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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-02-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2011. PAGE 5. Who do you reckon is the smartest man who ever lived? King Solomon has a pretty good rep in the Wisdom Department. Signor da Vinci was a veritable mental giant and Shakespeare was certainly no dummy. The 19th century British philosopher John Stuart Mill was quick off the blocks – by the age of 10 he was reading Plato and Demosthenes – in the original Greek. Closer to our own time, Mr. Einstein was undeniably impressive. But all things considered, I think I’d have to give the nod to Mr. William James Sidis. The movie Good Will Hunting was loosely based on his life, but Hollywood, comme toujours, goosed the truth and rouged the details until the cinematic product bore little resemblance to the flesh and blood original. There was no need for that. The real life of William James Sidis was sufficiently remarkable to stand alone. Sidis was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1898 and it wasn’t long before the Sidis household realized they had a child prodigy on their hands. He learned to spell in English at the age of one, moved on to French and German by the age of four. By the time other children were starting kindergarten, the child was speaking and reading Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian as well. He wasn’t merely a language whiz, he excelled at maths too. Care to know what day of the week Caesar was assassinated or the Siege of Troy began? Little Billy Sidis could tell you. He could name the day of the week on which any historical event occurred thanks to complicated system he came up with. At the age of five. Three years later at, yes, the age of eight, Sidis applied for entrance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He scored an unheard- of 100 per cent on the entrance exam. He entered Harvard at the age of 11 and graduated with first class honours before he was old enough to legally drive a car. By 20 he was a mathematics professor at Texas Rice Institute where he taught Euclidian geometry, non-Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. Oh, yeah…he was drop-dead good, but there was a dark side to Sidis’ blazing accomplishments. Putting a brain like his in a normal human body was like welding a Ferrari engine onto a roller skate. Sidis had his first nervous breakdown at 12. He recovered – sort of – but he was walking a fine line from then on. The professorship didn’t work out. “I’m not much of a teacher,” Sidis confessed. “I didn’t leave – I was asked to go.” The same year he got fired, Sidis was arrested for participating in a violent demonstration and sentenced to 18 months in jail. Influential friends kept him out of prison and he was shipped off to a sanatorium. For the rest of his short life (he died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 46), William Sidis lived pretty much in obscurity. He held only menial jobs and became a self- proclaimed ‘peridromophile’ – someone with a fascination for streetcar transportation. Indeed, Sidis collected streetcar transfers as a hobby. Newspapers and magazines love these ‘How the Mighty Have Fallen’ stories. In 1937 the New Yorker published a long piece on him under the title “Where Are They Now?” It described the one-time child genius as a lonely and largely forgotten down-and-outer eking out his days in a tiny “hall bedroom in Boston’s shabby South End”. Down, maybe – but not out. Sidis sued the magazine for defamation and won. In fact, the Sidis story isn’t a simple riches- to-rags morality tale. He spent the last half of his life in anonymity but he was far from enfeebled, he was a writing machine. Under pseudonyms like Frank Folupa, Barry Mulligan and William Edward Beals Jr., Sidis wrote treatises on everything from cosmology to American Indian history; from anthropology to transport system theory. He invented a language (Vendergood) and a grammar to go with it. He predicted the existence of Black Holes in space decades before astrophysicists confirmed it. Was he a genius? And then some. He had an intellect that ranged wider than Leonardo da Vinci. Most of us are lucky to have an I.Q. north of 100. Experts estimate Albert Einstein’s was 168. William Sidis was somewhere between 250 and 300. And yet he wound up, if not a failure, certainly not bathed in glory and adulation. An intellectual named Richard Hostadtler once said: “No one who lives among intellectuals is likely to idealize them unduly.” I think the humourist Josh Billings said it best. “Some folks are wise,” said Billings, “some otherwise.” Arthur Black Other Views Too smart for his own good While I don’t watch a ton of television I’d say that I watch enough. Maybe even a little too much at times. So who’s to blame for this? Is it the cable company? Is it Sony? It must be the guy who invented the couch; it’s his fault. Of course not. It’s my fault. Now that was easy. Or was it? Because people seem to have a real problem admitting that things are their fault, it’s always someone else’s and the television that I should or shouldn’t be watching is Exhibit A. Recently I watched a documentary on underage prostitutes in the U.S. which listed classified websites like Craigslist and Backpage as the “Wal-Marts” of the sex trade. At “John School”, a counselling program for men convicted of prostitution-related crimes, one man was interviewed about what landed him in John School. Despite having been caught red-handed with a prostitute, this man said that by checking these websites several times a week, he was not to blame; the websites were. Had they not existed, he wouldn’t have done it, he said. And this ridiculous statement is just the tip of the finger-pointing iceberg. Shows like Hoarders, Heavy and My Strange Addiction are rife with people deciding that they’re not to blame for something or another. Some reasons are a lot more legitimate than others. They range from understandable to downright laughable. Like the aforementioned “John”, people are excusing their indulgence in everything from prostitutes to fast food to drugs due to their availability. Because something’s made available to them, these people