Yeah, the whole changing forms concept is confusing sometimes. The forms Barty takes doesn't seem to be restricted by the 'size' (or whatever) of his essence. He can compress himself down to a flea, or strtch himself out into that giant flying roc thing that he used to spitit away Kitty from the wolves in Golem's Eye

And the lower spirits either can't or won't change shape very often. Then there are stubborn higher spirits that adamently stick to one form (Faquarl's ample sized chef or Jabor's big Jackal headed thing of death)

Barty said himself you can judge the intelligence of a djinni by how many forms it takes. But of course he'd say that

What were everybody's favourite of Bart's forms? I'm sorry we only saw his fabled 'Serpent of Silver Plumes' form once, in GE. That was AWESOME!

Rambling complete

And to you. We're not completely insane (I feel I need to tell the new members this, they always seem to be scared off).

wrote:Only has a few forms that it can take on the first few planes. Such as a midget boy. They don't have enough intelligence to change freely into any form

Never really thought about it before, but that actually makes sense.

Ahhh.
Hmm.
Not so much as intelligence.
As I've said before, the most idiotic spirit is still a faster (if not s intuitive or creative) thinker than any of us.
What lower spirits lack is ability.

And ability is related to intelligence;
We are able to learn to walk.
We are able to learn to speak
We are able to learn to write.
And a crap load of other abilities that we LEARN to do.
I don't really think spirits are any different.

More like Intelligence is essential to ability.
We are smart enough to learn to walk.
We are smart enough to learn to speak.
We are smart enough to learn to write.

Can't teach a legitamently stupid person Particle physics.

Sure you can. Particle physics is mostly memory.
>>

That's why I don't count memory as intelligence.
To me, there's memory, and the ability to solve.

You mean logic?

No.
I mean we can do two things:
Remember
Solve.

Unfortunately, our intelligence includes emotions. So they do tend to screw up our intelligence, over powering logic and sense.

Dansariki wrote:That's why I don't count memory as intelligence.
To me, there's memory, and the ability to solve.

But in that case, you could teach a legitimately stupid person with a half-decent memory particle physics.

But to most people, memory is intelligence-
I've got a huge amount of knowledge in my head, but logic and math-wise, I'd be lucky to hit average.
So that means the average person's view of 'stupid' is somebody without a good memory.

The average person is a moron (and 50% of people are worse than them).

That's why we hold smart people in such high esteem.

Dansariki wrote:That's why we hold smart people in such high esteem.

Or we fear them, and thus always target them.

Any Rand's version of your statement:
"'Mr. Rearden, ' said Francisco solemnly calm, 'If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, knee buckling, arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders- what would you tell him to do?'
'I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?'
'To shrug.'

Ah yes. That book. Haven't read it yet, but I did read the Fountainhead. Still an Objectivism novel.

The Foutainhead laid the foundation for Objectivism.
At least in her writing.