Fake Albert Einstein Quotes

Albert Einstein never said any of this shit:

"Success is a lousy teacher."

“Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.”

“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

“In the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.”

"Hard work never brings fatigue. It brings satisfaction."

“Talent is what God gives us, Skill is what we give back to Him.”

"Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further."

"The more I want to get something done the less I call it work."

“All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.”

"Success only comes to those who dare to attempt."

“I hope the millions of people I’ve touched have the optimism and desire to share their goals and hard work and persevere with a positive attitude.”

“A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”

In conclusion: read a book!

There Needs To Be A Website Dedicated To Investigating The Authenticity Of Einstein Quotes

I need to to stop investigating the Einstein quotes myself before it literally drives me insane. The problem of fake Einstein quotes is huge. Much too big for me. The breaking point came this evening when I saw a post on Facebook from a FB group claiming to be pro-science, and claiming that Einstein said, "Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."

None of the sources I've found attributing this to Einstein seem to have heard of attribution. None of the sites I've found with a page which sorts out false Einstein quotes deals with this one. Which doesn't mean that I should accept it as genuine, because of the volume of false Einstein quotes.

By the way, I must apologize, because I've told sold people that "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" is from Einstein. I still think it's a fairly good saying, but apparently someone else came up with it.

I repeat: the problem of fake Einstein quotes is much too big for me to tackle. It may be too big for any one person to handle, even the sharpest, most dedicated Einstein biographer. An entire website may not be enough. An entire institute may be needed. I can't solve the problem: all I can do is point at it and scream, "Help!"

No, actually, there's one more thing I can do while I'm here. I can explain a term I used above in this post: attribution. That's simply saying where you got a quote.

Strictly speaking, in the row of words:

"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them." -- Albert Einstein,

Albert Einstein is an attribution. If I wanted to give the most exact attribution I could, I would write:

"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them." -- Albert Einstein, according to some Internet sources about whose reliability I know nothing.

What I was looking for was something like the title of a book from which the quote was taken, or, even better, the title of a book and a page number. Or the name of a magazine which interviewed Einstein, or a radio station which aired remarks by Einstein, and the date when they did so. This wouldn't completely solve the issue of the authenticity of the quote, but it would be a big help.

Let's take the example of a famous quote which I believe to genuine:

"Without music, life would be a mistake." -- Friedrich Nietzsche.

That's a translation of

"Ohne Musik waere das Leben ein Irrtum" -- Freidrich Nietzsche.

A more detailed attribution would be

"Ohne Musik waere das Leben ein Irrtum" -- Freidrich Nietzsche, Goetzen-Daemmerung.

("Goetzen-Daemmering" is the title of Nietzsche's book which is usually translated into English as Twilight of the Idols.)

Or, if I wanted to be as helpful as I possibly could be to someone who might be wondering whether that really is a genuine quote from Nietzsche, I could give them everything I have, in the same manner in which you may have been taught in school to write footnotes:

"Ohne Musik waere das Leben ein Irrtum" -- Freidrich Nietzsche, Goetzen-Daemmerung, "Sprueche und Pfeile, 33. Frankfurt aM and Leipzig: insel taschenbuch, 2000, p 15.

If the person who wonders whether "Without music, life would be a mistake" is from Nietzsche doesn't trust me, he can get a copy of the book I've cited and look for aphorism 33 on page 15. If he doesn't trust the publisher of the book, Insel Verlag, to have gotten it right (Insel have a fairly good reputation), he can investigate the Nietzsche's publishing history and manuscripts. As the agnostics are constantly and uselessly telling us, nothing can ever be absolutely proven. But

"Ohne Musik waere das Leben ein Irrtum" -- Freidrich Nietzsche, Goetzen-Daemmerung, "Sprueche und Pfeile, 33. Frankfurt aM and Leipzig: insel taschenbuch, 2000, p 15.

is somewhat better in this regard than

"Without music, life would be a mistake." -- Friedrich Nietzsche.

"O Tempora O Mores!" Oh Please!

"O tempora o mores!" is a quote from Cicero (106-43 BC), the boring old gasbag who somehow became the single most well-respected writer in Latin and has remained that way for thousands of years. It translates to "Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!" and it means, basically: "Oh, how our civilization has fallen from what it once was!" Or, to put it another way: "Let's make Rome great again!" It has been a very popular saying from Cicero's time down to ours because there has never been a shortage of boring old farts complaining about these kids these days with their hair and their clothes and pining for the supposedly good old days.

