Great Minds Unite With Greater Minds…

“Great minds unite with greater minds and the wise value their enemies… But to what avail?”

L.L Brunk

“We’ve all heard the expression, “Birds of a feather flock together,” meaning similar people tend to associate with each other. We are going to make a presumption regarding this old saying; Great minds gather and share great ideas in desperate times, because of an ingrained survival mechanism. Is this true though? Or are we a kind of virus, a species whom will be defined by their addiction to self sabotage? Whether to a better future or our demise and the demise of our planet, ultimately we will flock together.”

Consul Nicholas Moore

Dustin Rubenstein is a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist who studies the causes and consequences of family-living in animals. He wanted to know why some species help each other raise their young while other species that are closely related go it alone. He had research published in the Aug. 21st issue of the journal Current Biology, which strongly suggests that the answer does indeed lie in the environment, or more specifically, the predictability of seasonal weather patterns. Rubenstein collected DNA samples of starlings around the world, and he has studied rainfall patterns across Africa covering nearly 150 years, and all of it points to one conclusion. If you can't count on the rain coming when it's supposed to, thus producing the food you will need for yourself and your young, you're going to need a lot of help from other members of your family.” (One of the first great cities discovered through archeology comes to mind; city-state Ur in ancient Sumer. The people here lived in a land constantly affected by the elements; floods or dry spells, and these tough conditions helped the people evolve intellectually faster. *Seems that when people get too comfortable, or life becomes too easy the random bursts of human insight decrease.) The causes and consequences of family-living in humans are no different than their animal counterparts at the core, although in recent years one may wonder if humanity is losing their primal instinct to survive.)

Rubenstein roamed across much of Africa, especially Kenya, where there are 26 species -- more than in any other country in the world -- but he paid particular attention to the superb starling, a colorful bird with a very complex social network.

Using DNA analysis, Rubenstein determined that when a new superb starling hatches, all sorts of kinfolk show up to help out. Most are siblings, or at least "first cousins," he said.

The researchers found that one third of all African starlings are cooperative breeders, but here's the key. They all live in the savannas, the semi-arid grasslands scattered across much of Africa. And nearly all the non-cooperative species live in the forests.

Long-term rainfall data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from more than 2,000 sites across Africa filled in the most important blank. The records showed that rainfall in the savannas is very unpredictable from one year to the next.

"Savannas have a pronounced dry season and a pronounced wet season," Rubenstein said. "But what was surprising was that the variability in each of the seasons is much higher in the savannas than it is in the forests or deserts.

"Everyone's looking out for their own best interest," he said. "If you breed on your own you will be producing offspring that are more related to you than if you are helping someone else. But if you can't go it alone, you can pass on at least a share of your genes by helping to raise relatives."

So in the savanna, where rain and food is less predictable, a smart starling chooses to maintain a close relationship with its kinfolk to ensure propagation of the family lineage. (Like a survival mechanism in animals; seems the greatest minds find each other during the most desperate times. They keep the knowledge growing. Almost as if a desperate attempt by nature to keep intelligence alive; the great minds find each other and intellectually feed from each other.)Please see article “Why Some Birds Flock Together.” http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=3507145&page=1

If not for Mark Twain and the great minds he crossed paths with, would we have ever heard of Helen Keller?

Twain was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “the Great American Novel. Twain was born during a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it” as well. He died the day following the comet’s subsequent return. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,” and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Twain moved to San Francisco, California in 1864, still as a journalist. He met writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, and Dan DeQuille. The young poet Ina Coolbrith may have romanced him. Upon making friends with these writers Twain had his first success as a writer one year later with his humorous tall tale, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in a New York weekly, The Saturday Press, on November 18, 1865. It brought him national attention. A year later, he traveled to the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. His travelogues were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.

Twain and Olivia Langdon corresponded throughout 1868, but she rejected his first marriage proposal. Two months later, they were engaged and a year later married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York, where he had courted her. She came from a “wealthy but liberal family,” and through her he met abolitionists, “socialists, principled atheists and activists for women’s rights and social equality,” including Harriet Beecher Stowe (his next-door neighbor in Hartford, Connecticut), Frederick Douglass, and the writer and utopian socialist William Dean Howells, who became a long-time friend.

Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, (an inventor, physicist, and electro-mechanical engineer, was known as “The Wizard of the West” and was instrumental in developing AC networks; invented the radio.) The two spent much time together in Tesla’s laboratory.

Twain patented three inventions, including an “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” (to replace suspenders) and a history trivia game. Most commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook; a dried adhesive on the pages only needed to be moistened before use.

His book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court features a time traveler from contemporary America, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. This type of storyline would later become a common feature of a science fiction sub-genre, alternate history.

In 1909, Thomas Edison visited Twain at his home in Redding, Connecticut and filmed him. Part of the footage was used in The Prince and the Pauper (1909), a two-reel short film.

(Going to backtrack now slightly to emphasize another connection, since Thomas Edison is being mentioned here; we should elaborate on the connection between Edison and Twains’ close friend Tesla. In 1882 Nikola Tesla moved to Paris, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment brought overseas from Edison’s ideas. According to his autobiography, in the same year he conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields for which he received patents in 1888. Going back a little farther to 6 June 1884, Tesla first arrived in the United States, in New York City with little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, a former employer and close associate to Edison-(an inventor also who was involved in some of the greatest inventions and technological developments in history.)-In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, it is claimed that Batchelor wrote, ‘I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man’, but the exact contents of the letter is disputed in McNichol’s book. Edison hired Tesla to work for his Edison Machine Works. Tesla’s work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving some of the company’s most difficult problems. Tesla was even offered the task of completely redesigning the Edison Company’s direct current generators.

