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Thursday, May 31, 2012

I watch the sky


Sometimes I just want to sit outside, watch the sky, and imagine.   I play out different scenarios to their logical conclusions.  So, if something happens as I had imagined it, I can say, "It worked out just like I thought it would."  But, often, something happens differently from the way I had imagined it.  I usually don't comment on that.   I still think, though, that if it had worked out, then... and I have various paths to go down in my mind.

There are a number of recent developments that I have imagined.  They haven't all come to finality yet.  So, when they do, I will either be shaking my head, wishing for a different conclusion, or saying, "It worked out just like I thought I would."  If I could do anything to tip the scales in favor of the latter, I would sure do it.  However, I don't think I have much control over the outcomes this time.  Much of what happens is in the hands of someone else.

I have faith, however.  So, I am not practicing ahead of time moving my head from side to side.  I am watching the sky, imagining, reimagining, imaging, and reimaging, so that I can say, "It worked out..."

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Tops determine margins

The Titanic accident is the perfect example of what happens when people navigate the waters they're in by sight only.  Yeah, they see the tops of icebergs all right.  But, they don't leave any margin for error for what is beneath the water.

So like the waters of life we navigate.  It's not that we don't know that more than half the iceberg is out of our view.  It's that we operate with no margin for error. 

My boat has been sunk before.  So, I know to leave that margin.  It still saddens my heart beyond belief when my boat sinks even though the margin was allowed.  But, speaking of belief - I have it.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Too many are content


The poetry of Stephan Crane is like an old, leather shoe to me.  His poems are form-fitted to my foot.  I have read, reread, memorized, used as illustration, and recited the short, pithy lines he created because they speak volumes.  I am an admirer of ideas succinctly stated.  Crane is the best.

From time to time, when I get frustrated, I call up a Crane poem.  It comforts me.  It lets me know that my frustration is not new, that the behavior I get frustrated about is the behavior that frustrated him and hundreds of thousands before him.  So, I pull out his poem from my collection or from my mind and recite.

A youth in apparel that glittered
Went to walk in a grim forest.
There he met an assassin
Attired all in garb of old days;
He, scowling through the thickets,
And dagger poised quivering,
Rushed upon the youth.
"Sir," said this latter,
"I am enchanted, believe me,
To die, thus,
In this medieval fashion,
According to the best legends;
Ah, what joy!"
Then took he the wound, smiling,
And died, content. 


On this weekend, through the week, and next weekend as well, institutions in grim forests cloaked in medieval garb, scowl with drawn daggers at youths who look at them, thank them for the legendary knowledge and skills they learned, shake a hand, and cry "What joy!" for the sheepskin that will wound them and kill them, its value drawn from the 19th and 20th centuries.  But they will die content.


Crane is right, at least for another decade.  I am fortunate to live in the days of another poet who speaks of everyday matters, Bruce Springsteen.  My hope is the same as his.  I may be deluded, though, because hope springs eternal...

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Beauty... smiles

Not often, but certainly more than in the past, I get to soak in the beauty of surroundings that are either the result of nature's forming hand or of humanity's ostentatious craft.  Today was such a day.  I found myself staring at a 15-story, shaved, marble-like stone edifice with dark glass panes.  It was in the heart of the city and belonged to a sequestered, nestled boulevard 1 block long.  Manicured shrubs, grass, trees, and flowers surrounded the building.  It was complete with valet parking for the hotel of the same height and stone look on the other side of the boulevard from the place where I had business.  After finishing what I had come to do in the miniature sky-skyscraper, I meandered over to the Starbucks that adjoined the hotel to enjoy a drink and a morsel of food.

When I get to sit in grandiose places, my mind takes a journey to its own realms.  Today it was to some of the beautiful events that have happened to me and delightful words that people have said to me in years gone by.  It  seemed like just yesterday those events happened or words were spoken.  I finished my drink and food with my lips bowed in a smile.  I sighed thinking how different a road I travel now than the one that carried the events and words bringing the smile to my face.  At least, though, I have the beauty of delightful memories to bring to the beautiful places I get to sit in now.  At least that.

Monday, May 21, 2012

The picture comes clear

The scientific method makes so much sense.  You start with a question: What is the truth about... ? or What if... ?  Then, you try answers that both fit what you think is true or what could be a counter-argument with evidence.  Finally, you pick out the patterns that emerge and explain those patterns.  How beautiful.

