Conservation of Matter

The careful reader of the pages of Forgotten Prophets™ will have noticed that the managing editor, Jack H, has many anger issues residual from his childhood. He feels himself to have been neglected and emotionally abused, among other unstated charges. He feels that there were active agencies which purposefully worked to undermine his health, wellbeing and happiness. Thus, when he considers the manifest disparity between his phenomenal intellectual capacities -- measured at precisely four standard deviations above the mean -- and his actual accomplishments, he has been observed to cast about for someone to blame, and has settled upon some certain person or persons present from the inception of his existence on this plain of physical manifestation.

As a society we spend ten times the money on educating the retarded than we do on the gifted -- 8 billion dollars to 800 million. We invest in the unproductive. We short change the most promising. It's certainly perverse, and almost maniacal. A child with an IQ of 160 sitting in a class designed for average students is like an average student studying material aimed at an IQ of 40 (four SD below the mean) -- that's below dull, below feeble-minded, below mental defective, below moron. It's imbecile. It's as if the powers that be expect intelligence to be a coping tool, so that the gifted can just fend for themselves. Well, that does not sound like a genuinely stupid idea. No, it doesn't sound like one.

In the late 1980s, the University of New South Wales commenced a longitudinal study of 60 Australian children with IQs of 160 or above. "Today most of the 33 students who were not allowed to skip grades have jaded views of education, and at least three are dropouts. 'These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because, having been to a large extent socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice ... in developing and maintaining social relationships. [...] A number have had counseling. Two have been treated for severe depression.' By contrast, the 17 kids who were able to skip at least three grades have mostly received Ph.D.s, and all have good friends."

I was in second grade for two years. God dammit. Retards. I don't have any friends. Who can I blame for this?

We travel through time at the speed of light. When we divert some of our energy to movement through space, less is available for movement through time and thus time slows. Time slows for moving objects. Move through space at the speed of light and time stops; move through time at the speed of light and spacial movement stops. How interesting.

Time, for Jack H, has stopped. He is stuck in a moment. Why isn't he moving in space, then, and at the speed of light? -- a great blaze and flair of brilliance that inflames the sky with glory? It seems that he is utterly still, and all his energy has gone to something else. It seems that the past has attained infinite mass for Jack H, and he is weighted down by it. The drag is too much, yet the motion that should create the drag has stopped. Not a paradox, though. There must be some third place for energy to go, that creates mass independent of movement, and has the power to freeze time itself.

It seems that some parts of the universe reach their heat death before other parts. It seems that something other than matter in time can die. It seems that memory can have infinite mass -- it can be its own universe, a singularity of exhausted potential. In such an expanse of darkness, where is light? What can quicken the dead?

Memory is the opposite of intelligence. Who would have thought it?


J