Simplification

Running late this morning.  Not even sure what to say.  Yesterday, some knucklehead decided to do a denial of service attack against one of our sights.  I was setting the site up for failover network capability.  The failover worked, so the entire denial of service attack was a big joke.  It was one of those perfect storms where an attack occurred, but the attack was completely mitigated without any harm to the site. 

 I’d like to say it was intentional that it happened this way, but it’s not.  It was just pure luck.  But I will take pure luck. 

Despite all this, I keep returning to a realization I had over the weekend.  In the Bible, Solomon is considered the second most intelligent person.  The first most intelligent being Jesus.  But back to Solomon.  For all his brilliance, after his reign the country of Israel goes down the tubes.  Solomon had hundreds of wives, and he allowed them to openly worship idols, leading the country towards idolatry.  I guess the main point here is all can screw up, even the most brilliant around us. 

The more I think about it, the more I believe excessive intelligence becomes a hindrance and not a help.  Excessive intelligence leads to more thought and less action.  Action is the catalyst of change in the world, not thought.  And really, most lives don’t need more thought.  They need more action. 

I was asked yesterday if I had been told I was smart.  I told the person I don’t think I believe them anymore.  For all the “intelligence” I supposedly have, simplistic truths have always confounded me.  And in the end, it’s always the simplification that yields the best and most accurate results.  Back when there was a geocentric model of the universe, a man created a map of the movement of the planets.  It was incredibly complex, but still did not explain everything.  Sometime later, the heliocentric model of the universe was developed.  Suddenly, the things that it took a mathematician to understand could be taught to children. 

It really makes me think… if the concept can’t be taught to a child, the concept needs revised.