I don't deny that Cicero was an effective politician, I just don't find him to be a very effective writer. Put it this way: I think Sallust's accounts of Cicero's actions are much better-written and more edifying than Cicero's own accounts of himself, and I think it's a real shame that dozens of times more of Cicero's writing has survived than Sallust's.

I realize that I'm in an extreme minority position with my dislike of Cicero the writer. I realize this, and I'm trying to keep an open mind about it. If I'm completely wrong about Cicero, it wouldn't be the first time someone had stubbornly clung to a completely-wrong position about something for a long time. (Not that that's any excuse.)

It has often been said that the study of human history is a study of horrors, and to a great extent this is true: history records a great number of wars, famines, plagues, murders, deceptions, betrayals, a great deal of cruelty, cowardice, stupidity -- a whole lot of Very Bad Things. That has been said, and to a very great extent it is true. It may seem strange when I say that studying all of these things can be very encouraging, but that is also true, if it leads one to the realization that, however bad things are at the present, they were in earlier times even worse. In other words, progress is being made.

Progress is a fairly new concept in human thought, barely a couple of centuries old. Cicero was hardly unusually in ancient times in his belief that civilization had sharply declined from a glorious past. A few centuries ago, some people started to notice that things changed, and that some changes were good. Then, what with world wars and genocides, many people found the idea of progress ridiculous. It may be that it is, ironically, mostly confined to circles of capitalists who are making things worse for humanity, what with pollution, global warming, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, the continuous struggle to squeeze more and more out of poor people, etc, etc. It may seem downright quaint that I am both a Leftist and optimistic.

But look at some historical evidence. Yes, exploitation is still with us -- but slavery is almost gone, and social support has grown greatly over the past two centuries, even in the US where so many people are terrified of the word "socialism," not realizing that all it means is a lot of things they're in favor of. Yes, pollution and global warming are very bad -- but the use of petroleum can be reduced to almost none, any time we decide to convert to solar/wind/tidal/geothermal/etc. We have the technology. We can make us better than we was. Call me quaint if you want to, but what should we call people who call themselves Progressives but who have great difficulty seeing progress? Historically illiterate, perhaps.

We must keep in mind that the study of history can distort things greatly if it is poorly done. And there are all sorts of ways in which it can be poorly done. One of these is to fail to grasp the selectivity of history. Vincent Van Gogh's painting are well-liked today. During his own lifetime, only a few of them were sold, and not for very much money. Not nearly enough to to make a living for a single person for the years in which Van Gogh did nothing but paint.

Everybody knows that much. What is probably a little less well--established in people's minds today is the art which was popular and which sold for high prices during those same years when Van Gogh was failing to sell his, and which has been forgotten in the meantime.

The physics of Einstein and Planck and Bohr and Heisenberg is well-known today. Alfred O'Rahilly (1884-1969) is much less well-known today, but this contemporary of Einstein was one of the most highly-respected theoretical physicists of their day. He became the the President of University College Cork in 1943. And he completely rejected Einstein's theory of relativity, championing instead the theories of Walther Ritz (1878-1909), of whom you've probably also never heard. O'Rahilly also believed that the theory of evolution did not apply to humans. And he and Ritz have been forgotten, along with a great many other scientists of their time who rejected the ideas either of Einstein or of Darwin or both.

We know that the academic authorities of Bruno's time opposed him sharply -- do you know any of those influential people's names? How about the names of the academics who made life difficult for Galileo? Or those who ran the University of Glasgow and refused to approve Hume's appointment to a professorship there?

Lincoln's speeches are still printed and read. Stephen Douglas' -- much less so.

Who today knows the names of the people on the Pulitzer prize board of directors who overturned the unanimous choice of the fiction panel who in 1974 had decided to award the Pulitzer in fiction to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow? Were they the same ones who, 2 years later, approved the awarding of the Pulitzer to Humboldt's Gift, the one and only novel of Saul Bellow's which savagely and hilariously mocks the Pulitzers? (Bellow, as editor of the journal The Noble Savage, was one of Pynchon's first publishers, printing an excerpt from his novel-then-in-progress V in 1961 under the title "Under the Rose." Is it a complete coincidence that Von Humboldt Fleischer appeared in print dissing the Pulitzers so soon after the Pulitzers had dissed Pynchon?)

