Nyquist-Shannon-Monk intelligence sampling theorem
In signal processing theory there’s this thing called the Shannon Theorem or Nyquist rate. It basically says that to sample a fast signal you need to be twice as fast as the thing you’re sampling. If you’re a little slow on your observations then the observed object looks too fast or too slow. This is why a wheel on a car can look like it’s going backwards.
I’ve often wondered whether a similar theory applies to measuring the intelligence of others. i.e. you need to be at least twice as smart as Marx to know whether he’s talking bollocks or not.
And if it IS true, how likely is it that anyone is twice as intelligent as somebody else? And even if you have Mr Double Intellect on the planet, he can only tell you that he’s twice as smart as you because you’re not clever enough to know if he’s lying.
AND even Mr 10-x-normal-brain is only guessing if the thing he’s trying to fathom is much more complex than he can comprehend. If my cat and your cat are playing chess and your cat has knocked over his king because it looked a little bit like a mouse, does that make my cat good at chess? Does my cat even know he’s playing chess.
Answers on a postcard.
you have aspergers and will never know the touch of a woman. you look disgusting you utter cunt
I suggest adding a facebook like button for the blog!
I really like the look of your blog: it’s beautifully designed (I could wear the pattern and colours of your front page on a tunic or something). What are you trying to do with it, though? Where’s the rest of the quotation below?
I like this quotation, which appears very memorably in the opening credits (or is it called a title sequence) of the amazingly moving film, Gods & Generals:
The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.
-George Eliot
I always paid particular attention to the clouds and stars in England because I loved the place and was taken away from there early in life: I thought of them as ‘English’ clouds and ‘English’ stars, and they were more special on that account. Seems silly, but Eliot understood.