Unsolicited Advice

I cannot count how many times in my life someone I'm talking to has fixed me with a look and just said, "You're really  smart." The specific look varies; sometimes it's dubious, sometimes it's blank confusion, sometimes it's deer-in-headlights. They say it in the same tone of voice one might have used to inform André the Giant that he was impressively large, or to comment to one's companions that the ocean is rather wet. What makes them do this is a mystery I have never solved. I know exactly why they think I'm ungodly smart. It's because I am. Aside from my self-evaluation, I have twelve years of public school records full of standardized test scores so high they broke the software used to print the results and sent parts of the bar graph shooting off into the margins. I also have confirmation from people who have been officially certified as smart by other smart people at large, well-regarded universities, who were themselves once certifi...

Dear Young Enthusiastic Genius Kid, Today is September 1st, so you're about to start college, or perhaps already have. That's great. I really hope you intended to be there. Universities are great places, if you actually want to go. A lot of your classmates don't, which is a social problem we're going to have to deal with someday, but many of you probably do, so congrats on obliterating the minimum SAT scores you needed to secure your spot. I'm about to turn thirty-four. This makes me like way ancient by the standards of college freshmen. You really have no reason to believe me when I say I had much the same educational experience that you did, unless you go back through the archives of this blog and develop a vague feeling of kinship. That's fine. I didn't listen to anyone this old when I was your age either, which was probably a good decision, since most of them didn't know what they were talking about anyway. I'm about to give you a piece of ...

I signed a petition on Change.org earlier this week, requesting that someone get Jon Stewart to moderate one of the 2016 Presidential debates. I have absolutely no idea if he wants to; right now he's busy guest-hosting WWE events, of which he is a longtime fan, and stopping just short of going eeeeeeheeheeheheeee  like a prepubescent fangirl whenever they let him into the ring. I wish to note, for the record, that 1) they don't let you get body-slammed by pro wrestlers unless you've practiced that first; 2) he's not doing too badly for a guy on the far side of fifty who routinely describes himself as "a hundred and fifty pounds of osteoporosis"; and 3) his dress sense, when not in costume as a news anchor, can be summed up in sexist meme terms as 'adjunct faculty in the humanities, whose wife has completely given up', and if he were one of my undergrad instructors, I would absolutely hit this man up for weed. I know exactly why I want him to do it, ...

Unsolicited advice for the week: If you assume that people talk to you for any reason other than they want to talk to you, you will drive yourself insane. One of the other desk attendants at the dance studio spent the last half hour of her shift telling me an extensive tale of her interactions with this guy, which were a classic example of overthinking absolutely everything. She likes him, they spend a lot of time together, she once accidentally went on a five-hour date with him, and apparently they've hooked up. She is uncertain whether he wants anything to happen. I spent the entire conversation wanting to take her by the shoulders and shout, HE LIKES YOU HE LIKES YOU HE LIKES YOU, GO BANG HIM UNTIL YOU RUN OUT OF CONDOMS, STOP TO BUY MORE, AND THEN CONTINUE. She spent the entire conversation spinning reasons why he might be answering her text messages for hours on end even though he didn't want to. I don't know, without the invention of alcoholic beverages and the ...

A brief demonstration of how the sherlocking thing does not have an off switch: I ran into these photos a few days ago. [It's Noel Fielding again, behind the scenes working on Luxury Comedy , from the site at e4.com , but that's irrelevant for this particular demo.] Mog had found a different photo from the same stream posted to tumblr, and linked me to it; I did what I always do and pitched it through TinEye and GRIS to see if I could find any more from the same session. Now, I asked Mog what about these things got her attention, and it was more or less that the pictures were nice to look at -- she likes watching people when they're busy arting, and she likes him, and the snapshots came out nicely in the purely technical sense of not being underlit or out of focus or featuring any part of the photographer's thumb. Moggie, it should be noted, babysits a lot of university servers for a living, with a degree in anthropology and a background in theater tech; you ...

While I've been working and sewing and primping and occasionally feeding the rodents entire bananas because I like to see them pretend to be little cave-rats falling upon a whole dead mammoth in their savage hunger (not very well -- I should note here that if I don't pull some of the peel off the banana, it takes them a good long while to scrape together the motivation to chew their way into it), I've had a constant stream of stuff running on YouTube. Most of it has been a British show called QI . QI  is technically what's known as a panel quiz -- these are not much seen on American TV anymore, although they were popular on the radio in the 1940s and 50s. The object is not so much to know everything and be right, as it is to share random information and be hilarious. Hollywood Squares  is probably the closest that's been on TV, although it's been off the air for a while, and in that case the celebrity squares got to be funny while the competitors were alarming...

