Corey Camel’s Bananas

Consider the case of Corey Camel – an enterprising, albeit eccentric owner of a small banana plantation in a remote desert oasis.

Corey’s harvet, worth it’s weight in gold, consists of 3000 bananas. The market place where the stash can be cashed in is 1000 miles away. However, Corey must walk to the market, and can only carry up to 1000 bananas at a time. Furthermore, being a camel, Corey eats one banana during each and every mile she walks (so Corey can never walk anywhere without bananas). How many bananas can Corey get to the market?

Yeah he must have not been that smart because most people talk about celebrity gossip, and the occasional ad hominem arguments based on hearsay.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201111/was-steve-jobs-smart-heck-yes

I would say “smart” means developing and using your natural-born abilities to the best you can, whether you’re a bricklayer or a theoretical physicist or (Jobs) a businessman.

On another tack, Muffit’s post raises another very significant concept, he says:

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and point out that timing and luck HAS got a lot to do with how ‘genius’ manifests itself, possibly more so than anything else.
It’s like that saying “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton said that, I believe.Surely there are countless magnificently smart individuals enjoying a quiet life out of the public eye, just as there are relatively average people catching the luck of the draw at the right time, to become publicly revered. Or even genius people stumbling in the limelight only by being lucky that one time.Quantifying this would be rather hard, I’m just not a huge believer in unique insights (which disregard history, luck, timing, I feel). Often it could be more of a sign of the times than a sign of individual genius.”

If we shake off our very natural anthropocentric biases it becomes clear that, except in a very trivial sense, there are no inventors, no designers.

We do, of course have discoverers, those who happen to be the right types, in the right place at the right time, who pick the low-hanging fruit.

But objectively, we have to interpret science and technology as evolving autonomously within the collective imagination of our species.

Do you honestly believe that without Faraday we would have no electric motors or transformers, no mathematical understanding of the electromagnetic field without Maxwell, no steam engines without Stephenson, without Marie Curie we would know nothing of radium, we would have no radio without Marconi?
Or that without Steve Jobs we would not have computers with GUIs and pointing devices and other gross features not too far removed fro the Apple Mac?

This is expanded upon in my latest book “”The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?” (free download in e-book formats from the “Unusual Perspectives” website).

Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories…

This is hilarious!! The dude who came up with Homology and Homotopy lacking in “imaginative genius”??

I hate authors sometimes.