But, it took a while to get to that point in civilization.  The first people had to make observations.  They tried explaining those observations but didn't have time to worry so much about the truth of them.  The next wave of humans decided to put the observations into myths to perpetuate them or implemented the observations into laws to abide by.  Inevitably, the farther away from the observation people grew, the more it gave room to question its truth or its old patterns for a current world with new observations.  So, new observations were made.  This went on for a long while.  Finally, people wanted to know what would be true over time, what would be constant and what would be variable.  They developed rules for following hypotheses and calculations to measure the patterns.  How brilliant.

Now we're trying to apply those rules and calculations to the exploration of space.  It might work.  It's likely that a new way of thinking about what is true will be discovered.  And, there will certainly be new questions to ask on the stem of "What if... ?" with a plethora of new answers and observations.

That is so much like our own lives.  When we were young, we made some pretty good observations and tried to live by them and perpetuate them.  Then we experienced that what we had come up with didn't apply across the board even if we wanted them to.  So we were able to ask "What if... ?" and find patterns that were constant and variable.  Then we saw ahead of us that the method might have to be applied in unknown territory because people are living longer than ever on average, new territory.  How contemplative.

Scientific reasoning brought civilization from darkness to light over time.  Our journeys from immaturity to maturity are much the same way.  We go through the beautiful stage, usually arrogantly.  Then, we face reality and get to the brilliant stage, confidently.  Eventually, we get to the contemplative stage, humbly.


Sunday, May 20, 2012

It feels like 1816 around here


No one knew on New Year's Day in 1815 that the world was about to change.  The year started as it normally did any other year.  Winter ended, spring started, the world was spinning around as if nothing special was going to happen.  But, the Earth had an opinion about what should happen next.  Too bad the people of Indonesia didn't know that.  They went to bed on April 13th as if the world would continue as it had. But the next day, they heard the Earth's complaint very loudly.

Mount Tambora had a magma chamber beneath it that had been building a long time.  It began to smoke, voicing its complaint that the Earth had built up too much pressure through early warning signs.  The people then didn't know too much about volcanic activity, so they missed the sign.  12,000 people regretted that since they were the casualties of the first round of eruptions and tsunamis.  Mount Tambora exploded on April 14th, 1815, with such ferocity that agriculture around the Polynesian Islands came to a halt.  Plants were rained on with all kinds of lava, hot rocks from the air, pyroclastic flow, and soot. Another 60,000 couldn't find anything to eat and tasted their last meals about a week after the eruption.  Recorded history had never seen an eruption of this magnitude.

That was just the immediate effect on the Earth. The summer and the fall passed while people around Mount Tambora were struggling to get back on their feet. The rest of the world hadn't even heard of the eruption, but they were about to experience its effect.  The winter started, and as it deepened in the early months of 1816, it became really harsh.  Spring was supposed to come, but it was bypassed.  Temperatures were really cool.  Summer was next.  Well, normally it would have been next.  This is the year that was named The Year Without a Summer.  No summer... no crops... famine... cold temps in summer... People died worldwide because of the famine of 1816.  Plants struggled to live without too much light.  Clouds from the volcano were still in place in the atmosphere making photosynthesis difficult.  Volcanic Winter had occurred.

Eventually, the Earth warmed up and had seasons again.  But not in 1816, The Year Without a Summer, the year of Volcanic Winter.  The people of Earth had to endure the effects of Earth's fury whether or not they had heard on April 14, 1815, of the worst eruption in human experience since the Ice Age ended.  That makes me a bit wary as I go through life.  I don't always hear of the matters that affect me, some of them in the greatest way.

I haven't really heard anything lately that might affect me.  But, I see some ash in the sky and it's been a cool spring.  I'm thinking that...

Thursday, May 17, 2012

(X)

A Tale of Two Cities portrays two characters opposite in nature and station of life but identical in purpose for living.  The protagonist of the novel is noble in his ambition but not admirable in character.  The other character (at times a true antagonist, but mostly a minor protagonist) ignoble in ambition (because he was born into status, so he really only has to maintain what he has) but admirable in character.  The story is written so that the two characters get a crossover effect in character development.  By the end of the story, a person cannot believe that, when Carton takes such great pains to get into prison and try to force Darnay to switch places with him, Darnay actually does switch.  What a scoundrel to let someone else take his place for execution.  There is nothing admirable about that - just selfishness.