Have been going through the press junket for Sherlock again, as if this is going to help them win an armload of awards tonight. (Must find a live blog or webcast -- the apartment is currently without a TV and we never did have cable.) Honestly, if they're going to keep stubbornly not giving Cumberbatch a BAFTA for anything, he ought to at least have an Emmy or a Globe or something for his mantelpiece. Or an Oscar. Although for that he'll probably have to be in a major story-driven movie where he's not upstaged by the horse. (No, I haven't seen War Horse . I'm told it came out excellently and I know he's done a lot of interviews for it with internet-favorite Loki Tom Hiddleston, but I try to stay away from depressing things where loads of animals die.) (Also, I've seen said interviews, and god you'd never guess he was the older one. Hiddleston is my age; Cumberbatch is in his mid-30s somewhere. He's just got this perpetual air of '12-year-o...

One of my message boards is having a discussion on why smart kids are so socially awkward. Smarts are treated differently from a lot of supposedly positive social deviations. People might encourage you to stop drawing so much attention to your looks or your money, but they don't generally tell you to actively  hide  it like they do with brains. I have actually been told, in my life, that I would fare better socially if I could just 'not be so smart'. This from people who would never dream of telling me that I should lose weight, dye my hair, do drugs, or put out in order to make myself popular. It's akin to being told that I'd probably have more friends if I just didn't let on that my arms worked. Yeah, I could do it -- it would just require huge amounts of concentration, perpetual paranoiac self-monitoring, passing on the opportunity to do things I genuinely enjoy lest my secret slip out, and inevitably screwing up in front of someone else, who would then be pi...

People occasionally flip out when I tell them I'm chronically pareidolic. Briefly, pareidolia -- from pieces of Greek meaning roughly "faulty perception of shapes" -- is seeing a familiar pattern where none is developed or intended. It's a form of apophenia, which is perceiving meaning in randomness. It is not the same as hallucinating or being paranoid; hallucinations are experiences perceived as resulting from external stimuli where none exist, and paranoia involves the belief that the pareidolic patterns are real, and generally out to get you. All humans are pareidolic to some extent. Otherwise we wouldn't see a rabbit in the moon, faces in the clouds, or the patterns in the stars that we call constellations. An inability to group things into patterns, in fact, is considered dysfunctional, and is part of a variety of neurological and psychological conditions like prosopagnosia, and some autism spectrum disorders. I have told psychologists, counselors, and the...

I made reference last night to "read[ing] Academician" while I was ranting about the government's grand plan to replace OTC decongestants that actually work with a substance whose primary function is to make them look tough on meth. I do a wide variety of translation work, and when I tell people that they always assume it has to do with the slew of other languages I speak. It does sometimes, but in point of fact, the vast majority of what I think of as "translation" work is not from language to language  but from context to context . One of my specialties -- in all languages, including my native one -- is taking a technical thing and making it understandable to non-technical people. Most people figure the stumbling block on that one is that you have to learn the technical thing before you understand it well enough to interpret, but that's never been much of an issue for me. There's some things that make for classes too boring for me to plow through, bu...

Someone on one of my message boards just started a thread by going, "Holy crap, my three year old is doing stuff three-year-olds don't normally do. I think she's scary-smart. I have no idea what I'm doing. Help?" Some people chimed in about being parents of gifted kids, some people chimed in having been gifted kids. And eventually someone chimed in to give one of the more popular pieces of parenting advice, which was to praise the kid for effort and not for native smartness, lest s/he get a swelled head. You have no idea  how hard I hate this. I speak as a former scary-smart kid, now scary-smart adult: This is not going to work how you think it will. The message you think you are sending to your child: "Not everything is going to be easy for you. That's okay; no one will love or value you less if they see you fail sometimes. Learning how to work at things you want or need even when you don't magically get them the first time is admirable. I'...

In the Wikipedia article on eidetic memory, it's suggested that Sherlock from the latest BBC series has it, but this is then disputed with the observation that he also seems to have cultivated the ability to 'delete' things from his internal storage. What Sherlock seems to have is pretty close to what I  call an eidetic memory, i.e., whatever I've got. The sticking point seems to be whether one needs to "know" things or merely "remember" them for it to count. There is a distinct difference between the two for me. I obviously know  a lot of stuff -- this can be attested to by any one of the probably thousands of people who, over the course of my lifetime, have stared at me slack-jawed while I ramble blithely across three different subjects that normally require a graduate degree -- but that's not my eidetic memory. That's the fact that my brain is a enormous filing cabinet. Facts  and procedures  require understanding, at least for me. I f...

Last night, I sat down and picked apart one of the more popular character moments in the Avengers  movie. The clip was seventeen seconds long, and the analysis was several times longer than what was actually written in the screenplay. Apparently this amazes people. What's amazing to me is that I managed to keep it down to just a couple of pages. Human interactions are fractal in nature. Everything people say and do is supported by personal experience and cultural context, which in turn is supported by cultural and familial history, which in turn is supported by the development of civilization. To drastically oversimplify: Everything is related, somehow, to everything else. The problem with getting this down on paper is that after a certain point, it starts to lose linear structure. The trails of context start to shoot off in a lot of different directions, and rapidly diverge to the point where trying to hit them all in one explanation would make me sound somewhere between schiz...