The passage of time sifts things. And so, many of the more senseless and horrid aspects of the past are forgotten. And so fools call the past "the good old days."

(Yes, I'm aware that my opinion of the quality of Cicero's writing combined with the stupendous endurance of his popularity as a writer completely contradicts the rest of this post. I'm aware of that. There are exceptions to rules.)

Thought-Experiment About Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine And Hollywood

If Einstein, Planck, Bohr and other prominent physicists had make a concerted effort, around, say, 1920, to warn against the dangers of using radioactive materials in research, and had succeeded in keeping such research very small-scale and protective measures at a very high level, would they have succeeded in effectively banning nuclear power and weapons 20 years before they were developed, simply because things like radium and uranium and plutonium were consistently treated like exactly what they are: extremely dangerous things which should be kept as far from people as possible? At the very least, they might've lengthened Marie Curie's life a little bit, and who knows to how many beneficial scientific breakthroughs that alone might have led? And she's only the most famous of many physicists who killed themselves with radioactivity.

And if this had happened, would there have been fewer of those dopey movies made whose message, in a nutshell, is: Oh noes! Cutting-edge science and technology is leading directly to an apocalypse which will eradicate all of mankind, helphelphelp they're gonna kill us all?

You say you hadn't noticed such anti-STEM fearmongering in Hollywood? Well, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Take a stroll with me through time: remember 1995? People were starting to get excited about the Internet. Remember the 1995 movie The Net, with Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller? Sweet Sandra's life is threatened by one swarm of evil people after another -- all because she works on the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet. Remember 2001's Swordfish, with convicted hacker Hugh Jackman forced by extremely-dangerous John Travolta and completely-topless Halle Berry, tempted by evil, evil cutting-edge equipment to participate in extreme violence via the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet? Like many other movies, Swordfish is notable for unintentionally-hilarious depictions of how non-experts imagine that cutting-edge technology works. Movies about computers tend to age very badly.

Remember what genetic modification led to in The Fly and the Jurassic Park movies? Not to mention almost every single Frankenstein movie? Young Frankenstein ends pretty nicely. It's the only exception which occurs to me at the moment. Can you name one other Hollywood movie in which genetic engineering leads to anything other than pure horror? ("How could you have been so blind as not to see that playing God would end up killing us all?! Oh, damn you, damn you, you fool!")

Or artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator movies, the Matrix movies, or, to take a more recent example which may or may not prove to be as memorable, Transcendence, released in 2014, starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman, which has both the hilariously non-realistic computer stuff and the horrifying apocalypse as the inevitable result of AI? ("Oh, how could you have been so blind?! How could you not have seen that the attempt to make a computer brain could only lead to huge massacres?!" That's not a direct quote from the script of Transcendence but it's pretty damn close.) You beginning to see the trend I'm talking about?

You beginning to understand how vaccination could be so unpopular in Hollywood because so many people there don't understand STEM (that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) [PS, 1 July 2017: Actually, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Whoops!] and have an uninformed fear and loathing of it?

I agree, unreservedly, that nuclear energy and nuclear bombs are very, very bad things, and that it's only natural that they would lead to an association of STEM and disaster in many minds. But things could have been very different. Scientists themselves could have prevented that nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs ever came to be, and if they had acted early enough, that prevention could have been relatively easy. There's nothing intrinsic about physics which had to lead straight to nukes.

And the fact that those bombs and plants did come to be has had a tremendous effect on the way that people in STEM research work. But that's one of the things you don't know if you don't know very much about STEM besides what you see in movies.

I've Spent 54 Years On This Planet, It's Time I Admit It --

-- "I think, therefore I am" ("cogito ergo sum") has never made any sense to me. It has never occurred to me for an instant to wonder whether or not I exist. I can't imagine not being sure whether or not I exist. Ergo, I don't see the use of "cogito ergo sum." Let alone why it is perhaps the most often-repeated phrase ever written by any philosopher. I don't unnerstand. And I'm not asking for you to try to explain it to me. You would only fail and exhaust us both.

And E=Mc squared. I have no idea what it means to square a velocity. Zzzoomm! Right over my munkee head.

Whew. I feel better!

Arts & Humanities & Sciences

Some people will tell you that in the Renaissance in Europe, there were some people who were both artists and scientists, and that these glorious individuals were what we now call "Renaissance men." But the truth is even more delicious than that: up until the Renaissance, in Western "civilization," it never even occurred to anyone to separate the arts from the sciences. People thought it was only natural for someone gifted in one area to be gifted in the other. And of course, it only is. Only after the Renaissance did this ugly and unnatural separation and antagonism between the arts and the science begin to grow and fester. I want no part of that split, and I'm hardly the first to reject it.