Edison accused Tesla of being ignorant of American Humor after he was offered US$50,000 (~ US$1.1 million in 2007, adjusted for inflation) for redesigning Edison’s inefficient motor and generators, and making an improvement in both service and economy. The insult to injury was in 1885 when Tesla inquired about the payment for his work, Edison replied, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor”, thus breaking his word. Earning US$18 per week, Tesla would have had to work for 53 years to earn the amount he was promised. The offer was equal to the initial capital of the company. Tesla immediately resigned when he was refused a raise to US$25 per week. Tesla, in need of work, eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time for the Edison Company. He used this time to focus on his AC polyphase system. The irony is that we could expect Tesla did understand American humor because his eventual good friend Mark Twain was many times a featured speaker, performing solo humorous talks similar to what would become stand-up comedy.

While Mark Twain had an upbeat personality and a grand sense of humor, he also had severe debt problems off and on during his life. At one point he credited Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil executive, with saving him from financial ruin, their close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial. When Twain lost three of his four children and his beloved wife, the Rogers family increasingly became a surrogate family for him. He became a frequent guest at their townhouse in New York City, their 48-room summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and aboard their steam yacht, the Kanawha.

The two men introduced each other to their acquaintances. Twain was an admirer of the remarkable deaf and blind girl Helen Keller. He first met Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan at a party in the home of Laurence Hutton in New York City in the winter of 1894. Twain introduced them to Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for Keller’s education at Radcliffe College. Twain is credited with labeling Sullivan, Keller’s governess and companion, a “miracle worker.” His choice of words later became inspiration for the title of William Gibson’s play and film adaptation, The Miracle Worker. Twain also introduced Rogers to journalist Ida M. Tarbell, who interviewed him for a muckraking expose that led indirectly to the breakup of the Standard Oil Trust. On cruises aboard the Kanawha, Twain and Rogers were joined at frequent intervals by Booker T. Washington, the famed former slave who had become a leading educator.

Mark Twain was a staunch supporter of women’s rights and an active campaigner for women’s suffrage. His “Votes for Women” speech, in which he pressed for the granting of voting rights to women, is considered one of the most famous in history.

Through Mark Twain’s many paths of inspiration one of the last ones led to Helen Keller. The young Keller benefited from Twain’s support, as she pursued her college education and publishing, despite her disabilities and financial limitations. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Mark Twain had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent, and from here the paths of inspiration continued to cross.

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If not for Jules Gabriel Verne and the great minds he inspired, would we have heard of space flight so soon in our history?

Jules Gabriel Verne; One of his teachers was the French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, professor of drawing and mathematics at the college in 1842, and who later became famous for creating the US Navy's first submarine, the USS Alligator. De Villeroi may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although no direct exchanges between the two men have been recorded.

When Verne's father discovered that his son was writing rather than studying law, he promptly withdrew his financial support. Verne was forced to support himself as a stockbroker, which he hated despite being somewhat successful at it. During this period, he met Victor Hugo; (who’s best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and Alexandre Dumas; (best known for his historical novels of high adventure The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Three Musketeers); these two authors offered Jules Gabriel Verne writing advice.

Upon reading Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon”; in his 1903 publication on space travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky refuted Verne's idea of using a cannon for space travel. He concluded that a gun would have to be impossibly long. The gun in the story would subject the payload to about 22000 g of acceleration. However, Konstantin was nevertheless inspired by the story and developed the theory of spaceflight. (He was considered to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, and the father of space flight.)

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If not for H.G Wells and the great minds he inspired, would we have ever heard of the Atom Bomb and Nuclear Warfare?

In H. G. Wells' 1901 The First Men in the Moon (also relating to the first voyagers to the Moon) the protagonist, Mr. Bedford, mentions Verne's novel to his companion, Professor Cavor, who replies (in a possible dig at Verne) that he does not know what Bedford is referring to. Verne returned the dig later when he pointed out that he used guncotton to send his men to the moon, and one could see it any day. "Can Mr. Wells show me some "cavourite"?", he asked archly.

In 1889–90 Wells managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School where he taught and admired A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh.

In C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength, the character Jules is a caricature of Wells, and much of Lewis's science fiction was written both under the influence of Wells and as an antithesis to his work (or, as he put it, an "exorcism" of the influence it had on him).

Radioactive decay plays a large role in H.G Wells, The World Set Free (1914). This book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic "hit". Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosive—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century", he wrote, "than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands". Leó Szilárd acknowledged that the book inspired him to theorise the nuclear chain reaction. He wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. (He also conceived three revolutionary devices: the electron microscope, the linear accelerator and the cyclotron.)

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On a positive note please see the following connections which didn’t seem to lead to more bad than good down the line.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.; was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. According to John Steinbeck’s eldest son Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."

Ernest Miller Hemingway; was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations… In Chicago he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson; (was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced other than Ernest Hemingway, were William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.

In Paris, Hemingway met writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career". Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. (All these acquaintances he had before writing his greatest novels, and being recognized in the mainstream.) Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and hostility". Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby the same year: Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.

J.D Salinger met Hemmingway during WW2. During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris. Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing, and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two writers began corresponding; Salinger wrote Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.

“Birds of a feather flock together.” The question is; are we flocking towards a better future? Or are we ultimately destructive by nature, even when we don’t try to be? Will are species be defined by our revolutionary thinkers in a positive light? Or will we be defined by our addiction to self sabotage? Whether to a better future or our demise and the demise of our planet… ultimately we will flock together.”

Consul Nicholas Moore