I just watched a video where a guy looked at a Rubik’s cube for about 15 seconds, put on a blindfold, and then solved the Rubik’s cube in about 15 seconds.
Holy shit. I wouldn’t be able to do that in a billion years.
So what’s made you feel stupid lately? (First one to say “reading your posts” wins.)
Holy Christ, just found a video where the same mofo does the same thing, but this time he memorizes 19 of them before putting on the blindfold . . .
A super young child prodigy playing perfect Mozart on the piano.
“Reading your posts.”
You mean I’m not the only one?
Now I feel stupid, …I should have said that, and then I would have won:smack:ay pendejo.
That doesn’t make me feel stupid. It makes me feel glad that I have a life.
I feel that way when I hear Jeff Beck play guitar. He is to guitar what Richard Feynman was to physics - his stuff is so next-level magical that it makes me want to put my guitar (or in the case of Feynman, my brain) down and walk away.
Second Life made me feel stupid when I discovered it. I had been describing worlds in text, here were people CREATING virtual worlds. Holy shit!
I did a similar, though not identical, thread awhile back.
There was a young man, Magnus Carlsen, profiled on *CBS*a week or two ago. He could play 10 people at chess at the same time and win, blindfolded. In other words, he could keep all the pieces of 10 games in his head at the same time.
I can accept that someone might be so good they can beat any player in the world. But this feat blew me away,
Now I feel stupid, because I can’t comprehend how a blindfolded guy can follow the game in the first place. Does someone tell him each opponent’s move or something?
So Mozart, then?
Is that a trick question?
Yeah, they pretty much have to.
Not to say it isn’t an amazing feat of mental power that I could not come close to matching, but there’s a trick to it: the chessmaster plays a standard defense in each game, and merely notes how each opponent’s moves vary. That is, in standard defenses as many as eight or ten moves into the game you are playing by rote, primarily because all the options have been analyzed and any variation leads inevitably to a weak position that not-quite-so-inevitably, but still pretty durned inevitably, leads to defeat.
Looking at some of my old schoolwork, particularly math.
Every now and then I’ll come across an old binder from high school or college and thumb through it. It’s definitely my work, the handwriting is obviously mine, but the mathematics on the paper make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
Economics.
I took the semester class in high school just like everyone else. I did just fine. I get things like supply vs. demand, inelastic supply, diminishing return, that sort of thing.
What I don’t get is the experts on tv talking about how if pork bellies go up, then Armenia will be in armed rebellion while Alabama will have a surplus of toilet paper, which will cause the scientists in the Antarctic to horde sausages, which will lead to another rise in pork belly futures, so the Armenians will all go home and knit fuzzy caps, which will cause the Antiguans to rewrite their constitution.
At least, that’s what it sounds like to me.
Solving it? Screw that. Boring.
How about designing and building your own 3D puzzles? The video is sped up to keep up with his narration, but even if he goes through it slowly, it’s still difficult to comprehend all of the things this guy is dealing with.
Taxes.
I’m a smart person. I’m even pretty good at maths, or was back when I did it in school. But my accountant sends me an email about something tax-related, and you know that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa is telling Homer something complicated and he’s pretending to listen and all that’s happening in his head is a cow dancing a polka while a monkey plays the accordion?* That’s what I get. I can read the email four times and still have absolutely no clue what it says, beyond a vague sense of ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
Also, Dylan Thomas. I can read just about any line he ever wrote and just sit there in awe, wondering how the hell he *does *that.
*or something like that
Fuck me.