We got ourselves another beautiful Florida Sunday. The one major way Florida is ahead of the pack is that Spring arrives months early, evidenced by these flowers. And this being a five-Saturday month, I do believe that means heading out for the day and wasting all the bingo money without a care in the world. I just wish cupid would hurry up as there is enough for two.
Next, I took my dress shirts out of the closet and minutely examined the sewing, particularly the “hems” in light of my new knowledge. Now I understand why these were expensive shirts. However, how expensive is a shirt one cannot wear in the heat? One of the things I’ll do today is drop into a sewing shop for a look-see.I took the early morning hours to do complicated research on genetic engineering. All the real advancement has taken place in the past fifteen years since I last looked. I’ve got this pending expectation that a breakthrough is headed this way. Look at the progress against cancer once they learned it was genetic.
I stumbled over a few passages that confirm what I have always thought. Some people, from an early age, simply “prefer” to be stupid than to be smart. The motive appears to be that for here-and-now, stupid is totally easier. There is instant gratification to being stupid, whereas smarts are a delayed reward. So, are they stupid because they are lazy, or are they lazy because they are stupid? These are the people who see nothing wrong with having to show ID to vote in a secret ballot election.
There were so few books in the household during my childhood. That means I witnessed the “stupid is as stupid does” behavior countless times when others read the same words. My theory now has excellent company as Dr. Crick, of DNA fame, agrees. He has shown that all brain activity can be reduced to neuron connections and we lack only the instruments to measure them. Aha, so I was right, there is no such thing as “born stupid”. It is an acquired behavior.
How is it acquired? Let’s see, for mental exercise, do I read that textbook or do I watch Oprah? The same goes for the half-loony and over-emotional set as well. They only get away with it because there are so damn many of them they can define themselves as “normal”. I dream of the day when court cases are won by IQ instead of jabberwocky. “Mrs. Smith, you are ordered to pay damages because your stupidity caused the accident. The court rejects your claim that you didn’t know you were stupid.”
Mr. Will and Sammy were on the same floor of the hospital. Sammy is fine, he’s there for observation. Mr. Will is not so lucky, but he is in a top-notch facility, Memorial Hospital. I forgot it was Easter Sunday, same as I forgot it was Good-For-Nothing Friday, so I was the only visitor until Will’s children came by.
Now for today’s trivia. I’m given to understand not many people are clear on where Intel, the chip manufacturer, comes into the picture. Intel did not invent the transistor or the integrated circuit. That was Bell Labs and Texas Instruments. Those integrated circuits were enough to scare me away when I saw my first one in 1975. It required a spider web of wiring to connect anything in a meaningful way.
What Intel did was to sandwich all that wiring as well as the components right into the chip itself. Then instead of needing an engineering degree, all you did was plug the chip into a socket and voila! Instant computer (although that is misleading). Apple and IBM are nothing more than designs utilizing these pre-made chips. As far as I know, the only other big chip companies are Motorola and AMD, since it costs a couple hundred million to set up a factory. Think of how long it would have taken you to get this information on your own.
Another hour was devoted to examining sewing supplies in detail to get a feel for what is out there. Do I really need pinking shears? The array of offerings is monumental, from expensive tools to cheap kits. Many choices make value-neutral choices difficult. It is no happenstance that cars come in fifty different colors. The selection of thimbles alone is bewildering. Perfect for them women shoppers.
Then, to combat any temptation to be stupid, I sat down and wrote the code to display the numbers counting down from 30 to 1, hitting every problem along the way. This was a phenomenal effort. I had to cut a couple corners, such as having the numbers flash separately, but the plan was to keep the code readable by avoiding embedded loops. This is one case where it would be just as educational for me to go look up how others did it.
And I finally killed the little mouse. He was making too much of a mess.
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