Ugh, I’ve just had one of those nights where you spend the entire evening taking care of all the work that you didn’t do during the day when they were technically paying you to work. Not that it was intense work, it’s just that I tend to have a few tasks that just take time and that are best done with music in the background. Sadly, my company frowns on my tendency to play Slayer during normal working hours. Something about choruses of “Destruction will occur” not being suitable for the modern workplace I guess.
True work story (since I doubt anyone believes the Slayer bit): There are a few reasons why I’ve been posting videos. One is because I do hope that people enjoy them and maybe find out about a new band. The other is that over the past few months I’ve created my online playlist through these videos (just click on either Wednesday Night Music Club or Best of 120 Minutes on one of those posts and you’ll see what I mean.) So if I get bored with Pandora or my MP3 player I’ll just click on the videos.
What this means is that occasionally I will be at my cubicle with the Rollins Band’s “Liar” playing very loudly in my headphones. And if I’m not careful I might hit the wrong tab and call up the webpage in which a red painted Henry Rollins is simply screaming into the camera. There are many things that are going to keep me from being an executive and the fact that this is the way I prefer to work is high on the list. Still, talk about getting pumped up at the office.
I’ve got another true story to share based off of a news headline I saw today. It probably explains a lot about why I am the way I am. For those of you who missed it, scientists recently found that in a certain logic test chimpanzees were smarter than college students. The experiment involved identifying patterns based on numbers being flashed on a screen. Given that numbers were involved I assumed that the college students scores were normalized for the inclusion of liberal arts majors because otherwise the chimps would have had a definite natural advantage. But, this isn’t the only example of a chimp being smarter than a college student.
Fall semester junior year I took ECE 340: Solid State Electronic Design. This was one of those course every electrical engineer took at Illinois for reasons that escape me. The course gave you the overview on how all electronic devices (transistors, computer chips) were built. Specifically, you dealt with all of the math and physics behind the design and talked about the diffusion of electrons across a 9 micrometer surface. Yeah, this was not exactly the most intuitive material one could study.
Anyway, it’s time for our first exam and I spend the entire weekend studying for it. I feel like I have a great grasp of the material, can answer all of the homework problems and was helping others prior to the test. Plus, how tough could the test be? It was fifteen questions, multiple choice. I mean, by definition a monkey could get a four on the exam.
I got a five.
With an entire weekend of study I could barely beat a chimp. A buddy of mine actually got a three. One guy, who didn’t even know until that morning that we had an exam, got a twelve. I think the class average was eight. That was what it was like being an electrical engineering major at Illinois. You knew by definition that you were one of the brightest people on the campus but that still meant that you were barely smarter than a chimp.
I think the rest of my life has been spent trying to prove to myself two things. One, I am more than an intelligent ape. Two, no matter how bad my life gets it will never be as bad as ECE 340.
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