Didn't Edison say that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? I think he's right. I get cool ideas for things to do every day, probably enough to fil

Didn't Edison say that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? I think he's right. I get cool ideas for things to do every day, probably enough to fill a few man years. I've got to filter that stream down to a very small list that fits my available time and resources. Since I've got a long backlog of my own ideas, I'm not all that interested in develop other people's ideas -- unless they're writing me a good paycheck. People's time in evaluating your ideas isn't free; turning one of your ideas into a rough estimate of the resources needed to execute it, and of potential market prospects, can be hours or days of work. One of my big complaints about X-Forge and X-Hub open source sites is that they encourage people to put out huge volumes of software out there without documentation, marketing materials, or even an elevator pitch that explains what the software does. I suppose some of that software could save me a lot of development time, but I know I could spend hours a day downloading, compiling and testing software that I'll never use... So I don't, not unless the people put some effort into marketing the project and explaining why I should care. The 'math deficiency' particularly concerns me, largely because of what I experienced when I used to teach Physics. One of the most common things I'd hear from the C-and-under students was "I understand the concepts, but I can't solve the problems." Well, helping the student was a process much like debugging an expert system: and inevitably, along the way, I'd discover what the student had in his 'knowledge base' and find that he didn't understand the concepts at all. I've got a superpower which may be similar to what you've got: I can research a topic for a shockingly little amount of time (sometimes even 20 minutes) and impersonate an expert. I've given talks at conferences on all sorts of subjects -- if I had 3 days to prepare, I could be a stand-in for any speaker at TED and pretty much get away with it. That's despite being (historically) two standard deviations below the mean on appearance and many other skills related to presentation. I'm just really good at attacking a body of literature, building a knowledge base, and telling stories about it. That's a skill that kept me out of academia, despite my PhD, because it calls the whole system into question: why do you need to give people tenure and put them through so much training when this guy can come in and 'pass' for one of them. What am I doing about it? First, I'm targeting those areas where my interpersonal skills are weak. Second, I'm working on breaking down my narrative reprocessing skills into something a computer can do, to create something like an 'amateur system.' Now excuse me while I go execute my idea...