As long as I can remember I've been artistically-inclined. As a small child, unfortunately, I shared an attitude toward science which was widespread among artists and ranged from indifference to hostility. Then in the 1970's I read Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, which helped me to several big breakthroughs, mentally. It greatly eased my paranoia, for one thing, by explaining to me what paranoia is: namely, a great over-estimation of one's own importance to others. More than 9 times out of 10 they're not only not out to get you, they rarely give you a thought one way or another.

For another thing, the novel made me interested in science and technology, and refuted my notion that these were in opposition to the arts & humanities. Gravity's Rainbow's author, Thomas Pynchon, had studied engineering physics at Cornell from 1953 to 1955, then dropped out and spent 2 years in the Navy, then returned to Cornell and switched his major to English and for the most part concentrated (for the next 58 years so far) on writing fiction -- fiction which refers to scientific and technical topics as well as to poetry and music and the visual arts and so forth, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

Which of course it is. Pynchon is not the only one who behaves as if there were no rules against liking both the sciences and the arts. Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso come to mind, each a great admirer of and great influence upon the other. It seems that for nearly 4 decades, ever since first encountering Gravity's Rainbow, I had been living in a state of grace, removed from that stupid, ignorant opposition between art & science of which I had been a part as a child. Somehow managing to not to pay a lot of attention to how many scientists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the arts and how many artists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the sciences.

To be sure, I had noticed for a few years already that there was an entire group of scientists ignorant of the arts & humanities: the New Atheists. But then just very recently it came home to me that there had been an abysmally equivalent counterpart to the New Atheists infesting the humanities departments of many universities for decades before the New Atheists were so called. I'm talking about the postmodernists. And I don't think that many of them have ever been able to get any sort of jobs outside of the humanities departments of universities. (Nota bene, humanities departments are far from entirely Postmodernist and there have always been many academic historians, philosophers and critics who couldn't stand this PoMo crap in the slightest.) The Postmodernists despise what they think is the entire group of scientists, but which is actually only the group of New Atheists -- who should be despised for their ignorance of art and history and philosophy. Conversely, the New Atheists look with contempt at the dopey postmodernists, worthy of contempt with their contempt for science -- except that the New Atheists mistake the postmodernists for the whole of the arts & humanities.

They walk among us to this very day: New Atheists who think that "modern art is a fraud," and Postmodernists who think that all scientists are right-wing reactionaries. If that were not enough, and it certainly would be, it seems that Postmodernists also tend to claim as their own all sorts of perfectly sensible people who would've wanted nothing to do with them, from the Dadaists to Heidegger to the Abstract Expressionists to Borges to Nabokov to Gaddis and, yes, even Pynchon.

So it seems that all we need to do is to get all of the New Atheists together with all of the Postmodernists. (New Atheists very often reject that label, but that's okay, they're still easy enough to spot. On the other hand, only someone who describes him- or herself as a Postmodernist, is a Postmodernist.) Then they can expend all of their energy against one another, and leave the rest of us much more free to accomplish things and hopefully even enjoy life now and then.

Spinoza, Einstein And Nietzsche

Atheists and believers have been arguing a lot over whether Einsteinwas an atheist, or a pantheist, or a deist, or something else. Over the course of these Titanic struggles of the mind, it has often been pointed out that Einstein was a great admirer of Spinoza,and that Einstein's remarks on religion often closely resemble those of Spinoza.

It is perhaps somewhat less well-known that Nietzschewas also a big fan of Spinoza. He said that he felt a special kinship with Spinoza, that he felt Spinoza reaching across the centuries to him, one outcast genius to another.

As with Einstein, so too in the case of Spinoza it is debated whether he was a devout Jew, or a pantheist, or an atheist, or something else. Those who argue that he was an atheist point out that the conclusions he draws do not conflict with atheism. I have often pointed out that if Spinoza, or Hobbes, or Descartes, or any other 17th-century European philosopher, had been an atheist and openly, publicly said so, he would've been killed. He probably would've been extensively tortured first, then burned, and his ashes scattered to the winds. The only halfway-safe way to publicly express atheist positions in 17th-century Europe was to imply them between the lines. Some people, from Spinoza's time to the present, have concluded that that was exactly what he was doing: announcing his atheism by repeatedly, deliberately, systematically hinting at it. Pointing out that this and that and the other reality did not necessarily require certain traditional religious belief in order to be understood. Suggesting various novel ways to understand that which we mean when we say "God." Leaving certain points vague enough that it could lead some people to speculate that the positions he was advancing were atheist. And some people did, right away, and some people have ever since.

