::scr The Geek Syndrome

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 04:59:55PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:

> Don't forget the other corner of the Geek Syndrome Square, ADD. It has been
> noted that caffeine binds to some of the same receptors in the brain as
> Ritalin does, which has led some to believe that the geek propensity for
> caffeine is actually a form of self-medication. I have ADD myself, and I can
> testify that caffeine helps me a lot.

ADD is the fancy name for "intelligent children get bored and find
something more interesting to do like breaking stuff" isn't it?

It always amazes me how many people have all these new diseases.  You woulda
thunk that if such things actually existed people would have noticed them
a long time ago.  Like nut allergies, for example.  I don't recall ever
seeing warnings at the canteen when I was at school about nuts in food, or
warnings on chocolate bars, or any of that rubbish.  And I will not believe
that a brand new allergy can magically appear in just a few years and infect
so many people of all age groups.

> > I /think/ I'm fine with Algebra, being half way through a Computation
> > degree, but.. *shrug*.  I keep wondering when there's going to be
> > something that I can't handle at all.  I'm sure it'll happen eventually.
> I've always had a problem with long division. I thought that it was because
> it was never explained to me properly at school, but now I'm not so sure.

Or maybe you've had problems with 'long division' because there's no such
thing and it's a damned silly method which is not necessary if you are
reasonably intelligent.  If you want to divide by BIGNUMs, then the simplest
way, at leas tfor me, is to use successive approximations.  This requires
the use of rather a lot of stack though.  Or better still, this is the C21,
use a calculator.

> > > other trends such as almost universally bad handwriting (even
> > > before extended contact with computers precluded writing stuff by hand.
> I had to do endless extra handwriting practice lessons at primary school...
> my handwriting, whilst now much more controlled, is still IMO childish. I'm
> still pretty slow at writing, although I can go fairly fast if I scribble
> and take less care.

My handwriting was always pretty good, until about eight or ten years ago
when I switched to typing everything.  Why should I write stuff by hand
when I can type a lot faster.  Now, of course, my handwriting is terrible,
as I simply don't do enough of it.

> > > Is this something other people have noticed? I'm mildly dyslexic - I
> > > have problems 'seeing' word endings especially if I wrote them and will
> > > often write "th end" and such. Are other people dyslexic?
> That's interesting; I do that quite a lot, or skip out letters without
> meaning to. Plus sometimes when I write numbers they come out as letters.

When I'm handwriting, I frequently double letters or miss 'em out.  This
isn't because of dyslexia though - I only rarely dunnit before I started
typing everything, and I don't do it with a keyboard.  It's just one of
those mistakes you make when using an unfamiliar skill.

> I went to secondary school with a kid called Tom Leake who was dyslexic as
> they come but a brilliant programmer. I recall him once writing the rudiments
> of a kernel in assembly language as a hobby project.

We've all done that though, right?

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use
  regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems.        -- jwz