessary evil. The part that’s debatable is the level of evil that’s necessary. This brings me to an idea that Athena and I have been in agreement on for a few years now: Identity likeness rights.

Everyone’s familiar with the idea of likeness rights. If company X wants to use my mug in advertising they have to reimburse me, or at least get me to sign a waiver. To quote from the Library of Congress’s web citation on privacy and publicity rights “The privacy right or interest of the subject is personal in character, that the subject and his/her likeness not be cast before the public eye without his/her consent, the right to be left alone. The publicity right of the subject is that their image may not be commercially exploited without his/her consent and potentially compensation.” (Italics mine.)

I don’t recall ever giving my consent to Trans Union or Equifax to create a profile on me. In other words, they own my financial likeness. Their corporations are the direct financial beneficiaries of my financial existence, yet I have to pay them for a service that I have no choice in participating in. Yes, I know we’re allowed free credit reports. How incredibly noble of them, a gratis look at an algorithm’s opinion of me. Meanwhile, through lovely concepts like universal default, the credit reporting bureaus facilitate a greater payout by consumers across the spectrum of purchasing.

But how is my financial identity any different than my physical likeness? Apparently the difference is that the law has decreed my physical person has a right to privacy but not my financial person. To again quote the above, “their image may not be commercially exploited without his/her consent and potentially compensation.” I hate to sound like I’m playing lawyer word games here, but I don’t think this is too much of a stretch.

The really scary folks aren’t the Big Three. They’re regulated and accountable to a fair degree, and that regulation is growing constantly. The really scary folks are pigf***ers like ChoicePoint (with their pictures of kids playing and puppy dogs on their mainpage) and Acxiom. They can take your identity and sell it to whoever walks through the door and any financial fallout is borne by you, the consumer that had zero say in who gets possession of your financial likeness. Choicepoint got caught doing just this a few years ago, and the jury is literally still out on what sort of penalty they should incur. (Update, I stand corrected. 5 mil, that'll show 'em.) This, not the Big Brother Bogeyman, is who we should lavishing with concerned attention.

And please, spare me your incantations of 1984. Anybody who’s worked in government can tell you there aren’t enough smart people concentrated in a given corner to execute a finely tuned cabal in secret. Your chances of being mistakenly imprisoned by the government without recourse are pretty close to zero. If it does happen there are broad avenues of recourse. (Unless your name is Jose Padilla, sucks to be you pal. Read my reference in an earlier post about entering the arena of conflict.) Your chances of ChoicePoint selling all of your personal information to a Nigerian criminal ring are substantially higher. And your recourse when that happens amounts to Jack and Shit, and Jack left town.

Ares

Administrative Notes

Just a few housekeeping details. As you've probably noticed, I've been putzing around with the formatting. If there's any particular format you find more annoying than another let me know. Second, I know it looks like I'm blog-hoggin. It's not that Athena doesn't have anything to say. Due to a bunch of factors that are too cumbersome to list I have more time and access to posting than she does. She tends to "give at the office", so to speak. More to follow......

Ares

All those people

Today I did something I don’t normally do. I drove around the exurbs of this godforsaken city. A lot. An appointment took me over hell’s outer acres. I normally have almost no commute, so I can’t complain about having to endure traffic. (My aggregate monthly commute miles are less than most people’s daily.) But one thought did strike me: What exactly are all these people doing and why are they doing so much of it?

True, I was one of those people, but I was just visiting. Sitting in traffic is one of the biggest wastes of time since penguin baseball without the ensuing bragging rights. Which leads me to think that anyone that believes mass transit is going to solve this problem needs to put the bong down. People are annoyed to the point of shortening their lives and wasting breathtaking amounts of time, and still volunteering to do it each day. We need something bigger than mass transit to get a handle on this one. I think the appropriate buzzword here is paradigm shift.

I’m not climbing on the global warming/anti-hydrocarbon economy/save the earth soap box. Also not talking about anti-capitalism; I’m a market champion to the point of being Libertarian. There is something bigger at work here. Humans weren’t meant to live like this. And by “like this” I mean spending inordinate amounts of our waking hours going back and forth to sit in little boxes to earn money to buy stuff. Somewhere along the line means and ends became inexplicably intertwined. When you break the chain of habit commanded by existence and think about it does this feel right to anybody out there?

I’m not espousing a return to the mythological “Good Old Days”. (Any time you hear someone use the term “Good Old Days” be wary. It’s a loaded term wielded by those that can’t envision a future worth creating.) There are parts of this modern world that are very much worth having. Mrs. Ares advocates something between neo-Amish and neo-luddism. I think that mightiest of modern writers got it just right:

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra. F*** Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic.

Ares

If It Walks Like a Duck.....

I don’t like beating dead horses, but I’ve got a few questions. By now the battle lines are firmly drawn in the whole overwrought imams-thrown-off-the-plane incident. Is it me or does it seem like they had the press releases and indignation spring loaded and ready to fire? We’ll let that one go, as I’m sure one of the imams had CAIR on speed dial. CAIR probably has a pre-formatted press release for stock denouncements. I have yet to waste a single second of my life reading anything they write, but I would imagine it reads something like “We, the yadda yadda yadda of the religion of peace, do most strongly protest the treatment of yadda yadda yadda at the hands of yadda yadda yadda.”

