First post. What can I say? Welcome to my blog, I guess.Why did I call it ENTP? I’ve always wanted my own website and I had to think of a name for it. I thought about calling it maverick, but thought that might come across as being too pretentious. ENTP is a personality type as described in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).You can read the Wikipedia entry for all the gory details.

I think I may do a personal podcast. They’ll not have a theme. It’ll just be what I’m interested in and interested in sharing. Subjects would include, Scots Gaelic, science fiction, science, politics, religion, evolution, history, movies & tv, astronomy, spaceflight (manned and unmanned), cooking, travel, other foreign languages (Russian, German, Japanese) & linguistics, computers, geekdom, and mavericks. I’m already doing a podcast for a science fiction convention, Conestoga.
Mavericks are people that I’m drawn to. They have had an impact on the world and impressed me with their accomplishments. I could probably rank them as to their importance to me. I would rank Richard Feynman above Isaac Asimov, but not by much. I’ll list others that have influenced me but I no longer place much faith in. People like Ayn Rand and G. Gordon Liddy. I do wonder how much of our personality is innate and how much is learned. I also wonder how much personality influences our politics and our religion. There are a multitude of factors, education, environment, society, friends, etc. that can influence a person. At what point do the influences stop and your own self shine through. The self that is created by you, that is original. And if it stands out in society you are considered a maverick.

What I like about a maverick is they look at the world a different way. The status quo says ‘it’s this way accept it’ and the maverick says ‘No. that doesn’t make sense. after examining it, this is how it is.’

Some are more maverick than others. And not necessarily in the order of ranking.

  • Richard Feyman
  • Joseph Campbell
  • R. Buckminster Fuller
  • Isaac Asimov
  • Freeman Dyson
  • Gerard K. O’Neill
  • John Gardner
  • Bruce Lee
  • Lon Chaney, Sr.
  • Carl Sagan
  • Julian May
  • Julian Jaynes
  • Douglas Hofstadter

I’ll expand on the list later. I’ll also include people that were a big influence at the time but not so much any more. These are people that have had an impact, whether I consider it positive or negative. I might include places that I consider to be maverick as well, like San Francisco, Geneva, Edinburgh.

There are some people that had a big influence on me at the time I was reading their work, but I no longer hold them as valid. They are mavericks. Ayn Rand comes to mind. I read quite a bit of her work. She is like Zeno’s paradox. You can prove through logic that motion is impossible but that’s not what we observe in the real world. Her ideas work in her writings, but it’s not what we observe in the real world.