User:Quacksalber
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[edit] About me
I'm a humble contributor to this monumental work. Wikipedia has profoundly expanded my scholarship.
I am a retired jack-of-all-trades. My abilities are derivative, my skills are in cross-referencing. I'm a big fan of all things Kircher. He died the day before my birthday. He even looked a bit like me. His interests eerily reflect my own, from Hieroglyphics, Alchemy and Colour Harmony to Bioluminescence, Space Travel and the Cat-Piano. His shortcomings are mine too. His silly sense of humour I find devilishly funny. His achievements I will never match.
For the lowdown on me, see: http://www.maxclark.me.uk/nida/biopages/ian.htm
From which you'll see I am scientifically trained, but think holistically. I shall never win the Nobel Prize.
[edit] Apologia pro vita sua
Fr Athanasius Kircher, SJ (1601-1680), was the epitome of a Renaissance Man. Nowadays we laugh at his funny ideas, but he probably went as far as anyone could towards a Theory of Everything, knowing only what was known then. His approach to problem-solving was to acquire as much knowledge about as many diverse facts and cultures as he could gain access to, then toss a novel problem into the stew of his mind and render it down. This was the man who had himself lowered into a volcano to get an idea of what really lay beneath the earth's crust. A Jesuit who studied Hebrew to learn to call God by His right name(s). Were he alive today, he would love Wikipedia, seeking no doubt to become a wide and prolific contributor and correlator of stated facts.
Subsequent scholars like René Descartes would up-end Kircher's approach to knowledge, throwing out everything extraneous from their minds, systematically doubting everything they had ever been told, giving us the Scientific Method and the world we know today. The Rennaisance Man was replaced by the Expert. The Generalist by the Reductionist. The man who sharpens his mind to an augur the better to punch through the crust of ignorance. The man who knows more and more about less and less until he knows pretty much everything about virtually nothing.
Descartes famously referred to Kircher as "more quacksalber than savant": an insult that I'm proud to wear as my badge.
[edit] Sample publications
The Door Out of Hell, http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1899820213/
Who Knackered Aragorn's Catamite? http://www.henneth-annun.net/stories/chapter.cfm?STID=1343
How To Rig An Election. http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v213/elect213.htm
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