Neanderpundit

Ellison makes a point of saying “never underestimate a rube” and he’s right. I’ve had this post wandering around my head for a while, and this is the spark that lit the bomb

See, I grew up, summers, working on a farm. I never had a new car until I was thirty. I always worked on machines, taught myself to do everything I know how to do.

What education I have, I acquired the hard way, and other than a few classes in statics and stengths of materials, I’m pretty much an autodidact.

THese days I work in robotics. The company I work for is doing the real cutting edge stuff in the robotics field, and the things I do are SO new the software on my computer is almost always in beta test.

I believe there are three basic types of human, when it comes to their talents. Those types are, more or less, as follows:

1: Deep thinkers. When left to their devices, these people spend their whole lives taking things out of their mind and putting them on paper. or in a computer. Or speaking them out loud. Those people whose value lies in the value of their thoughts alone, and who are most uncomfortable when touching anything. At the top of level One are pure mathematicians. Theoretical Physicists. You get the idea. At the bottom end of this group are engineers, architects.

2: Sheeple. People who are capable of living their entire lives going to work, putting the door handles on Fords 118 times a day for 35 years until they retire. Most of the modern world is made by these people. At the top end of the spectrum are those who can change their own oil, at the bottom end, those who can’t figure out how to assemble KD furniture.

3: The outcast. These are people who fit in neither class, who cannot imagine the tedium that manufacturing, or office work, or anything else entails. They’re not gifted the way group one is, nor as capable of withstanding repetitive tasks as the other. This is the class to which I will belong to my dying day, because of the way I’m wired. I think a lot of bloggers fall into this class. Entrepreneurs. Field techs. Anywhere a good grasp of science and a pair of skilled hands in applying engineering and scientific principles, that’s us.

I’m in good company. Henry Ford. Eugene Hardig. Thomas Edison. People who know just enough about the sciences to be able to make a difference where the rubber meets the road. People capable of managing a project.

THe outcast group, more prevalent in western society (mostly because of the heavily structured environments of other countries) is what pushes human evolution forward, from a technological standpoint. There aren’t any resounding advances in countries like Cina, where the third class (for the most part) doesn’t exist, they have only theoreticians and common laborers, little between. What they are good at, is throwing a huge number of bodies at a product someone else is already making, and making it cheaper. Not a lot of good new ideas coming out of china.

No, for people like me to thrive, it’s necesary for there to be an atmosphere that rewards the individual, that allows the individual to prosper of his own merits, and that was never more prevalent than during the beginning of the Atomic Era. Look at where the biggest Atomic installations were placed. Oak Ridge Tennessee. Lost Alamos. Chicago. All in the land of “rubes”. Because, in an era of almost no solid state, and nothing in the way of computing power, people built something out of nothing with their bare hands- and ended a world war. Nobody had agita over who was going to do what, Enrico Fermi was on an equal foundation with the lowest maintenance man if the maintenance man had an idea that worked, and as often as not they did. A classic example: At the Hanford plant, in Hanford Washington, the physicists in charge of the DOE Atomic Weapons project had projected how big the nuclear piles needed to be to generate plutonium, and an engineer at the explosives department at Du Pont (who was heavily involved in the project) said “we ought to make the buildings bigger, just in case”.

The physicists thought he was a fool, and told him so in no uncertain terms. But: the Department of Defense paid attention. TO the tune of some additional fifty million 1940’s dollars.
And it’s a damned good thing they did, because the piles the physicists designed didn’t work, and had to be redesigned. Taking up more space. Which would have set our nuke program back six, seven years.This guy, this person who saved our butts with a little foresight, was a nobody, had to have been because his name is lost in the mists of time.

Don’t underestimate a country boy.

And don’t you forget it.

Spew alert.

Hat tip Lord Spatula.

At present, there are two works in the public eye that deal with gender roles, the first and most prominent being Brokeback Mountain.

Brokeback mountain is a film I will not see. It may be good, it may be great, but I’m just not interested, because it is taken from a short story (I believe) from Annie Prolx’s collection of shorts, “Wyoming stories”.

Annie P. is a great writer, from a technical standpoint, and her other major work, “Shipping News” is a great read. I have enjoyed reading it and re-reading it. There is a problem at it’s core, though, and that is that the narrative is basically the internal dialog of a man, and such a man has never walked the planet. Annie basically wrote about a man who at heart is a woman, because she only has that viewpoint. To write about two ranchhands, she’s going to be stretching, and stretching badly. There’s no doubt that she can write well, but she will never be the man she seems desperate to be.

On the other hand, Norah Vincent did get to be a man, and seems to have learned something, which you can tell by reading excerpts from her book “Self Made Man” in which she masquerades as a man for a year and a half,and reports back on her findings. In various interviews about the books she says things like “I went into this expecting to find that men are needy and less evolved, and that turned out not to be so”. Well, duh. There has always seemed to be a certain faction of the lesbian community hell-bent on declaring men useless and obsolete, it’s interesting to see one of that kind see men in a different light. In an interview for the Sun TImes she states
“Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked…. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. …”

Another “duh” moment. Look, ladies: We try to grok you, but we don’t. You try to grok us, but you don’t. We are all different, not only as sexes but as individuals. Even identical twins cannot truly know what the other feels. How about we deal with one another as individuals? And for the militant homosexuals trying to remake the world in their image, we don’t really care what you want, as long as you don’t jam it down our throats (sic).

Me, I’m gonna go watch some old John Wayne movies.