Hello, good evening, how are you? I’m fine thanks.

The best way to stay relevant in Gooogle searches is to keep on producing content. As it’s just me and the bots, it really doesn’t matter what the content is, so, as usual, this is me leaving the here and now on a tangent.

I read yesterday that Chris Robertson had died. He won an oscar in 1968 as a mentally challenged man in the film Charly. The film was based (faithfully as I recall) on Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon. I remember being rather impressed with the novel as well as the film. In the story, Charly receives an experimental procedure that makes his intelligence rise first to a normal level and then high above normal. He goes through life, from where it had stopped for him, in an accelerated pace (e.g. finally understands that the men in the bar weren’t friendly but making fun of him, falling in love).

Of course, in a Hollywood film like this, this can’t be the case for good. The experiments effects subside and Charly recedes to his previous level of intelligence. Despite its premise (a procedure that improves intelligence, albeit briefly) for this lowly way to solve a “what-if” scenario I would be hesitant to call the story Sci-fi. For a counter-example how to solve the premise (and be Sci-fi), see Isaac Asimov’s Lest We Remember.