[ExI] Question for the psych squad

spike spike66 at att.net
Sat Jul 1 18:20:06 UTC 2017


 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark



>…That may also be why great mathematicians often tend to be a bit...odd. There may be a fine line between insanity and genius.  …John K Clark

 

 

John, we aren’t really odd.  In most cases, it is all an act to make our math buddies think we are smart.  For instance, if you go to a restaurant with the math crowd and do something weird, but they already know you suck, they will call you on it.  I went in, tried to think of something weird to impress my friends, started trying to eat with the wrong end of my fork.  They shouted LIAR!  OK so that didn’t work.

 

Here’s the real story:  A number of years ago, Prime95 discovered a new Mersenne Prime, the local geeks were celebrating at the Tied House in Palo Alto.  The guy who had the office next to The Donald up at Stanford was there, saying The Donald might make the scene, but he couldn’t promise because he was working on a book on specialty algorithms and was busy as all hell.  

 

Waitresses came, took our order (about 20 of us) went away.  A quarter of an hour later, up shows The Donald, striding in like he was just some guy rather than the author of the textbooks many of us studied at some point in college.  We were in shock and awe.  He didn’t really talk much to anyone, just sat down as if lost in thought.

 

About a minute after he sat down, the waitresses arrived with the food.  His generous colleague offered: If you want you can have my dinner and I will order something.  The Donald cheerfully accepted, they put a giant chimichanga before him, he scarfed it down like he hadn’t eaten in a week.  He was there about two minutes after slamming the giant chimi, stood up, said: Nice to meet you all gotta go!

 

SHOOM he was out of there like a whirlwind, before his benefactor’s replacement dinner had even arrived.  {8^D

 

So there you go.  Of course, The Donald is a genuine genius, where the rest of us suck.  We all want to be like him when we grow up.  But now we can’t even have a decent Mersenne celebratory dinner because we all try to make like The Donald, show up late, say almost nothing, hope someone will give us their dinner, inhale it like a vacuum cleaner, then run out immediately afterwards.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

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