My brain has been blunted

Years ago, I aspired to enter the wonderful world of academia, specifically in the field of history. To make a long story short, I gradually realized two things during my 2 years of graduate school:

1. Actually being a good academic requires a large amount of diligence, persistence, good organization, and mental discipline, in addition to intelligence, intellectual curiosity, and good communications skills.

2. With the possible exception of intellectual curiosity and intelligence, I had a serious deficit in all of the above-mentioned qualities, at least compared to my fellow students who were at the same level of study. (I may have been lacking in intelligence and intellectual curiosity as well, but I'll hang on to those as exceptions to salve my ego for the time being.)

So after two years I took a Master's degree and left, not to return. From that point onward, history would be a hobby, perhaps an obsessive one, but not a profession. Still, I like to flatter myself that I have a pretty well-informed and critical mind when it came to history, even if it was far below professional standards.

Now that I work for a historical society and archive, though, I have my doubts.

The society that I work for is always host to at least a few professional academics doing research there on any of a variety of different fellowships. My particular job does not bring me into much contact with the people (academic or non-academic) who actually use our collections. We do, however, periodically have presentations where people who are doing research at the society present a summary of some of the information that they have found, and how it has affected their research. I sometimes attend these presentations, since I figure it's nice to get a glimpse of how people might actually use some of the material that I work on cataloging.

There is a downside to these presentations, though. They make me realize how blunt my brain has become. You see, way way back in my graduate school days, I might not have been one of the better people around when it came to doing research myself, but I could at least understand a lot of what other people were talking about. I could ask reasonably intelligent questions, even if I was on the lower side of the bell curve when it came to coming up with intelligent answers. Now, I can't even come up with good questions anymore! When I go to one of these presentations, I feel like I'm surrounded by people with minds as sharp as razors while my mind is about as sharp as that rusty old pair of garden pruners that hasn't been sharpened in years so that it can barely cut anything anymore.

Why this came as an unpleasant surprise, I'm not sure. After all, it's not just muscles that shrink and atrophy when they aren't used very often.

Only tolerates narrow temperature range

I've hated hot weather since I was a kid, but until I was 30 or so cold weather didn't bother me much unless it was really cold, like under 10 degrees Fahrenheit (under -12 Celsius). Over the last few years, though, I've noticed that I dislike the cold more and more as well.

Extrapolating from current trends, I predict that by the time I am 50 I will be extremely uncomfortable, and possibly even dead, anywhere outside the temperature range of 65 - 72 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3 - 22.2 degrees Celsius).

In terms of climate tolerance, I will have become like one of those rare and delicate plants that can only survive under an incredibly narrow range of conditions and quickly wilt and die if anything changes too much. The main difference is that the plants are probably a lot prettier than I am.

Computers and magical thinking

My continued inability to post any comments on some people's blogs (because I am officially "signed out" of certain people's blogs and can not sign back in no matter what I try) is seriously pissing me off. On the lighter side, it reminds me of how ludicrously ignorant I am about what makes computers work. I think that it has something to do with "electrons" moving through "semiconductors" in the form of "binary code" following complicated sets of instructions known as software, but I have to take that completely on faith. If I had been taught as a child that computers were driven by powerful and unpredictable spirits residing within the metal and plastic boxes, and that glitches could best be cured by sprinkling the blood of a freshly killed goat all over the machine at midnight, then I would have gone through many, many goats in the past 20 years (not to mention that the corner of my room with the desktop would be very dirty and foul-smelling).

I suspect that this is true for a lot of people. If you don't know much about computers or other electronic devices, then you basically stand in the same kind of relationship with them as people in earlier ages did with the weather and the seasons. These things were/are controlled by mysterious forces that you don't really understand, and when it comes to explanations you pretty much have to take someone else's word for it, or work hard to be initiated into the mysteries of the knowing elite. I think that this is more or less what people are referring to when they talk about "magical thinking" (someone correct me if I'm totally wrong).

This may be a wild over-generalization, but I'm going to say that most people's basic approach to reality today isn't much different from that of earlier people who hunted and gathered for food, or farmed with stone tools. Most people just want to find what works so that they can get things done and get on with their life. When it comes to explanations, most people will accept what the experts say. Even though science is surely a more accurate way to understand the physical world around us, most people who accept the knowledge and insight gained by science still accept it because it's what the experts say.

The question is which groups are considered the experts in any given society. Is it scientists, religious authorities, political figures, celebrities, something else, or some combination of these? It may seem strange, but a society that accepts scientifically established facts doesn't necessarily have any higher a percentage of truly "critical thinkers" than one that accepts religious explanations of natural phenomena. It is just a question of which group of experts has more prestige in a given society.

Computer quirk - unable to comment

I love it when I'm about to comment on someone else's blog and then I realize that due to some quirk in the computer or network, I can't comment on this person's blog on my home computer unless I fully signed out of blogger on my work computer, or vice versa. Well, I forgot to do that, and now I'm stuck not being able to comment because I am taking the next few days off from work for vacation. The weird thing is that there are only a couple of blogs that this happens on - it must have something to do with how they are set up, etc., etc. Computers for me are kind of like the weather was to everybody before modern science - mysterious, powerful forces that I can try to take advantage of, but that are ultimately beyond my control and can turn on me at any moment.

For several weeks now, my morning commute has been slowed down by the fact that traffic is narrowed down to a single lane due to construction. As far as I can tell, they haven't been working on the road itself - they are working on something under the road. I wonder what they could be working on that would take this long. Are they constructing a secret underground bunker or lab down there? Some people would say that this is ridiculous - why would anyone build something secret in such an obvious place as right under a state highway? This objection, however, ignores a critical point. People here in Massachusetts have become so accustomed to long, drawn-out, disruptive, mysterious construction around and underneath roads that it probably wouldn't even occur to most people that there is something slightly unusual about spending weeks on end working underneath the same short section of road. By taking advantage of this, they might be hiding something in plain sight!

(This post made with tongue firmly in cheek, except for the whining about endless construction.)