Power in numbers
He also had a curious love of pigeons too… Nikola Tesla was, like many scientists, a genius and a fruit-cake.
Take Henry Cavendish for example could not talk to women, at all… Oliver Heaviside liked to work in tiny rooms that were dark and rather warm… Jeremy Bentham preferred the company of rats… and the great mathematician, Paul Ersdos had trouble tying his shoe laces… I could go on.
Indeed, most of the things I have mentioned here are at the tamer end of the spectrum.
The stereotypical image of the mad scientist has its roots firmly planted in reality.
We recognise it as mental illness now, rather than eccentricity, forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and even schizophrenia.
But remember, the world we live in has been shaped by these men – the mad scientist is almost exclusively a male, for some reason the great female scientists* tend to preserve their sanity – they saw what the sane could not… the truth.
And so the following is self-evident – You don’t have to be mad to be a great scientist, but it helps.
* Ada Lovelace, Shirley Ann Jackson, Cynthia Breazeal and Inez Fung, to name some of my favourites.
Philip J Schadenfreude on
It becomes increasingly difficult to not develop “eccentricities” when returning from a lunch where the principal topics of conversation were web-comics and Tesla to discover a merger of the two.
There are an absurd number of synchronicities in the world.
That’s pretty creepy… although considering the geek post the other day, not entirely unexpected.
Any webcomics in particular?
The funny thing is, I’ve had that discussion a number of times too — something about Tesla. I love all the ridiculous stories around the man. You could write a webcomic just based or myths surrounding that dude. I’d read it.
I really wanted to do a ’superheors of science’ webcomic… Tesla would have been my gadget man, my Q at base… and capable of teleporting.
He’s already capable of teleporting, Adam. XD
I read an article about autism a while ago and in it claimed that NASA had become the “hiding place” for a great deal of high-functioning autistics - these are people who could indeed build rockets to the moon, yet still had trouble with shoe laces. (The proof being that they ACTUALLY invented velcro for their shoes). They were all so good at maths and physics that no one actually noticed that these grown men only liked to eat white and yellow foods and would scream if anyone touched their hands.
They sound like surveyors, a occupation for socially awkward ppl.
I was wondering what it was about the proffession that attracted or made odd ppl, tho I doubt it is as simple as autism or anything like that.
Reminds me of the classic Gary Larson strip ’school for the gifted’ (type it into Google image search – Mr Larson doesn’t approve of people using his strips without his permission, and so I won’t link to them).
I like the idea that Velcro was invented, not because of the need to hold things in zero gravity, but because boffins couldn’t tie their own shoe laces.
I think it was almost confirmed today that atleast one surveyor at work is atleast semi autistic.
I told him that I had signed out some of the gear that he normally signed out.
Wow
He went off.
He didn’t like the change in routine at all.
He rationilised it, but that didn’t at make sense, other then that he doesn’t like the change.
I’m quite mad. I won’t elaborate further.
Adam, I think you’re brilliant. I hope you won’t take that as me questioning your sanity. Actually, no, I hope you will. It wouldn’t be any fun otherwise.
I second that. “Brilliant.”
Thanks… I think… question away – I know I do.
Genius is often nothing but an unconventional approach. A short-circuited brain is more likely to come up with such a thing. It’s all relative anyway, and anyone who can show us a different paradigm in a remotely identifiable way will be hailed as brilliant.
I was going to mention a real mad scientist that I had the pleasure of meeting… except, I can’t remember his name – something I’ve always been terrible at and possibly my own little eccentricity.
His nickname, however, was ‘Ernie Flee’, and he was a genius… he designed engines and electrical systems for companies like Fiat before ‘retiring’ to become a teacher.
By the time I met him he was four years away from his final retirement and teaching physics at my school.
Legend has it that he had a photographic memory and a penchant for practical jokes… remember that…
He looked the part. A mass of white hair in a corona around a shiny bald top. A bit like the Doc out of Back to the Future.
We called him ‘Ernie flee’ because of how he pronounced the number ‘three’ – ‘flee’. Every other number was fine – one two flee.
Any other subject and we might never have known, but numbers are hard to escape in phyics.
Ernie was old-school, he used to tell stories of when he was a child and milk was still delivered in carts pulled by horses. In fact he used the horse-cart allusion to illustrate virtually every possible problem and theory in physics.
Ask me how gravity works, and the first thing I think of is a horse-drawn milk cart… ask me about conductivity and again, horses, carts and milk.
But perhaps his defining moment came when he wrote school reports for an entire class that he didn’t teach. And not just generic, ‘could do better’ reports, no, full-blown essays on the failings of each student, many of whom he had never met.
It doesn’t sound like something that someone with a photographic memory would do, but as I said, he liked his practical jokes too and it is believed that he did this intentionally to highlight the pointlessness of most school reports.
I will find out his real name, for his nickname does him no justice, a great man and a legend.
