When a supermarket shelf-stacker was jailed for two years for using his basic hacking skills to blackmail Playboy magazine, one writer said the line between a criminal genius and a hapless moron is a thin one. Preoccupied with similitudes, Kiwi psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa found something else. Both criminals and geniuses tend to be at their best early in their respective careers -- unmarried! Prof. Kanazawa's study of 280 distinguished scientists, from Marie Curie to Albert Einstein, shows that two-thirds of them made their cutting edge contributions to science before their mid-30s. Postmarital life had evidently caused their productivity to nose-dive. Criminals, especially male delinquents, follow a similar pattern. They stop committing crimes when they get "domestic". One theory is that as males find partners, get hitched and have kids, their testosterone levels fall and they no longer feel the imperative to compete with other males. All this squares with what Einstein wrote when he was past 60: “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so”. Past his prime agewise, Einstein dubbed himself a political revolutionary, "still fire-spewing like Vesuvius" (one of the world's most deadly volcanoes). It is history that until the end he was struggling hard to put all the forces of nature in a single equation.
1. Refusing poll tax
Henry David Thoreau was disturbed by the paradox of people describing a war of their country against another as “unjust” and still funding it through taxes. Thoreau’s historic essay (‘Civil Disobedience’) was spurred by his refusal to pay a poll tax to the government as a protest. Against what?
2. Leaving the trees
We started to become humans when our non-human ancestors turned bipedal (two-footed). It marked the transition from a tree-dwelling ape to a hunter standing on one’s own ground. Who argued that studying the mathematics of falls could provide insights into the origin of Homo sapiens?
3. Doubling endlessly
A prosthesis is an artificial extension that replaces a missing body part. This extension can have a mental parallel. The bewildering power of cinematic and photographic images has replaced the culture of fixed identities with a culture of endless doubles. Who called it a “prosthetic culture”?
4. Values do matter
“The most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century” is a non-believer, but no atheist. A question he did face once was “What, if anything, does God have to do with economics?” He said: “I do not believe God has anything to do with economics. But values do”. Who is it?
5. Get up, walk out!
He is not Jesus, but people literally come in a wheelchair and walk out of the office after one appointment with him. The secret is with the patients. A balance-related disorder (“Fear of falling gait”) convinces them they can’t stand/walk, and they stop standing/walking. Who makes them walk out?
6. The most abundant
Life often manifests itself in more and more complex forms over time, but taking this as a proof of progress is “a ludicrous case of the tail wagging the dog”. The bacterial mode is both the earliest and the most abundant mode of life on Earth. Which biologist used the term “modal bacter”?
7. She will burn you up
Charlene McGee in Stephen King’s novel ‘Firestarter’ says, “Get out of here ... I’ll burn you up! I’ll fry you!”. She isn’t boasting! She possesses the power to set fire to anything just by staring at it (pyrokinesis). The special limited edition of ‘Firestarter’ is often called “Asbestos Edition”. Why so?
8. Runaway nanobots
During the 1970s-1980s, Kim Eric Drexler became the greatest populariser of systems at the molecular scale. He was gung-ho about tiny robots, but later he repudiated the idea, because he was aware of the potential eco-terror from bacteria-like runaway nanobots. What did he call them?
9. Perfumed visuals
Film speed is controllable and perfume effects are uncontrollable. Perfumes take effect in three unpredictably time-bound stages. Smells won’t match scenes, if you deploy 30 different scents in a theatre, “sequenced to specific triggers in the film reel”. Who failed in an attempt to achieve this?