This is something rare in the history of this humble blog: a post from a guest blogger. I give you the thoughts of Paul D. Van Pelt. Neither he nor I have any responsibility for the illustrative cartoon, though. Genius is an unassuming noun, consisting of three vowels and three consonants. The word is useful in its' brevity and can refer to all manner of facility with concepts, ideas, facts, numbers and algorithms. When used in reference to itself, the word is elegant; when used by those who only believe it describes someone they know of, it is empty rhetoric. Few geniuses are notable in their lifetimes. Clever people rarely turn out to be geniuses, and, strange as it may seem, a genius is rarely clever. Clever people who disguise themselves as geniuses are called charlatans. Even so, they may be well-remembered by historians and public intellectuals: facility with language gains traction in the public market and political genres....