seem to think, they are no longer responsible for making the decision to say yes. Sure, it makes sense if they’re children. Even dogs, when fed, know when they’ve had enough and can back away from the dish, even if there’s some food left. They don’t eat until they’re sick simply because the food is there waiting to be eaten. A woman who was featured on a recent episode of Hoarders had similarly ridiculous reasoning behind allowing her home to slip into such a state of disrepair that it was full of over 50 cats who now used the entire home as their litter box, which she refused to clean, and was so full of junk that she had to sleep atop boxes. She said that her father was always very neat and organized, so perhaps her behaviour towards a home he had bought for her was a form of rebellion against him. Not only is that stupid, but where I come from, that’s just downright ungrateful. Don’t even get me started on My Strange Addiction. This is a show that features people who insist on wearing furry animal costumes in public, people who are married to a sex doll and people who eat everything from toilet paper to couch cushions to laundry detergent. Everyone goes through hardship and everyone has their own way of dealing with that hardship, but many people (at least those being focused on by television) are choosing to lean on a crutch while pointing fingers, as opposed to working through the hardship like the majority of the world. A note I posted on my mom’s fridge features a quote that reads, “It’s not what you achieve in life, it’s what you overcome”. It’s sad to think that in some circles the growing sentiment of, “don’t look at me; he did it” is eclipsing the power of hard work, redemption and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel that can come from overcoming adversity and living to tell the tale. Don’t look at me... I’m a fan of George Carlin and I think he hit the nail on the head when he said that coveting our neighbours’ material goods is what drives our economy. But what happens when material goods don’t really exist anymore? I consider myself blessed to be part of a unique generation, one that has witnessed the rise of the personal computer, the creation of numerous storage mediums, and the subsequent death of those storage mediums. I may be jumping the gun on that last one, but I’m sure my prophecy will come true. I remember getting my first DVD player, it was the future to me. I started building a collection of DVDs. Then I got my first BluRay player and thought we definitely had it now, high definition movies. Batman never looked so dark and gritty. Fortunately, BluRay players can still play DVDs, but now I find myself wondering – when will all these discs be passé. The new wave, digital editions, doesn’t really sit well with me. Part of why I picked print journalism was that I still enjoy the tactile feeling, and the incorruptibility of paper copy. The same can be said for storage media like DVDs or CDs – you can lend them to someone, they have a physical presence. Unfortunately, for tactile individuals like myself, technology is getting away from this. It started for many people, as many technological advancements of the last decade have, with music. Whether you bought your music straight from a digital distributor like iTunes or bought CDs, there was usually some digital component to the music. Companies have put emphasis on the digital market with services like Steam – a ‘digital store’ similar to iTunes you can buy video games from – and Apple’s App Store, a recent release from the trend-setting company that allows users of all their platforms – computer owners, iPad owners and iPhone/iPod users to buy software designed specifically for that gadget through their computer. Whether because this development enables immediate purchases or because it is part of the green movement, it is the way that companies are leaning right now. The consequences of this kind of commercial paradigm shift could be staggering. While it does make music more accessible and marketable, it is going to cause many problems. First off, this isn’t the best way to combat people illegally downloading software, movies and music. For me, I don’t mind paying for physical products because I like opening them. I like having them, and not having to search through a hard drive to have them. Second; yes it will save someone money, but not the people buying them. Imagine, for example, a Compact Disc. In my mind, there are many stages in the production of a product. While the following may not be completely accurate, I would imagine the number of people/companies is fairly close. To produce a compact disc, a musician first records several tracks. The tracks are then mastered, remixed, and prepared for the CD. That musician’s record label produces media to go with the track, like a cover for an album and information inside. Some will also be advertised. A factory produces the raw components (paper, plastic, etc.) necessary for the next stage of development. A factory produces the CDs and cases and prints album liners. A person (or a company) ships the CDs to a distribution centre. The distribution centre then ships it to a store, be it a music store or a big box store or an electronics store. An employee of said store then unpacks and stacks the CDs. Another employee (or the same one) is then paid to show customers where it is and explain what the product is. Each one of those jobs (after the CD is produced) happens innumerable times in many countries. Now, compare that with the production of digital music. The artist records several tracks. The tracks are remixed, mastered or prepared for distribution. A small amount of media is prepared for a website and possibly an iTunes web. The product is made available digitally. This cuts the production, shipping and point-of-sale companies and the employees therein. A balance needs to be found between digital distribution and physical products, and I think we’ve gone past it. This process of distributing media may be a lot greener, but no one will have the green to buy anything because of the jobs lost from this switch. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Carlin had it right with goods Denny Scott Denny’s Den