When I was 15 months old, my father had to rush me to the hospital during
the middle of the Great Hurricane of 1939. For several days I was in an oxygen tent.
SCIENCE NEWS, March 20 1999: "A Mathematical Mystery Tour by A.K. Dewdney: "In addition to giving his name to a key theorem, Ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras was the first to suspect that mathematics underlies every element of the cosmos. For 2,500 years, math has consistently proven relevant to defining elements of the physical world."
Does this mean we are not really flesh and bone and blood but just a
humongous string of numbers in some Gigantic Ordinal Device? Are we truly intelligent or is our intelligence artificial? Just wondering.
My mother said that when I went to the hospital, I was toilet-trained and
talking coherently. When I came out, I called the nurse (my Aunt Bernice) "mommy", was talking baby talk, and she didn't get me toilet-trained again until I was nearly 4.
A number of people with extremely high IQs claim they can remember back to when they were about a year old and research indicates that our first memories usually date from when they began talking coherently. About 15 years ago, I read an article in Science News about someone who had been researching people with low intelligence with no known reason (such as Down's Syndrome). He discovered a large number of them had been exposed to pure oxygen while still babies and hypothesized that the oxygen had "burnt up" a number of their brain cells.
Since my IQ is between 150 and 160, considering all the above, what would my IQ would be if I hadn't spent a couple of days in an oxygen tent when I was 15 months old? Just wondering. Nonetheless, I think I'd rather be a live moron than a dead genius.
The Common Reader: "When I was a boy of fourteen," Mark Twain was once alleged to have quipped, "my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." ... it leaves unobserved another stage of a father's education, one a son won't witness until he gets to be, say, forty-one, and has grown to be a parent himself. For it's then--as he finds himself adrift on the sea of middle age (with no real memory of embarking from the shores of youth)--that another truth about fathers begins to dawn on him. Indeed, in the shadow of the son's fretful, awkward, hopeful ever-improvisatory efforts to meet the sure demands of his own progeny, he may ... learn to see his father in another, even more astonishing light: as a boy much like himself,
youthful and carefree, who was never graduated to his paternal role but was surprised by life into purposes he was not given time to understand ...