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Date:         Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:22:53 -0400
Reply-To:     David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject:      Re: Dometic failure on propane, one time
Comments: To: mcneely4@cox.net
In-Reply-To:  <20120815094900.3P7U7.1228461.imail@eastrmwml206>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 09:49 AM 8/15/2012, mcneely4@cox.net wrote: >Been to school lately, David? Your engineering and your comic >selves must have gotten their classes confused. Funny.

I contain multitudes and often believe six impossible things before breakfast. Sometimes I have breakfast at ten at night, which helps. The Galton whistle is real and the turbo-encabulator is the brainchild of a highly-regarded professional training-film actor who decided to write his own script, just once. You can find him on YouTube, along with several imitators.

Schools and I have had a rather shall we say guarded relationship - with the notable exception of my training in the Navy, where we had a deal: I'd get excellent marks and they wouldn't send me to jail.

Have you ever seen one of those tests that measures your affinity with various professions? Not your technical ability to do it, but how your attitudes correlate with people who actually do those things and enjoy them.

The Veterans Administration sent me thirty-some years ago to spend a whole afternoon taking two of those. Same idea, nasty hateful forced-choice questions with a few ringers thrown in to see if you're trying to rig the test. Results printed on a pretty graphical form; one squarish and one roundish as I recall. Anyway, after I finished and quit hissing and spitting at having to choose 400 answers most of which were only less wrong than their opposite numbers, and the nice man spent half an hour plugging said answers into his scoring setups, he came out looking not so nice and said "*IF* you answered these truthfully then you're very unusual" and he handed me the forms. They were essentially identical. Both showed a huge spike, .85-.95 correlation with scientific and technical persuasions (five points higher with female than male doctors, I remember), and an equally high spike in artistic and musical professions; and a vast wasteland in between. Nothing else above maybe .15 and a whopping .02 with accountants and .04 with farmers. I was fascinated, largely at how those hundreds of wrong answers could add up to [part of] a right answer.

So it's not that they're confused so much as they're just part of who lives here...but it makes me pretty good at translating between techies and non-techies, mostly. Throw in some low-grade Aspergers, probably more than most engineering types but still very much on this planet, and you have another part of a right answer. Any more you'll have to pay for, at least until next time I feel like blurting stuff out on the Internet. ;-)

Yours, David


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