As I said, this approach was only halfway safe. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue for it. I have not yet been able to find out any specific ways in which excommunication altered Spinoza's life. But it's hard for me to believe that some of his social connections weren't cut, at the very least.

Spinoza died in 1677. Nietzsche was born in 1844, and Einstein in 1879, which meant that neither of them ever had to fear any criminal proceedings for expressions of atheism. Nietzsche's atheism was pronounced to the point that he declared that even debating the existence of God was beneath an atheist's dignity. (He said that atheists before him had not understood this, which seems to imply that he may have thought that atheists of his own time, or serious ones, at least, no longer condescended to such silly debates. I think he was over-optimistic, and I wish that more atheists would at least consider whether debating the existence of God lends theists a credibility they no longer deserve.)

Einstein's remarks about religion tend to parrot Spinoza, without seeming to consider that Spinoza may often have been unclear for the sake of his life. I don't see the need for such unclarity, such vagueness in Einstein's case. I can only explain it by assuming that Einstein himself didn't really know whether he was an atheist, or a pantheist, or something else. And if I'm right about that then it's perfectly absurd for other people to argue about it. If I'm right, the debate can never be resolved.

Einstein ought to be read more for the sake of physics. If half of the time and effort which is currently expended debating Einstein's religious view were dedicated instead to studying what he had to say about physics, that would be a great leap forward in the education of the general public. As would it be if people devoted half the effort now spent on examining Darwin's and Dawkins' views on religion to seeing what they have to say about evolutionary biology. Between the three of them, Einstein, Darwin and Dawkins, I have yet to encounter one profound sentence on a subject related to religion. It's such a waste on the part of atheists to get bogged down in this, and all the more so when the wisdom of some others on religious topics, people such as Goethe and Marx and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Russell, is so boundless.

Just In Case Some Of You Haven't Noticed Yet: Theologians Don't Play Fair

Here are just a few of a countless number of instances:

I think maybe every single one of my comments on Nathan Schneider's non-mind-blowing essay 10 Proofs That Will Change How You Think About God on Huffington Post Religion may have been removed, because of "violations of our guidelines," ie because some holy roller has achieved Community Moderator status. A time-honored Christian approach to inconvenient criticism is to pretend it never existed.

From Aristotle's prime mover to the "endgueltigem Beweis Gottes" Schneider says Hegel was working on at the time of his death -- perhaps it's very good for Hegel's rep that he died when he did -- Schneider's 10-point stroll through thousands of years of Western philosophy resembles a walk through a minefield which the perambulator survives, in that not one of the many bombs of skepticism in Western philosophy was set off by the merest hint of a mention. If one's only source of info about Western philosophy has been Huffington Post Religion -- and I fear that it is some people's only source, and that many have only seen Western philosophy through similarly-filtered lenses -- then one definitely could get the impression that philosophy and theology are synonymous to a great extent.

In any case, the assumption that they are in harmony seems to be very widespread among both theists and atheists. The former love to trot out their favorite quotes from Augustine and Aquinas, they often assume that Spinoza and Einstein were on their side. The atheists generally dispute the subject of Einstein's religious view much too much -- his religious views are unclear, that's about all there is to say about it -- and the case of Spinoza not nearly enough. If they have looked at all at the actual words of Spinoza, they immediately notice all the theological-looking phrases, up to and including the 2nd word in the title of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
and often they discard Spinoza long before they have begun to suspect that what looked at first glance like theology could have been camouflage for atheist arguments in the 17th century when plain spoken atheism was not allowed. (The same may also have been true for Descartes, whom Spinoza regarded as the greatest of his immediate predecessors in philosophy, although to assume atheism in Descartes' case is a bit more of a stretch. But even a century after Spinoza, even the plainly-atheist Hume never actually said in so many plain words that he doubted the existence of God.) Just as I myself discarded Spinoza after my first contact with him, and only returned because Nietzsche praises him so often and so highly.