A number of stories studied in literature have the dynamic of the crossover effect between two characters.  A character starts one way in a story, but through a series of circumstances beyond what the character can control, (s)he makes an about face from the way (s)he was originally portrayed.

Not everyone has the experience of the crossover effect in his/her life.  Most people operate under the belief that consistency is the best policy (and many times it is for image's sake).  But, I have found myself to have undergone the crossover in the matter of politics, religion, and philosophy of the heart.  I was with a high school friend not long ago, and in the three matters just mentioned we have changed places.  Another way to achieve crossover is to measure it against someone who has remained consistent over time.  I have a lifelong friend who fits this mold.  One of his admirable traits is that I can count on his steadiness of purpose, which we share.  But when I measure myself against him, I can see how much I have changed because we used to be much alike.

In stories, a person doesn't have to worry so much about whether the crossover is moral, costly, advantageous, or unnatural.  But in life, I have to evaluate all four of those.  I only live once, so the stakes are really high to cross over in the three matters of life mentioned.  Tonight, though, I can sleep well.  Sydney Carton and I have crossed over in much the same way.  And, if Carton and Darnay are but representations of the dual nature that lives inside each one of us, I hope people don't view me in disbelief, shaking their heads at my selfishness because I have let the Carton side of the dual nature switch with Darnay's side

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

It's all in the rub

I guess I am a counter-culturist at heart.  But, there have been others, and they have been very famous and influential: Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (at the top of the list).  Every poet probably qualifies as a counter-culturist, particularly so, though, Gwendolyn Brooks, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman.  And there have been those standouts through time like Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Leonardo Di Vinci, Herodotus, ad infinitum.  So, I love it when the status quo gets challenged.

People get comfortable in their routines, which is why routines exist.  But, when routines that work for a few are made into routines that become law for everyone, I get disgusted because precious little is a one-size-fits-all shirt for all to wear. Certainly business in the world knows the beauty of custom design.  Something simple like a pen has so many variations that it is hard to describe their appearance anymore.  The clothing industry for sure knows not to make clothes look alike.  Ask someone about what (s)he likes in a car, and you would get many different answers.  The car industry knows that.

Then there are the social sciences.  They seem to be shielded from the reality of the colors that exist in life.  Psychologists, for the most part, have tried to reduce the study of personality to 4 or 5 traits and put those traits in a test for people to take and match to.  Educators want to reduce everything to a 4-core curriculum and create tests to compare everyone to.  Politicians want to reduce society to blocks of voters and make laws that benefit those blocks.  Athletes get reduced to skill sets and traded as a commodity to teams needing those skill sets.

So I applaud people like Freud and Piaget who refused to have their thinking reduced to match some known model.  I laud educators like Dewey, Montessori, and the founders of the University of Phoenix who know that education cannot be done in a cookie-cutter factory.  I support people like Noam Chomsky, Ted Kennedy, and Ron Paul who try to get people to see that routines need to shaken up once in a while so that progress doesn't pass us by.  And I love to follow teams whose owners know to stick with a player and not abandon him if he gets hurt or goes through a slump like Robert Kraft's Patriots, Nolan Ryan's Rangers, and Jerry Buss' Lakers.

In order to get a spark to start a fire, a person has to rub two sticks together or two flint rocks against each other.  Progress depends on the rub, not the straightjacket.

Monday, May 14, 2012

NO to control through language


Recently I was in a discussion group whose members were expert grammarians of the English language.  It was an international group, so several spoke varieties of English from a region other than North America.  The discussion was about someone's phrasing of ideas with expressions that many thought were either ungrammatical or non-standard.  There were several ideas expressed, some rather vehemently, that the person's phrasing needed "fixing."  So, I brought up the viewpoint that all kinds of dialects existed within a language and that some dialects achieve wider acceptance than others.

The idea of a "standard" English doesn't exist really.  There are some conventions for writing that people agree on for professional standing in the larger English speaking communities of the world, but in a context other than professional writing, people rely on their spoken dialect to think in and express themselves with.  Thus, their spoken dialect will surface in contexts other than the professional writing community, and should have equal footing in that context.  A couple of others in the group were of this persuasion too.

