personal: April 2005 Archives

I always wanted to be a mom to a large family, but there were also lots of other things that attracted my attention. One concept that attracted me was to be an encyclopedic sythesist. It's a profession described (possibly invented by) Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer who profoundly influenced my youth (for better and for worse). (It's in Beyond This Horizon). Basically, a person with this profession tries to learn as much as possible about as broad a variety of fields as humanly possibly, and then brings together items from disparate fields and ties them together into a new knowledge. As described by Heinlein, it requires eidetic memory, high intelligence, and an ability to see patterns that others can't, and then be able to explain those connections to others so that they understand it.