By T.J. Ray

Columnist

 

Since we call oranges orange, why don’t we call lemons yellows and apples reds?

Future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.  The difference in the two may be rooted in the fact that discovery consists of looking at the same thing everyone else sees but thinking something different.  

A wise fellow named Neil Postmas may have put his finger on the problem:  “Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

Our educational system does a fairly good job of developing hard thinking skills, but there is not much to develop soft thinking.  

Human intelligence is a complicated phenomenon, and yet almost all of our formal notions of intelligence are based on logic and analysis—look at IQ tests.  Musical ability, decorating, painting, and cooking seem to have no place in the testmakers’ conception of intelligence.

In 1971, Nolan Bushnell got tired of watching his TV so he devised a way to play with it:  Pong was the result.

Columbus was looking for India.

Thomas Edison knew 1,800 ways not to build a lightbulb.

Franz Josef Haydn’s orchestra needed a vacation that the Duke had promised.  He writes the Farewell Symphony in such a way that as each musician finishes his part, he blows out his candle and leaves, until no one is left.  The Duke got the message.

Captain Grace Hooper explained what a nanosecond is by showing a piece of string 11.8 inches long, the distance light travels in one billionth of a second.

In the second century BC a Greek librarian sought a way to classify manuscripts.  He came upon the idea of putting all manuscripts beginning with gamma after beta, but before delta.

In the 17th century, William Harvey looked at the heart not as an organ or muscle, but as a pump, and discovered the circulation of blood.

One of Madame Curie’s failures was radium.

Edison used to take potential new employees to lunch for a bowl of soup.  He would watch to see if they salted it before they tasted it.  If they did, he wouldn’t hire them.

Plato dictated that the circle was the perfect form for celestial movement.  Even Copernicus used circles in his heliocentric model of the universe.  Only after much soul-searching did Kepler use the ellipse to describe the heavenly paths.

Edison founded the electricity supply industry using direct current (DC).  He didn’t foresee that the success of industry would like an alternating current (AC),

Henry Ford did not want to add to his basic black color because it had been successful.  Thus, General Motors took a large segment of the market.

Gutenberg married a wine press and a coin stamp to produce movable type.

When the Spanish explorer Cortez landed at Veracruz in the 16th century, the first thing he did was burn his ships after they were unloaded.

An explanation of these geniuses:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.