Juan Candeche

I will use this name as standing for not acting in accordance with the norm.

I wrote about this character below.

All of us once in a while don't do what people around us do. To use this name for those cases is extreme, because Candeche was known to masturbate in public using donkeys. He was, I guess correctly, considered insane. The point here is to give a name to excentric behavior. In Spanish we have a saying: "De músico, poeta y loco, todos tenemos un poco". We are all a bit musicians, poets, and crazy.

Complexity in society, one can read in a recent Science magazine article, comes with demographic growth. Some 45,000 years ago humanity entered a new era, heralded by the appearence of big enough population centers. Numbers alone don't explain, how we figured out Pythagoras Theorem, but I believe that it helps to have different kinds of people around you.

I have been in several academic communities, and we had our share of nut cases. Fortunately for us, none like Scott Roeder, that just killed a Medical Doctor the other day.

The subtle aspects of Candeche are the dangerous ones. People around us put up with us, as long as we produce something they feel they need.

Human genius nonetheless comes from daring spirits unafraid of what other people will say.