Man, sounds like a real character. I’d love to know his actual name, so I can look him up, find out more. Sort of reminds me of my college physics prof, who was this Romanian fellow with a thick accent, who used to illustrate points with references to Theodore Sturgeon stories, or other classic sci-fi. Made me glad to be a geek!
Tesla’s my favorite Mad Scientist.
And you drew that thrice too, didn’t you Adam? No computer replication for you.
Indeed I did… all of my strips exist as you see them here and they’re all hand-drawn… except when I use my mouth because my hands are busy.
You’ll notice that the eyes are all over the place… I just couldn’t get them to behave, but as a serendipity it gives a certain amount of animation to the strip that it wouldn’t have if it was replicated.
So yeah, I have all of my strips stacked in spiral bound books, just under a foot high in total now… and they look pretty much as they appear here.
Each ‘real’ cell is 7.5cm high and 14.2cm wide, y’know for scale.
The only thing you don’t see are my pencil notes that lie down the margins of the originals… i toyed with the idea of including them at one point, but then I read exactly what I had written and decided not to.
Ah, it was they eyes that tipped me off.
I remember you saying at some point that everything was done by hand, no fancy digital modification. At the time, I remember thinking, “gee, that’s kinda neat, but I wonder why? There’s so much functionality in those photo-shop-like programmes…” Since then though, I’ve come to understand it a bit better. When I hit upon the idea for the cover of our latest Flesh Socket CD, I thought I’d do the linework as ink-on-paper, and then fill in the text and the symbols, and the black of the background, in photoshop. But the more I got into it, the more I drew and painted, the more I couldn’t see using the digital tricks. It felt like cheating. And the finished product looks exactly the same on paper, and I love that. So I get it now.
That’s also why my new range of… it’s a horrible word, but ‘merchandise’… is taking so long to appear.
I was selling a couple of shirts through cafepress, but I wasn’t entirely happy with them, it just seemed to be the opposite of my method for creating my comic…
so…
I learned how to screen print. Each one of my t-shirts will be hand-made, and individually numbered by me. No two will be exactly the same and I will accept requests.
But I’ve really needed the time to perfect my technique.
I’m very nearly there though.
That’s awesome Adam! I’m gunna wager that once you’re ready, and get it all up-and-running, you’ll be inundated with a flood of orders and requests that’ll take the better part of a year to catch up with.
I’ve actually got a friend taking a screen-printing class at uni right now, who is going to, for a class project, burn a screen and assist me in screening a bunch of thrift-stored T’s for Flesh Socket shirts. Unfortunately, he’s swamped with more class related classes now, and it won’t happen till April. Depending on how that goes, I might have to get into it screening — it sounds like a lot of fun.
Interesting thing: you can (and I’m sure this is not cost effective or useful, but it’s cool) make stencil-art shirts, using a can of the compressed air computer people use to dust circuitry, a Sharpie marker, and a white (or pale) T-shirt. Cut your stencil, and instead of spray-painting it onto the shirt, like you would onto a building or sidewalk (owned by yourself of course, never public property…), blow air through the tip of the Sharpie with the can of air. You have to hold it about four inches from the surface your “painting;” it basically works as an improvised air-brush, giving the same look as spray-paint. My fiancee has a shirt with a copy of a Banksy piece on it done this way, and a shirt we did last month with Chuck Darwin done in the style of the Che Guavera shirts you see around.
Wait, you know Banksy?
I love Banksy.
Or atleast that art style.
Oh, and I just noticed that your comment was The Flowfield Unity’s 3000 comment.
Wow. Fitting that that ought to come on this comic, eh?
Three cheers for Adam and his comment-attracting awesome comic!
Which one of the above comments?
Or below?
Or even side ways?
Do we have backwards and forwards comments?
Are we a 3Dimensional community?
The comment starting ‘And you drew that thrice too’.
As for backwards comments… they’re the ones I usually make.
?ekam yllausu ouy seno ehT
People like him fascinate me.
Fascinating people are my favourite type and I could learn about them foreverandeverandever.
…And ever.
All the best people are interesting.
Oh, and Tesla looks rather dashing, I must say.
Indeed he was… he had a few notable lady admirers, but like many scientists of that ilk he was far more interested in his work.
One of the main problems with those types of genius is that they tend to contribute so little to the gene pool. Who knows what Tesla.2 would have come up with?
“You don’t have to be mad to be a great scientist…”
I grew up with the saying: Don’t get mad, get even.
It’s a simple thing to add ballast, but more fun still
to turn heads. Even if others don’t understand,
humoring oneself is more fun than being boring,
ie: you don’t have to be a scientist to be mad.
Vapourising owls ftw, Mr Tesla. For serious. \o/
I like that he is getting more press now (from steampunks, too!), he deserves it. Damn that Edison bastard–DAMN HIM, I SAY!
Wait, there are pidgeons in this comic entry as well.
Have you sold out Adam?
There was pidgeon spores in that book wasn’t there.
Evil spores.
hush, it’s ALL about the pigeons….