One would have thought that a bomb hit.  The notion that a "standard" English didn't exist certainly went against the grain of most of the contributors' training.  I only vaguely remember hearing in the class in which I learned about the variationist approach to categorizing English that it was a minority viewpoint.  But, with the venom that some of the group struck back for dismissing the idea that the conventions of written English should carry over into one's daily speech and be called a prestige dialect (many call it a power dialect), I quickly gathered how much of a minority the point of view really was.  And these were the experts talking.

I am so glad to have had the course in sociolinguistics which taught the viewpoint of prestige English.  It has helped me understand human thinking and communication so much better.  Life doesn't get communicated in "standard" terms except in a professional world.  Those who communicate otherwise have backgrounds in certain families, who have roots in certain regions, who have identities in certain countries, who all express themselves according to their marked phrasings.  One good example is that I would never say, "God gave me you."  It is ungrammatical to me.  But when the smash hit song came out using those exact words, who was I to say, "I can't believe people are listening to a song that uses an ungrammatical sentence in it."   Blake Shelton would just laugh all the way to the bank because a huge number of people didn't know or care about the song's grammatical properties.

So why is the notion of a "standard" English taught to every student in the schools across the world?  Why should all students learn the discipline's written form used by its professionals and be taught that they also should try to speak this written version of professional English?  It's not the truth about reality.  Learning the prestige dialect for financial gain might be taught in schools.  Even if students understand the correlation between hiring practices, amount of salary, and prestige dialect, it should still be left to them as to whether they want to learn such prestigious governance of a language (or power dialect).  If they would rather take their chances using their home-grown dialect in the oilfields or the coal mines or the lumberjack industries, that's their business.  Those industries have their own jargon anyway, very separate from the prestigious written dialect scribbled on a few papers in a course that would never apply to their way of making a living.

But, the world is full of people who want to control others through every means possible.  Language is just one more way to exercise that control.  Keeping people on a notch below them is a game people seem to want to play.  Don't play that game with me, though.  I will decide when I want to adopt the rules of the prestige dialect and when I want to express myself in the flavorful dialect of the region of the English speaking world I grew up in (a region, incidentally, that ends sentences in prepositions and uses "that" freely in substitution for "which")!  I reserve the right to communicate with the audience who I know about (or about whom I know, if that is my audience) in the language they will understand best.

And the person who understands God Gave Me You will understand it whether or not its prestigious form is God Gave You to Me...

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Digging for grandeur

Atlantis is one of those mythical, bigger-than-life, legends perpetuated into eternity because the people there were so advanced for their time that when it disappeared, the world lapsed back into darkness.  Something like that happened when the Roman Empire disappeared and the "Dark Ages" followed.  But the Roman Empire, as large and influential as it was, was not the stupendous, advanced place that Atlantis was.  It had knowledge of the universe that the Romans never gained.  But, myths are made of such stuff.

Troy also was a legendary city that hosted the fight of the millennium for an entire decade, then was burned to make it disappear for all time.  That was the myth anyway.  But Heinrich Schliemann found the Troy written about by Homer, and myth turned to reality in a heartbeat.  All the fictional characters suddenly became real.  Myth was founded on truth and reality.

Archaeologists have been digging around for years for the lost city of Atlantis.  Plato is the ancient philosopher who has perpetuated the myth.  He wrote, as Homer did, about a city that had been lost to history but that lived through literature.  What if Atlantis could share the same luck as Troy and "get discovered?"  Enter Richard Freund of the University of Hartford.  One day while viewing satellite photos of the coast off of Spain in 2009, he found anomalies in shapes that reminded him of the description of Atlantis in Plato's writings.  Could it be?

Over the last three years, Freund and others whom he asked to join his team have uncovered a number of indications that Atlantis had really been discovered.  The last word is not in, but how exciting it will be to find the city of the legend and myth.  And who knows but that some of the world's secrets, known so early on, will be revealed.  Exciting, exciting!

Tapping our oft-buried attributes of grandeur is hard.  It takes work... and faith that those attributes will surface... and hope that those attributes will illuminate what is possible for us.

