What is Smart?

Someone recently said to me "You're smart..." after hearing me talk about relevancy ranking algorithms for email and detecting spam dynamically based on its characteristics.  My response was the same thing that I always say when someone makes a comment to me like that: "No I'm not.".  And, to me, I'm not smart.  I don't feel smart.  I was thinking about this in the shower this morning (what?  You don't practice "virtual blogging" in the shower?  Or somewhere else) and the answer came to me: Smart Is What You Can't Do.

Let me give you some cases and examples of people I think are smart:

• I've written a lot of different code over the years and if there's an oddball screwy little language I've at least read up on it (anyone remember David Betz's xLisp and adverture writing language) and once upon a time I actually knew some Z80 assembly but I've never been a mainstream C/C++/Java guy.  So for me people like this are brilliant:
  • My buddy Brian who I've seen dropped into code bases of 3,000,000+ lines and can debug it.
  • My buddy Ed who knows the right way to do things, even when the C++ problem is __hard__ and does it.  That takes guts.
  • My buddy Andrew who knows more about searching than I ever will and doesn't get anywhere near the credit he deserves.
• Like a lot of software geeks I've played around with hardware and made the obligatory little geeky project.  So for me, people like him are just off the wall brilliant:
  • About a year ago I had lunch with my friend Jim in an Indian restaurant on Boston's Newbury Street.  We hadn't seen each other physically in about a year so there was the obligatory talk of "Why have you been geeking out on lately".  I talked about researching algorithms ino detecting pornography on the fly and how the existing firms do it foolishly at best.  When I asked Jim, he pulled out a box and showed me a circuit board about 9 inches wide and 6 inches high.  I looked at it and saw a 1/4 normal size screen lcd panel attached to it, a USB port, an X86 style processor and the requisite logic and such.  I knew right away that I was looking at a single board computer and that Jim, who is a brilliant software engineer, has for a while been into home automation.  His next comment was short and to the point: "Look at the initials silkscreened into the board, lower right".  I did and saw "JDK" (those are his initials).  His next comment: "I designed it all and built it".  That's smart: Software and Hardware in one engineer.  Damn.
• I speak multiple computer languages, some well, some poorly.  I speak exactly 1 human language and just can't seem to get past that.  So for me, this is smart:
  • My friend Eiric who speaks like four or five languages, has worked all over the world and is heavily multi-cultural (when a Norwegian marries a Brazilian and makes it work -- that's multi-cultural).

Smart.  It's what you can't do.

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