But of course the theists (especially those tedious 21st-century pantheists) cite Spinoza as if he had been perfectly free to say plainly and literally whatever it was that he really thought about the idea of God.

Among other absurdities which theists present with maddening smug stupidity as fact, such as that Biblical literalism was invented in 19th-century America, that fundies have much more in common with atheists than with them, the religious moderates, the truly enlightened, and that the "conflict thesis" has been thoroughly refuted and discredited among historians (How many people who have not read much more theology than is good for anyone have ever even heard of the "conflict thesis"?) is this version of the Western philosophy absent its religious skepticism. Democritus, Lucretius, Seneca (Seneca was an idiot but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then), Boethius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Even worse than behaving as if all of these people had never existed, the theists, the theologians often go one disgusting shameless step further and cherry-pick them for quotations to take out of context and make these thinkers seem quite different than the critics of religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to/po-TAH-to) which they were, just as they cherry-pick Augustine and Aquinas to make them look tolerant and urbane and not like the bloodthirsty Bible-thumpers they were. If you want to learn about the integrity and reliability of a philosopher or theologian, read an entire book by someone they've quoted, and compare the impression you've gotten from that entire book with the impression you got from the citation.

Relativity

I have a hard time remembering what happened when. The sequence of things often doesn't seem right. I know I got that mostly-amber-colored piece of rock crystal -- maybe heated-treated amethyst, a small part of it is not amber but very pale violet -- for two dollars or so at a little roadside store somewhere in the Rocky Mountains where I stopped for gas or lunch, when I was driving cross-country solo. Which means that I've had that piece of crystaline quartz since 2003 at the very earliest, because that was the first time I drove cross-country solo. That seems wrong, though. It seems like I've had that rock a lot longer than that.

It seems like I saw The Cure's video for "High" in 1990 on the same old burnt-out TV in Bonn, a TV which was more sepia than color, where I saw "Pictures of You." But "High" wasn't released until 1992. Actually, it feels like I first heard "Pictures of You" in 1992. I know this has to do with the lyrics to "Pictures of You," and to missing someone who still hadn't left me when "Pictures of You," from the 1989 album Disintegration, was first released as a single in March 1990.

I spent an awful lot of time looking at pictures of women I used to know and being very miserable. I'm working on not being so very miserable like that anymore. There's no doubt I really used to overdue it. Just like the guy singing "Pictures of You." It's like I was making myself miserable looking at pictures of someone when "Pictures of You" came out, but she hadn't been my girlfriend yet and I didn't have any pictures of her.

The woman I since got pictures of and whom I associated with "Pictures of You" told me she remembered the first time we met. I don't remember it. There's only one person I remember seeing one for the first time. It was 1975. We were both fifteen years old at the time. My memory is ordinarily anything but photographic, but I remember what she was wearing. I never remember what anyone is wearing. I remember the shape her hair was in at the time. She was having a bad hair day At first she was standing with her back to me and I couldn't see her face. Then she turned her head and I saw her very beautiful face in profile. I saw that her eyes were green. I never notice eye color. He eyes were wide and sad at that moment, and somehow the bad shape her hair was in -- quite atypical for her, it turned out. She was usually very well-groomed -- just made her more adorable. I wanted to rush to her and fold her into my arms and take care of her.

She really was breathtakingly beautiful. We became rather close for a short while. I remember her face as vividly as any face I've ever seen. Every contour. Other women I've known have been just as beautiful, I've been much closer to some of the others, but I don't remember their appearance as vividly. I have no idea why.

In the 1990's I joined the house staff of the Promenade Theatre in New York while Steve Martin's play Picasso at the Lapine Agile was playing there, about a fictional encounter between Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso at the Lapine Agile, Picasso's Paris hangout, in 1904. I loved that play, I love it, I spent many evenings in the back of the house watching it, several dozen evenings and matinees, easily. It was this play that helped me to feel relativity, physically feel it, and I haven't stopped feeling it since then. It makes me a bit woozy at times but it's worth it. Leaving the theatre after having watched it for the very first time, in the midst of New York's blizzard of 1995-96, I literally felt as if I were floating above the sidewalk. I slipped on the snowy crowded sidewalk and fell flat on my backpack, which cushioned my fall quite nicely. Someone asked me if was alright and I said, "Yes, I'm just fine." I was indeed fine and dandy at that moment. I was great. I was flying.