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Passing the test

 Signs

And the sign said long-haired, freaky people need not apply,
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why,
He said, "You look like a fine, upstanding young man, I think you'll do."
So, I took off my hat.  "I said imagine that.  Huh, me working for you."

Chorus:
Signs, Signs, everywhere signs.
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
Do this, don't do that. Can't you read the sign?

The sign said, "Anybody caught trespassing will be shot on sight."
So, I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, "Hey what gives you the right
to put up a fence to keep me out or to keep Mother Nature in.
If God was here, he'd tell it to your face, 'Man you're some kind of sinner.'"

Chorus

Now, hey you mister, can't you read? You've got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat.
You can't even watch, you can't even... You ain't supposed to be here.
The sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside...  uumph!

And the sign said, "Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down, and pray."
Then they passed around the plate at the end of it all.  I didn't have a penny to pay.
So I got me a pen and a paper, and I made out my own little sign.
I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me.  I'm alive and doing fine."

Chorus

It was in 1971 that young people became tired of being told what to wear, how to think, what to make of themselves, or who to associate with.  So, the song Signs was a big hit.

Here it is 2012.  Deja Vu.   It seems as if so many people want to tell me what to do, what not to do, or how to do the simplest things.

I was told...
I should not have a patty melt to eat because it wasn't healthy.
I was driving too fast in a 40 MPH zone.  I was driving 45.
Not to drive 75 MPH even though that was the speed limit.  The person didn't like going that fast.
I should leave at least a car length between cars at a stop light.  I was too close to the car ahead of me.
I made too many out-of-town trips.
I don't make good business decisions.
I made too many allowances for my daughter.
I needed to lose weight.
I needed to go to the cardiologist.
I needed to be more religious.
There was a certain way to change a baby's diaper (& I wasn't doing it the right way).
That my choice of music wasn't satisfactory.
That I looked shaggy in a beard.
That my hair was too long.
That I had made a poor career choice.
That I need not try to fix a toy train for a niece because I'm not handy.

Blah, blah, blah.
All of this in a two-week period of time.
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.

It's a test.  No, I have more character than to succumb to the many voices that say, "Can't you read the sign?"

Saturday, May 05, 2012

A disruption in conversational acquisition

I did a study a number of years ago that featured women's speech and their pattern in turn-taking.  It was interesting enough,  but there was a by-product of the study that was a surprise.  The women in the study were of different, graduated ages from 16 to 76, representing increments about a decade apart.  It was very clear from the tapes that the older women were accomplished at conversation building and the younger women were not.  In fact, the younger the woman, the less engaging she was.  A particular conversation typified the principle, one between a teenager and her grandmother.  The teen was at a loss for topics or elaboration a number of times.  The grandmother provided the extra elaboration or a timely topic switch every time.

That little surprise tucked away inside the larger study was what many would consider common sense because people have believed in the "art" of conversation for a long time.  But the "art" turns out to be linked to the socialization process, and it is that process that can be and has been studied for better understanding.


Some people have believed that conversation is something a person is either good at doing or they are not.  If that is true, then language in general is not developed evenly from birth.  But, every human's ability to learn language, manipulate it for her or his benefit, and communicate with it no matter what language it happens to be, seems to mitigate against that notion.  So, something else must be in play, and that would be socialization.  The true test for this is about to be seen.  Today's youth have opted for texting as their mode for conversation rather than face-to-face.  That should change the socialization process.  At the very least it will disrupt the process for "learning" to have a conversation.  Texting operates by different rules from face-to-face conversation.  Already I have heard the loud laments of those 60 and older of the dying art of conversation or the anger they feel when "all they get" is a text once in a while from a grandchild.

I look forward to reading a study someday about the new socialization process as it affects conversation, if that is what the texting mode is still called.  It might be titled to illustrate the quantum leap in efficiency the process has taken since machine delivery of a message is involved.  Or it might take the tenor of today's 60-year-olds and try to prove the denigration of the benefits of face-to-face conversation.  It doesn't matter to me.  I live in both worlds.  It will be easy to side with the winner.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Not this or that, but this or this or this



Every time the gate is open is one of those phrases that comes from the old days when people built fences  to keep livestock from roaming into their neighbor's fields.  The gates let people and horses and wagons through but were to be shut after coming through them in order to keep the livestock in.  If the gate was left open, the animals got out, had to be rounded up and put back in their rightful place.  This happened frequently.

