Author: Deano

The other answers make several excellent points about the super brain's failure to reduce absolute R&D time on all the component parts of an Iron Man suit.

However, if a non-imprisoned Tony Stark wanted to make such a suit from his office under no physical duress, the tactics involved would likely be primarily the purview of his super-brain:

• Quickly generating a list of required components for the suit
• Identifying any components for which the technology did not exist
• Locating all of the patents, companies and people worldwide needed to create these "sci fi" components in the fastest manner possible
• Recruiting, purchasing, or licensing said personnel, materials, and organizations in a friendly manner
• Tricking/coercing any unwilling partners as needed by quickly determining their vulnerabilities and exploiting them
• And of course, all the while, sectioning off a small portion of brain activity to make the required financial investments and other business/social moves to generate the necessary funding and connections to pull everything off without significant competitor/government intervention.

Ultimately, whether you are a "regular" super-brain, or a comic hero like Tony Stark, you cannot actually invent/create everything on your own. Rather, you must use your "brain powers" to:

• manage a huge number of simultaneous initiatives at the highest possible levels,
• possess (and continually develop) a huge store of functional knowledge across almost every imaginable field,
• and quickly identify, vet, and persuade a great number of the world's best and brightest people to work on a challenge that in most likelihood cannot be fully or openly revealed to any of them.

Given this answer, it should be far less odd that Tony Stark is portrayed not only as brilliant, but also a party-loving playboy: super-brains make super-schmoozing that much more important and valuable. A lot of the most brilliant SV Tech CEOs could probably take a lesson from that.

Assuming you had a "super brain" (iq >1000) where everything you read just clicked in, how long would it take to amass enough knowledge to be able to build an iron man like suit?

As a semi-competent learner of languages as an adult, I'd say Dan Holiday is pretty solidly on to something with his "yes/no" answer… But it applies much more contextually against the backdrop of "an American living in America, primarily working in a role that does not interact with Chinese clients/bosses/etc a great deal".

Basically, Chinese is a valuable asset if you think you'll ever need/want to work or live in a Chinese-speaking nation, or if you will work with Chinese speakers a great deal.

And in that light, learning Mandarin Chinese while young has numerous advantages over another popular language – it is actually a very difficult language to learn not only to speak fluently, but also to read and write, for someone whose primary language is English.

Young language students are often much quicker to pick up a second or even third language – my 3 year-old speaks Japanese better than me already, has above-average but non-stellar English, and has memorized a dozen common children's songs in both, plus Chinese! Oh yeah, and now that she's talking non-stop, her sign language is going to hell. Kids.

If I had to make a solid recommendation based on overall usefulness/life fulfillment, I'd recommend learning English, plus 1-2 languages that use a significantly different alphabet (cyrillic, Arabic, character-based, etc) as a child.

Not to knock French or Spanish, for example, but both have lots of English-friendly cognates – due to the flow of history, both have deposited large quantities of their language into our own, and in turn all our American ingenuity has imbued these older languages with new words mostly based on things we've invented in the last 100 years[*]. Because of this, learning such languages as an adult is far easier for those with the desire to learn and no fear of looking stupid when they start speaking like an infant in some public market in Central America.

Similarly, once you've learned, say, Chinese reading and writing, Japanese will also prove a much easier target to defeat – all you'll need to punish yourself with is a very Yoda-Spanish like grammar, and general vocabulary… But the reading and writing will be merely annoying, rather than mind-numbingly difficult.

Still, above all else, remember this: kids start out loving to learn, and the best way to cure that is to force things on them that not only take away from their general play time, but also never get to "show off" – at least with something like violin lessons, when they finally complete a recital, they start to understand how cool it is to be good at something. It doesn't make much sense to start your kindergartener in Chinese if you aren't also willing to commit to trips to China/HK/Taiwan, and/or otherwise immerse your child in the language on a regular basis at home.

It's far more interesting for a child to learn the language of a parent, uncle, grandparent, cousin, etc. And if none exists… Well, music is an even more universal language than English, and can even be a far more useful skill when you're stuck in a country and don't speak a word of the native tongue.

[* In fact, the French got so mad about this trend, they made a law banning the use of such words, in favor of more "natively French" ones! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tou… ]

Should English-speaking parents have their children learn Chinese to prepare them for the future?

If by girl like tone you mean a raise in pitch when excited, then the goal is more to get him to moderate excitement as expressed vocally. A couple good ways to do that are voice acting/singing lessons (ideally it needs to be something that interests him), and meditation/breath work techniques focused on keeping calm in tense situations.

Please note – prior to puberty, your kid's voice is going to hold a higher pitch. It may even remain that way forever. What you are really shooting for is a less jarring screeching tone, rather than "enforced manliness".

The tone and wording of the question, though, is a little offensive. Girls have beautiful voices, and men with more feminine or higher pitched voices have certainly gone far in life. While doing any/all of the above steps, I'd also look at why his voice upsets you so much.

How can I stop 7 year old boy speaking in girl like tone?

Totally pragmatic analysis, based on locally-available data sources:

• Boys have more utilitarian, and typically shorter hair styles
• Boys have fewer clothing style and color-range options
• Because of the lack of diversity, boys' clothes tend to fairly universally "match", thus outfit creation as a skill is not learned until much later
• Boys are culturally directed to more active/aggressive play activities, which lose all cuteness as soon as one or more participants or bystanders are seriously injured
• Every so often, those cute girls you see, are really just well behaved boys giving fewer-than-normal gender cues to the observer[*].

Of course, a lot of these same things hold true straight into adulthood, but both men and women tend to become less "generally" cute to the average viewer, as individual tastes take hold.

[* As a young boy of the 70s who wore a comparatively wide range of colors (no pinks or anything "super girly"), and lots of overalls (which were pretty unisex and popular at the time), who had moderately long fro-hair, I was mistaken for a girl about 60-70% of the time in stores. While you may still think of specific boys and girls when comparing cuteness, I guarantee you've mistaken an unknown boy for a girl or vice versa out in public at some point – and I would argue that this is largely due to a perceived presence or lack of "cuteness" in the child. ]

Why are little girls cuter than little boys?

There's a reason Boston is the #2 (former?) startup hub – lots of colleges, lots of cheap office space (well, when you throw in the metro area/"Metrowest corridor" out to Worcester… Public transit options are decent, if not perfect, MUCH superior to say the Bay Area. Oh yeah, and whenever you need it, it's an hour flight to New York.

When you're just starting out, looking to keep costs down, and build a product, Boston will tend to be a bit friendlier to your wallet, without a real "downside".

Unless you're a fashion/financial startup, you can always just move to NYC later, if you find that appealing. Otherwise, it's a huge risk/change unless you're already New York-based/have an existing network there.

If you had to choose between New York City and Boston to start a company in, which would you choose and why?