My second question is the big one. This is your big chance Mr. Imam, explain exactly what it was you were doing dancing around the cabin, yelling like a Palestinian game show host? I can assure you the media is on your side and is only too willing to make the airline and the Department of Homeland Security look like jackasses. Throw Wolf Blitzer a bone show us how it was all just a big misunderstanding. I’m a reasonably intelligent guy so I’m sure if you got me in the contextual neighborhood I’d be all up in there with you. The lady that got the flight diverted for lighting matches to cover her farts is a good example. Who hasn’t let fly on a plane? Maybe you had some lower G.I. issues and decided to go check with Mohammed to see if he had any wetnaps for your impending trip to the wiz closet. En route to Mohammed’s seat a couple of good air biscuits shot out of you unexpectedly. Embarrassed, you let fly with a few good Allah Ahkbars to provide some auditory cover.

My other question is simpler and more towards the rhetorical. Though I haven’t seen it anywhere I’m sure someone has made this reference. Isn’t a bunch of guys screaming Allah Ahkbar on an airplane the modern equivalent of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater? Memo to all you ass clowns: Your freedom of speech comes to a screeching halt when you scream the name of your god while in the midst of a conveyance that your co-religionists used to murder my countrymen. Flying is a privilege, not a right. If you wanna get your god on at Koresh levels while in a mode of transportation get yourself a Kia and hit Interstate 80. (I don’t usually endorse other people’s work, but for an excellent editorial on the issue I direct you to this piece in the Wall Street Journal.)

I think it’s time we engage the Duck Rule. For those not familiar, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and craps like a duck you’re probably dealing with a duck. This was a PR hit, pure and simple. I’m not the first person to suggest that. The only reason I invoke the Duck Rule is that no other plausible explanation has been put forth. With the world-wide mass media engine pointed directly at them the voices of the Religion of Peace haven’t issued so much as a beer belch in the arena of explanatory logic and justification. Here’s a hint to all of the Islam boosters in the crowd out there: Bashing the faults of your opposition does not endow you with righteousness, or even prove your point. It just makes you look like the mental 11 year old that you are.

And while we’re on the subject I think CAIR is the Tokyo Rose of the Long War. Think of all the energy they’re wasting on press releases when they could be, say, beating they’re wives. Okay, that was crude, I’m sure they don’t beat their wives. But I’m pretty sure hell’s going to freeze over before we hear them condemn the practice. I sent Athena an article the other day about a male school teacher in Afghanistan that was disemboweled and literally ripped apart by the Taliban recently. His crime was teaching at a school for girls. Surely we can all get together and agree this is evil? Not CAIR’s cup of tea I guess. As the brilliant television show once intoned, they’re beating the women. Step back from that and we can talk like adults. Hell, I’ll even talk to you like you’re a man.

Ares

Dumb Smart People

I’ve been kicking an idea around my melon for a while now. Are we more inclined to think people are smart because we agree with them? Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you agreed with a statement made by someone you can’t stand? It is so automatic that we barely even notice. We dismiss them as morons and henceforth everything issued from their pie hole is crap.

The conservative blogs have a designated term for this when it’s applied to the president: Bush Derangement Syndrome. Its victims are otherwise intelligent people that are never more than two conversational leaps from a sputtering, profanity laced Tourettes syndrome outburst when it comes to anything dealing with our current president. (That reminds me, at some point I’m going to take a blog walk with the outsized emotional investment this country has made in the office of the president.)

But to me the president is just a humorous footnote in a larger question. If possible, put down the political and social pretensions and ask yourself a question. What constitutes ‘smart’ in our society?

There are obvious benchmarks that have always been accepted. An advanced degree will get you street cred in some circles. Going to law or med school will get you a seat at the table. But the older you get the more lawyers and doctors you meet. After you’ve met a few and spoke with them socially you realize that the dumb ass distribution hits that population with some measure. I think in some cases people we’ve been giving the smart tag are really folks that were just obsessive-compulsive about academics.

Another pit we commoners fall into when it comes to viewing smart people is being mystified by their skill set. Because a person knows a lot about something doesn’t automatically make them smart. It just means they’ve lived in a neighborhood you haven’t, intellectually speaking. How many of us have met people that can give you the intimate details of a computer server while barely being able to dress themselves?

I know, there’s that whole ‘emotional intelligence’ thing at work. But I’m driving at something a bit different. A computer with a big hard drive isn’t necessarily a great computer; it just holds a lot of stuff. Saw a bit on the Science Channel a while back about an English guy that can solve pi out to 20,000 places in his head and can learn a new language in a week. While he is an impressive intellectual specimen he is also of limited use to humanity. My idea of a really smart person is Benjamin Franklin. He failed a fair amount, but he was always pushing the unknown. Granted, in his day the unknown was a hell of a lot bigger.

And while I’m on the subject of the unknown there is another ugly phenomenon that’s poking up its head up here and there. With the rise of the Internet, Wikipedia (which I love), and the Discovery Channel there are a lot more people getting exposed to a lot more stuff that would have normally been outside of their knowledge envelope. While learning is a good thing because it makes us push up against our unknowns it does not automatically impart wisdom. Just because you saw a thing on the Discovery Channel does not mean you’re an astrophysicist or expert on modern warfare.

This is especially insidious in the realm of politics, where partisans pick and choose knowledge that suits their position. You can test this hypothesis by going into any large chain bookstore. Look at the variety of books that are prominently displayed near the entrance. Most are tomes taking a particular view on a divisive issue. Somewhere along the way it was decided by mass media that controversy and conflict should constitute the largest part of our diet. Critical thinking is getting that much tougher, for those that even care to engage in it, because our springs of knowledge are being flavored and tainted.

So I return to the question I’ve been asking myself for quite some time now: What constitutes ‘smart’ in our society? I think the definition is like art and pornography. You know it when you see it. I think we would benefit from a lot more people pushing the limits of their experience and intellect. Merely being an information consumer isn’t enough.

Ares