These days we like to think of “smart people” as those who can fly through an IQ exam with exceptionally high scores. Or maybe someone that can reiterate… regurgitate, lines from a 16th century poet? How we measure intelligence today is completely nonsensical and ludicrous in my opinion.

Just because someone can rattle off “answers” to a quiz or exam, does not make them intelligent. It tells us they have a great memory. Nothing else. Did they have to “think” to come up with the answers or just “remember”?

In case you don’t know the difference in what I am referring to, it kind of goes like this…

When presented with a problem, if we immediately “remember” the answer by the books we’ve studied, or teachers that taught us, then we are not really thinking at all. To think would involve coming to YOUR OWN SOLUTION by in fact actually “thinking” and studying the problem and then coming up with a solution based on your own research rather than depending on what a textbook or teacher told you is the answer. What if the book or teacher were wrong? Never wrong? Ok then tell me why it is that we murdered the famous Greek philosopher, Socrates, because he proposed the idea that the Earth was a sphere and in fact, not the centre of the universe after all? You see you first need to understand that at the time, the church, and therefore the populous, believed that an imaginary/invisible man on his chariot would drag the sun up in to the sky every morning and down again in the evening. How could someone dare challenge this theory? Ya…I know…crazy isn’t it? Well it was death to anyone who challenged this theory. Socrates was only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of free thinkers that we executed for their “out of the box” thinking. Read more

Well over the weekend I came across a documentary labeled “Hackers Wanted”. Naturally I was intrigued.

The film consists primarily of a compilation of the best parts of previous hacker documentaries however it does have it’s own ‘unique’ content also. What was most interesting for me was the tie in with ancient civilizations and how in the past, we have crucified (no pun intended) those who think outside the proverbial box of what we like to call reality. Read more