Inabel One of the more interesting characters that I met during those hard years at Roanoke college was a girl named Inabel. She had a glaring physical defect. Her nose had a prominent hook, and on that hook there was a wart. In other words she was the living embodiment of a fairy tale witch. But her bright happy character was just the opposite of that of a witch. And she had a natural sense of humor that clearly overrode any anxiety she may have had about her appearance. The students who lived in Roanoke and did nor participate in dorm life were assigned a study room for those who did not have 8 o'clock classes, and it even extended to the 9 o'clock hour for those returning from an 8 o'clock class. These were hours of heavy study. We asked each other questions, some of which were anticipated test questions, and some real need-to-know questions as we struggled to keep our heads above water in the oner...
Accomplishing the Impossible The movie Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, opens with the Kobayashi Maru test being administered to an aspiring starship captain. This test is a simulation of an attack on the student's ship, to test the student's responses to the various calamities resulting from the attack. As each difficulty is dealt with, the simulation computer issues a new, even more difficult, problem until it is no longer humanly possible to handle the situation. It was impossible to win the simulation game. And yet one person, James Kirk, had won it. It was impossible, but he did it. How? He hacked into the simulation computer the night before the test and reprogrammed it. He cheated, but he won. Anything that seems to be impossible is only impossible within the conditions, rules, laws, hypotheses, assumptions, that limit the means that may be taken to accomplish the desired effect. This set of conditions define the paradigm, or “box”, that restricts the mental act...
The Power of Positive and Negative Thinking In the previous posts we discussed the effectiveness of focused thinking, as described by the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, and others. What is actually going on in the subconscious throughout this process is debatable. One theory is that, once the subconscious grasps the problem it searches through the brain's data banks until it finds a means of solution; but it has to wait to reveal it until a time comes when the conscious mind is not focused on anything in particular, and so becomes available to receive the solution. That theory may seem reasonable, but it doesn't explain one mysterious aspect of the phenomenon. The problem that often arises is that the missing link – that one critical bit of information that is needed to complete the solution – can't be found in the researcher's subconscious because it isn't there. If he has never studied that particular field of science the information was never in...
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