In the play one of the several women with whom Picasso is dallying at the time says to him, "You notice every woman, don't you?" and Picasso says Yes. She goes on, "Young women, old women, women in wheelchairs," and he says, Yes. And standing in the back of the theatre I said to myself, Ah, yet another way in which I am like those geniuses Picasso and Einstein.

What a strange thing to have said to myself. I notice a lot of very pretty women, sometimes I don't notice much of anyone or anything else. Completely different from Martin's Picasso. But I wanted very badly at the time to feel like a genius and so I clutched at that straw and said falsely to Picasso's ghost, Ah yes. My brother.

Occasionally I'll catch myself re-arranging reality like that, telling myself I share traits with a genius which I do not share in order to flatter myself, or not remembering the year the video of a sad song came out because it matched the miserable way I felt about a woman two years later, who when I was watching the video on the sepia TV was merely a friend and not yet an occasion for neurotic misery. In my mind I take fragments of remembered things, twist them around so that I'm viewing them from a different angle and then paste them back together in a composition like a Cubist painting.

(Of course, Picassso did that sort of thing on purpose, and with actual paint, and before anybody else except possibly Georges Braque, and so on and sort forth, and I don't mean to imply I'm doing anything remotely similar.)

So Stupid it Makes Me Mad

This article is so stupid that it makes me mad.

"the scientific metaphor known as string theory[...]the Biblical metaphor known as Genesis[...]"

I don't whether to laugh, cry or try to start a class-action lawsuit against somebody on behalf on common sense.

"what the Bible has been telling us through metaphor since 8,000 B.E. (Before Einstein)"

Wow. Would that be 8000 YEARS before Einstein?

Does the author use dates metaphorically too? Or does he have a whole separate groovy lecture where he demonstrates that Genesis is actually 8000 years old?

"Open yourself once more to the mystical message in the first so-called "day" of Genesis 1:"

I wish more people would open themselves, in the face of poota reconstuctionist intellectual history like this, to the plain truth: that the various authors of the various stories which were eventually woven together into Genesis meant them literally, that most Jews continued to believe Genesis literally for a very long time, that most Christians still did until pretty recently, and that the brightest ones from Augustine to the present -- their numbers have increased explosively over the course of the last century -- who have been blathering on about its "metaphorical," "mystical" meaning (I've been trying for a long time to find out just exactly what mysticism is. I'm coming to the conclusion that it is babble which confused religious people find soothing.) are not on to the real, hidden meaning of Scripture, but are just too embarrassed, subconsciously usually, to see it all, the book, the religion, the whole silly situation, honestly for what it so very plainly is: primitive hoo-hah, pre-scientific attempts to understand a frightening world, and prefer to engage in something on a par with seeing ducking and horsies in puffy white cumulus clouds, rather than fully let go their religious beliefs. (Religious, spiritual -- poTAYto, poTAHto...)

Postscript: here is another Too Hot For Huffpo! comment I made about the same article. Didn't make it past the moderation:

"For me, sometimes the mystical pseudoscience gets so out there that it becomes fascinating, like a fictional trainwreck in a slapstick comedy movie.

"At the same time, though, it makes me angry, because stuff like this and Lanza and Whatsisname, the classical-musician-turned-non-physicist [Ervin Laszlo], and the Naked Archaeologist and the Bible Code and Dan Brown, is so successful, at the expense of actual competent science and history and archaeology. And the thing is: the intelligent stuff, the actual science -- expanding the term "science" to include history. Why does the English-speaking world sometimes not do this? -- is not only based on real evidence and intelligent reasoning, it's actually more interesting than the stuff these crackpots dream up."

I Don't Care What Einstein Thought about God --

-- and I don't know whether I would ever have found it worth my while to mention that I don't care, were it not for the fact that so many people care so much about it -- specifically, theists and atheists arguing with each other, each claiming Einstein as belonging to their side. The debate centers mainly around two of Einstein's utterances: the famous remark that God doesn't play dice with the universe, and then, some time later, an expression of annoyance at the first remark having been misunderstood and a statement that he didn't believe in a personal God. Which of course leaves open the possibility that Einstein believed in an impersonal God, of the pantheistic or the watchmaker variety.

I am one of those atheists who's always arguing with believers, but, in the first place, it doesn't seem at all clear to me what Einstein believed on this subject, and in the second place, I don't see what it would matter if it were clear one way or another, because I see no evidence that he ever gave a lot of systematic, rigorous thought to the matter, the kind of thought he lavished so brilliantly upon physics. And as for Einstein's annoyance with his remark about God, the universe and dice having been misinterpreted, I think it was a very cryptic remark, as was his expression of annoyance. I don't see any evidence that Einstein ever had any clear thoughts on the question of the existence of God.