Once in a blue moon is a phrase that comes from a couple of hundred years ago when sailing the high seas was a major mode of transportation and exploration.  The moon had a blue cast to it every so often when it was full and there was a great amount of humidity in the atmosphere.  The phrase meant something happens infrequently.

When pigs fly is a phrase that comes from about the same time period.  It was coined when someone was certain that an event wouldn't happen.  Pigs aren't designed to fly anatomically, so it wouldn't just be rare that something would happen when pigs fly, it would be impossible.

Language is colorful and can be used for all kinds of reasons including taking a phrase and changing it from its literal meaning to something figurative.  These figures become well known and become embedded in language as idioms.  Idioms can also take on syntactic ideas.  In this case, all the idioms deal with time and are, thus, adverbial in nature.  And anytime a person deals with adverbs, (s)he can have gradations and comparisons - gradations in this case, from frequent to never and in between.


Life is not a dichotomy.  It is not black and white.  It is not always just right and wrong.  People don't have to decide something is either this or that.  Life has beauty to it and richness and spectrums and continuums and depth and height and flavors of sweetness and a thousand reasons for change.  Even our practice of language bears this out.  It is our pleasure to see that multivariate nature of life and not our narrowness to reduce life to right and wrong, black and white, this or that.


Wednesday, May 02, 2012

What gets done

Today 2 items on my planned list actually happened.  The list contained 6 items.  4 remain to be accomplished.  Maybe tomorrow?  Well, maybe, but tomorrow has a list of its own with timing of its own.  So of the 4 remaining 2 might be accomplished.  And what happens to tomorrow's list if its items do not get accomplished?  They get pushed back too.  At some point, though, the items get pushed off the list for good and never happen.  The list tomorrow contained 4 items, but now has 8 items.  I don't see all of that happening.  I know for sure that one of the items had a shelf life of one day.  Well, that's off the list.  I am down to 7, but still don't see that happening.  One of the items can be done at any time in the future.  I doubt it gets done tomorrow, then.  Now, I'm down to 6.  5 of the items all depend on the length of time it takes to accomplish the first two items on the list.  One of those two items is very time sensitive, one is not.  So, I'm thinking that I will be at 50% max tomorrow on getting things done.  That might be high.

Oh, my. How does anything ever get done around my place?  No wonder civilization hasn't advanced to its maximum potential.

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

A myth disappears, fortunately

Intelligence is a much debated subject.  The spectrum of beliefs out there contain a good number of followers for each.  Personally, I follow the end of the spectrum that contains the null set - there is no such thing as intelligence.

That, to many, is a contradiction in what I have done all my life.  But, I see no contradiction at all.  Once a person understands about personality, the power of interest, the allure of prestige, the drive of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and the need for utility, then intelligence becomes blended into the 6 above forces for learning and intelligence disappears.  So, why does education in this country gear everything to levels of intelligence?  That has a clear answer if you study the history of education in this country, but clearly education was never meant for the masses.  Since the 1960s, when the United States began experimenting with mass education, educators here had to buy into the intelligence belief system so that grading could be correlated with it and begin the charade of intelligence measurement..  Several measuring systems have been drawn up and justified because the masses who have gone through the 50-year-old experiment now believe it and will perpetuate it in their own and their subsequent generations.

Sad, since it doesn't really exist.  On one hand you have the general populace who try to believe that they can do anything they set their minds to and the same populace who have been educated to think that they are smart in music, art, math, language, history, or literature and dumb in one of the same list of disciplines.  They can't discern between the truth of one over the other since their education has failed them.  By 2100 A.C.E., history will refer to the current period as the time of the failed American mass education experiment.  But, they don't see it that way.  They still think that somehow both of the above principles are true.  They cannot see that the two are mutually exclusive.  Maybe after the next generation is over 30, technology will be in such a state that it will become abundantly clear that people can concentrate on something of interest or something they are driven to accomplish, let others (or machines/software) around them help them accomplish their goals, and forget this talk of levels of intelligence.

Even software is not built that way.  And eventually software will be very intertwined with the way people think.  For the moment, though, I'm stuck in a deluded world, and I await the maturing of those who are not quite in school yet to run the world a bit more practically (rather than intelligently).