re: #24 Shiplord Kirel, Friend of Moose and Squirrel

My older daughter is an MIT grad. I have no idea what her IQ scores would be now, but she is a genius.
Hee, reminds me of a story about her mother, my late first wife.

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When it first appeared that daughter #1 could get into MIT, when she was a junior in high school, I was naturally very excited. Her mother much less so. During a long-distance phone discussion, she said, “Gee, I don’t know about her going there, Jimmy. They say all the boys there are gay.”
I was astonished at her bizarrely skewed priorities, but instead of delivering a lecture on gossip, generalization, homophobia, etc. I merely said, “Ok, is this a problem? Sounds like a perfect place for her to me.”
She said, in disgust, “You just can’t take anything seriously can you?”
I just shook my head and hung up.

When I was 16, I took a Junior Engineering Testing Service test when we lived in Georgia. Summer, 1972. I scored in the 97th percentile. We moved that August back up to Fairfax, Va, where I finished my last two years of High School (W.T.Woodson Cavaliers!). The next month I got a letter from MENSA inviting me to join.

I circular filed it. I wanted to be a student, not an egg head. I’ve known a lot of people who were really, really smart in my life, and quite a few of them couldn’t change a tire if you handed them a jack and a lug wrench.

When I went to college, I entered Tulane with an idea to be a bio-medical engineer. That lasted a semester. Hated the curriculum. Realized I was a skilled generalist guy and not someone who was interested in “focusing down” on minutia.

So I majored in Geology, minored in theater, and then went and flew jets in the Air Force for a few years. While I was there I discovered I was a cool customer when things went wrong (things often went tits-up). Didn’t panic, went through the checklists, got really analytical as to what was happening and how to fix it.

After I got out of the service, I worked as wellhead geologist, offshore, and then as a consultant on high-pressure, deep drilling projects.

It was always about solving problems and keeping us out of trouble. Tore my back out in a rig accident, got a lumbar laminectomy, and went into environmental geology.

Learned shallow groundwater dynamics, vertical contaminant flow based on contaminant density, and vapor intrusion models for chlorinated solvents. Ended up spending my 16 years working as an emergency response coordinator trying to keep things blowing up and killing people. Never had a fatality after an initial incident. Nor a serious injury.

This is just to say there are several kinds of genius. I got yanked out of my fifth-grade class in my neighborhood school and transferred into the first “Gifted Program” in the Fairfax County Public School System. I was comfortable with many of the other kids, but some were just weird. Twidgets.

I’m really good at calmly reviewing a large chaotic situation and seeing necessary immediate reaction, looming bottlenecks, and fixes.

I understand Schroedinger’s cat, but I quite frankly don’t give a fuck whether it’s there or not. I’ll leave that to someone who is into that shit. I have always been into real world grit. Always will be.

See a problem. Fix the problem.