Some people are astonishingly intelligent

[Flying_Monkey]

Sorry DanB, only recognise friends reunited... just goes to show that potentially better ideas may not be commercially viable- as Betamax discovered.

Orkut is one of the most popular social networks in the world, just not in the English-speaking world. It is hugely popular in the Middle East and in South America, for example.

And you've never heard of myspace? Seriously? It was only the biggest social network in the English-speaking world prior to Facebook... mainly popular amongst younger people and musicians because it has support for streaming media etc. - and the latter are now its biggest and probably only users.

 

[Archie_tect]

Orkut is one of the most popular social networks in the world, just not in the English-speaking world. It is hugely popular in the Middle East and in South America, for example.

And you've never heard of myspace? Seriously? It was only the biggest social network in the English-speaking world prior to Facebook... mainly popular amongst younger people and musicians because it has support for streaming media etc. - and the latter are now its biggest and probably only users.

Thanks FM, no need to Google now!

I only used the computer for work until the day I joined CC after completing the C2C in 2009 and joined Trip Advisor to check out holiday plans to Italy around the same time, so yes, I'm a social network virgin!

[Edit: Mrs A_T says my daughter used myspace for a short while but dumped it for Facebook].

 

[pshore]

He then began writing high-quality Perl, right from the word go on the Monday, having never even programmed anything in his entire life before!!

... Tuesday his code had a bug in it while he was on holiday and none if his colleagues could work out what the stupid code symbols were doing and the software was down for a day.

Yes, I hate perl

the clever bit though was all the customers were addicted to the software like crack cocaine and could not move on.

 

[vernon]

I once had a fifteen year old pupil of mine approach me and ask me what I knew about surface integrals on curves surfaces. I gulped. That particular body of knowledge was a distant and painful memory of my university days - calculus was not my strongest subject. Besides, what the hell did a fifteen year old want with surface integrals?

'Im modelling what's going on near the Event Horizon in C on my Linux computer and the sticking point is I don't know how to do the calculus.'

The lad had a knack of presenting really difficult problems for his teachers in a simple and matter of fact way. At times, I hated him. However, I had a solution, Engineering Mathematics by K.A.Stroud at home. I leant it to him and got it returned a day or two later.

'Wasn't it any good?' I asked

'It was fine. I enjoyed reading it.'

'All of it?'

'Yes'

Yep - some folk are astonishingly intelligent. The academic thorn in my side after a few false starts should by now be a PhD in Astrophysics.

He was almost the sort of geeky kid that could type at the DOS command line

C>COPY CON executable.exe

followed by native machine code and end up with a running programme.

 

[Hover Fly]

On the other hand I have known people like that, brilliant at maths, gone to university to study engineering, and it has just vanished, and they have gone down to a standard where they would struggle with primary school maths.

 

[MissTillyFlop]

I'm a genius too - I know all the words to Tragedy by Steps...

 

[MacB]

I'm a genius too - I know all the words to Tragedy by Steps...

I don't think that's quite what they had in mind when they told you that you were 'special'

 

[Chromatic]

I'm a genius too - I know all the words to Tragedy by Steps...

Post of the day already.

 

[User482]

I'm a genius too - I know all the words to Tragedy by Steps...

You need to come an a FNRttC, as soon as possible....

 

[swee'pea99]

And then of course there's different kinds of intelligence. I remember a friend at university once saying to me 'I think I'm generally thought to be one of the better physicists round here, but I know my limitations. I'm strictly Newtonian. Whereas Dave does stuff like sitting in a dark room for an hour thinking about what it would be like to be a quark going into a black hole. I can't even begin to do that stuff.' (Personally I can't even understand it, but I sort of got what he was on about.)

 

[jonny jeez]

I think I'd rather be a billionaire and socially incapable than the impoverished social butterfly that I am.

I can't look at people like Mark Zuckerberg or Winston Churchill. Their achievements make me feel suicidal, frankly.

this depends entirely upon how you measure acheivement.