[blackdog]

Simson Garfinkle....I was his camp counselor in the mid 70's. The kid brough a computer to camp when nobody knew what it was. He behaved like your worst nightmare kid in need of a ritalin fix. His mind never stopped.

His dad is a Philadelphia lawyer who is the nicest, most patient man around.

Simson is a walking statement of why not to drug your kids. He could disrupt a pet rock sleeping. He never shut up. He did really wierd stuff like count the number of steps he took in a day, multiplied them out by the number of kids, adjusted for age/stride length, and figured collectively how far we had all walked in one day. He was eight years old!

It's good to hear his name crop up once in a while. Better world with people like him around.

[VeritatisSplendor]

I remember Simson well from MIT in the early 80's. He was annoying and hyperactive, but no more so than hundreds of other MIT nerds (including me), and fit in fine. We were both on the staff of The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. When he started he was an absolutely terrible writer, but he contributed so much content that they let him keep writing, and after a couple of prolific years he became pretty good. He was a medium-sized kid with one of those frizzy "Jewish Afros". Definitely the type to have been a Ritalin candidate when younger -- you're right, the world needs 'em. (That, IMO, is why autism and related disorders haven't been bred out of the species -- you'd have a lot fewer brilliant nerds.)

I like the camp story. Reminds me of my son when he was 8 (or me when I was 8).

[M. Peach]

You're kidding, right?

[buffyt]

My son took Ritalin and still did the kinds of things Simson did. He is 21 and still does things like that. Was into computers before computers were cool. Genius thinker. Ritalin for ADD kids makes them speed up, not slow down. It calms hyper kids and makes the attention deficit kids more active. Only works if you have ADD or Hyperactivity, and doesn't work on all people. Gary just sat and daydreamed without Ritalin. With Ritalin, he was alert and active and into everything. Actually made him more hyper. It is a stimulant, not a depressant. He was leaving the case off his computer when he was very young, it was easier than putting it on and taking it off, cause he was always installing new drive, hard drive, etc. He was a computer nerd before computer nerds were cool. [Bill Gates]

[mlmr]

He must be the world's oldest graduate student...