JaredSIM - The Adventure Posted on June 20, 2007 by Dave Fowler

I get asked all the time about why I call all of my projects Jared.[project_name], what thingsilearned is about, and why we chose to call our company JaredSIM. The only way to explain it is to explain Jared, and the whole story, or adventure as I like to call it of JaredSIM. I thought I'd write about it here to reduce some of the repetition, though I never mind telling it as its a great story.

Lets start from the beginning with the childhood of a one Mr. Jared Lee.

[The setting: a small private lake in northern Wisconsin. Camera zooms in from helicopter view on a young curious boy floating in an old tire tube reading an article on nimbostratus clouds in the N volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica. Que Narator]

*Narator: *In a world of common people, going about their common tasks in their common everyday ordinary regular ways, a young boy was born and raised away from its influences...

[kill narator]

Ok, I went a little overboard, back to regular story telling style. Jared was home schooled the majority of his childhood. His older brothers were moved away to college and he spent all of his time with his parents enjoying the frills of life that typical 50 year olds enjoy. Jared loved reading non-fiction, politics, religion, nature, radio, talking about the weather, photography, watching sports and other mature activities. It was during this time that, with the learning power of youth combined with the interests and intelligence of someone well beyond his years, Jared acquired almost all practical knowledge. Note: you might have to back over that last sentence, it was a big one.

After graduating high school Jared decided to go to Gustavus Adolphus College and obtain a degree in physics, one of the few subjects he hadn't already learned. It was there in the dark rooms of Olin Hall that Jared and I, along with the other physics majors, would study all hours of the night. As would be expected with long periods of study tons of questions, both physics and non-physics related, were posed to the group: "Who was the 8th president of the United States?" "How much does a pizza cost at the caf?" "What's the name of that girl that Cory made out with last week?" "Where are the beer specials today?" "What day is it?" "Is Jolene Right?" "When is our next frisbee game?" etc.

Some of those are easier to answer than others (Cory's dating habits have never been tough to follow and if it's not physics related, Jolene doesn't even get rhetorical questions right.), but miraculously, no matter the difficulty, Jared could answer all non-physics questions.

It was a feat that remained unappreciated and even unnoticed until the semester Jared studied abroad in Australia. Suddenly when posing similar questions "What will the weather be like in by the time i go outside?" "Who shot JFK?", the group wouldn't know. We were lost, and decided that we'd have to start going downstairs to the computers and using a rising technology called the Internet and a search engine (Google) we had heard about others using to solve similar queries. After several unanswered searches ("Is Jolene Right?"), it was obvious that no technology existed that could adequately replace Jared. We had temporary hope that soon Jared would return but also realized the loss we would experience upon graduation.

It was then put on me, the sole member of the group with computer programming skills, to simulate Jared so that we all, and the rest of the world, could have the advantages of those in his presence. The project/life task was called JaredSIM and is being carried out in several different sub projects. So far the following have been kicked off with varying successes: Jared.trader, Jared.survivor, Jared.hockey, and now Jared.learn. So you see the goal of JaredSIM is the mass production and distribution of the resources of Jared Lee and the goal of ThingsILearned.com is to acquire all of the things that Jared has learned in digital form.

So you see there was a very simple explanation. I hope it got you excited to help teach!

Dave