And furthermore, if I'm right, that one of the most brilliant scientists yet to inhabit this planet had nothing much to say about religion, I don't see anything particularly remarkable about that. Spinoza and Nietzsche both had a lot of intelligent things to say about religion; it was a central theme, if not the central theme, of both of their philosophical life's work. Both Einstein and Nietzsche admired Spinoza very much. But Einstein used language about God which was as cryptic as Spinoza's; but Einstein lived in a time which was much more tolerant of frank discussion of religion than Spinoza's time, and so he did not have Spinoza's excuse for -- relatively -- cryptic expression. Relatively: Spinoza still got into a lot of trouble expressing as much skepticism as he did. Nietzsche was very unmistakably clear on matters of religion, although theologians and Nazis, in my humble opinion, have still managed to completely misunderstand him.

Why should the fact that Einstein was so brilliant on the subject of physics have meant that he would be an authority on religion or any other subject? I don't know of anyone who's not stupid in some area of inquiry. Goethe, a Renaissance man after the Renaissance if ever there was one, a leading botanist and geologist and a fairly good draftsman as well as a poet and dramatist, still managed to be very wrong in some substantial ways about optics. So wrong that the young Arthur Schopenhauer, a protogee of Goethe's in Weimar, did not know how to resolve his differences of opinion with Goethe about optics except by leaving town. Which in turn is a very good example of how Schopenhauer, although very brilliant in very many ways, was anything but an expert in interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution. Nietzsche was brilliant in the area of religion, morality and ethics as they relate to nations and other large groups of people, and also when it came to pointing out errors in the thinking of other intellectuals, but he was very stupid on the subject of women.

Just as I am pretty smart in some areas -- for instance: when it comes to explaining how someone can be smart in one area and dumb in another -- and dumb in others, as are you, as is everyone else, if I don't miss my guess.

Asperger's Syndrome

I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2007. That's not very long ago. It's not as if I've been studying Asperger's or autism for decades, as have many other people. I don't consider myself an expert on Asperger's just because I have it. I certainly don't wish to present myself as some highly-qualified spokesperson for people on the autistic spectrum. But since I learned that I have it, it's been on my mind a lot.

Some people, myself included, think that Asperger's is autism, and that the difference between those of us who are diagnosed as Aspergers, and those who more traditionally would be called autistic, is a matter of degree in some symptoms, some of the differences in behavior between us and the neurologically typical (NT for short). So when I say I'm an Asperger, in my opinion, I'm saying I'm autistic. But again, I'm no expert. I'm trying to keep an open mind about all of this.

As I understand it, the best current research says that autistics and Aspergers differ from NT's in the structure and chemical processes of our brains. Most people seem to think that this difference constitutes a disorder, a malfunction.

Maybe so. But what bothers me about this view, by all appearances very much still the majority view, is that it seems not to account for the fact that many Aspegers and autistic people have very unusual talents and abilities. The most famous autistic person is a fictional character, the tittle character in the movie Rain Man. But the character is based on a real person, Kim Peek, and aw crap, as I learned just this minute surfing around looking for some info him, apparently Kim Peek may not actually be autistic!

You know, I feel like I'm opening so many cans of worms with this post...

Okay, forget Kim Peek, forget Rain Man. I gather that many Aspergers and autistics have unusual abilities, up to and including savant-level mathematical abilities comparable to those of the fictional Raymond-Rain Man. If a certain condition brings with it not just difficulties but also extraordinary abilities, is it accurate to call it a disability? Is it really inherently a problem? or a good thing, which only looks like a problem because it's misunderstood? Maybe more of us than is currently realized have unusual abilities, and maybe these abilities would be recognized more often if people looked for them more often. As opposed to treating us as if we had a disease. (Let alone a disease caused by vaccination, as Jenny McCarthy and other celebrities maintain, in a depressing popular attempt to set medical science back a century or two.)

It is said that Einstein and James Joyce may have been autistic, that Wittgenstein may have had Asperger's. If it's possible that those three, and some others of us, have unique talents wholly or in part because we have autism or Asperger's -- if that's the case, is it appropriate to want to cure us of our condition?

I wish merely to raise the question. I don't claim to have the answer.