Art & Inspiration Do you ever wonder about really smart guys?

Too funny.....

 

When I was just a kid, Saturday night in the bathtub, I told my mom...and I really believed...I could breathe under water. I was just puffing my cheeks in and out. She said, "Do that for about a minute."
Thought I had hit upon something that nobody in the history of the world...

 

Think...lol.
When my dad would be getting frustrated with me about something and I'd say, "I thought..."
He'd interrupt and say,
"The problem is, you DIDN'T think."
Might've been some truth to that...

 

There's still some cool new stuff going on.
Ever see how they can burn sea water with radio waves?

 

i'm amazed what people like Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday were able to figure out hundreds of years ago...just to name a couple. Einstein kept pictures of both on his wall , he must of thought they were smart too. there are many more that could be named here...Galileo , Da Vinci , etc

the ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew the world was round and even calculated the diameter to within a very small percentage.......but in 1492 the world was flat?

 

I've been known to invent completely new ways to screw something up.

 

This told as a true story from the Marshall Space Center.
Two Rocket scientists, yes real Rocket Scientists, were discussing a problem with rocket nozzle cones melting due to excessive heat.
A kid with a high school education who was hired as a janitor interrupted their conversation.

Those two scientists looked at him as if he had a horn growing from his head.
The kid with the broom continued....

Those two scientist looked at the kid, looked back at each other. One grabbed the kid by the arm and led him to his office.
"Write that down." he said. Then he said, " You are going to Patent that and we are sending you to school."
The tube nozzles were used on the Saturn 5 and the Space Shuttle.
The kid with the broom retired as one of NASA's top scientists.

Natural gifts are great. Another form of greatness is recognizing the natural gifts of others.

 

The human species is the only animal on earth intelligent enough to invent their own food....And stupid enough to eat it..........

 

Then there was the guy that said, "I think I'll make a camera that doesn't use film".

 

I want to know if the very first person to eat an oyster or a clam was smart or just VERY hungry

 

Especially the mountain variety.

 

The thing that becomes apparent with programs like Apollo was it was a team effort, tens of thousands of people. Yes, of course there were some really smart people involved, but it had to be organized and they were working on a timeline. The administration of such an effort is almost as amazing, for example from the concept stage of a lunar orbit rendezvous, was in late 1962, and the hardware hadn't been finalized, and they actually did it by late 1968 - 6 years.

Somebody had to oversee 400,000 people, hundreds of different contractors and subcontractors and make sure all the pieces fit together. The minutae and attention to detail was staggering, they had "launch windows" that they had to stay within for example, because where they wanted to land, and they wanted the sun angles on the moon to be just so (behind you, and low) upon landing, among other things.

A lot of the navigation was done with primitive computer hardware and rope memory, and then they'd stick a smart guy like Buzz Aldrin in the can, who wrote his PhD dissertation on orbital rendezvous mechanics. They still used sextants and star charts like sailors of old, as backup, to navigate.

 

Yep, them Apollo missions was really sumthin' wasn't they....Hey!... How come I can't get decent cell phone coverage across town! Maybe I can get good 'ol Buzz to work on that for me after he gets back from mars.........

 

core memory? I have some laying around here somewhere.... who would have thought that a tiny ferrite donut with a few wires through it, could remember things?

that has to do with the smart accountants at the phone company....they know where the money is

 

Fiberglass was discovered by mistake, took 15-20 years to figure out what to actually do with it.
A lot of these were screw ups that turned out to have a use later on......ponder that the next time you shake your head at that kid down the street who seems to be a total fuck up and just do everything backwards.

 

What about that Ford guy who thought he could put a motor on a buggy and not have to have horses to pull it? And he thought somebody would want to buy one of those things, as long as it was black!

 

Don't you guys know that all that "smart" stuff was given to us by aliens???

 

The Blender, YES! The Saw, WTF?

 

“We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
― Bob Ross

If you can take a mistake and make it look like it was intentional you can get away with almost anything!

 

I think it was DuPont that came up with Tyvek. 1st thing they could figure to do with it was make indestructible hunting licenses. Or so I was told.

 

Well we wouldn't even have cell phones/smart phones in the first place, not yet anyway, if it weren't for things like the Apollo program. It accelerated technological development in a huge way.

One of the great memories I have with my dad, keep in mind he was of the same sturdy pre-war construction that generation of guys had, because of the "Great Depression", and the war years, about the same age and outlook on things, Navy vet, so it was a real treat to show him - "Hey Dad, ya wanna see Buzz Aldrin punch out some twatwaffle who claims the US never landed on the moon? Dad watched that vid on a smartphone, at YouTube, with a big ole grin on his face. He didn't understand the internet and the rest of it too much. But he liked that.

 

Overheard at a home show by a solarium salesman regarding his product:
"This is the material used for the windshield in the Space Shuttle. "The reason they don't use it for car windshields is that in a major accident, they want you to go through the windshield!"
The well-informed potential consumer then asked, "Why do they make you wear seat belts, then?"

 

Back to the cashews...This past weekend my lovely wife and I went camping in Michigan's UP. Being birders, we were hanging out near the bird feeders at Whitefish Point (Google maps that!). At one point, Jenny snapped a pic of me eating fresh cashews out of the main feeder! She laughed her ass off! I'll see if I can post the pic later...

 

Brilliant ideas build upon themselves.
In 1940 the British needed more fighter aircraft. North American quickly drew up a fuel efficient design, if I remember correctly in 90 days. It was a decent aircraft at lower altitude with the American Allison engine.
In Britain...somebody, somewhere got the idea of replacing the Allison with the Spitfire's Rolls Royce Merlin. Thus....The P51 Mustang.
This has to be the greatest engine swap in history!

BTW....The little Ford sports car developed in the Early 60s was not named after a horse.

 

I think I'm pretty smart but, nobody else does!
I remember in 1964 the professor told each student to design something new.
I came up with the idea of a wrist watch with no hands that would tell time with just numbers.
Needless to say, I didn't patent it. That wasn't smart.

 

How about the guy that thought to let fruit or grain rot in a solution of juices. Then drink the juice in a couple of weeks. The result is beer, wine and other forms of alcohol! That has helped out in a lot of inventions over the years!

 

Camping in Michigan UP in December? No disrespect intended, but I don't think you exemplify the people being referenced in this thread!

 

Failed attempts of storing them, probably. "This has obviously gone bad, but perhaps it's still good enough to eat/drink."

 

WRONG! I got away from everything! Just me, my wife and nature. Smartest thing I've done since the last time I did it!