MPJ

In the history of humanity, the complexity of solving riddles of big crimes, ordinary felonies, and even simple misdemeanors in growing western society has become more difficult with the fast development of large cities of the 19th century. This was the time when first detective agencies were founded, initially in Paris by Eugène François Vidocq, convicted criminal who, in his inspirational life, switched the side of the law and turned into criminalist career, followed by 'Bow Street Runners', the very first police detective force in London and first detective units in Boston and Chicago with Allan Pinkerton, famous owner of the most memorable private detective agency in the history of United States. There is no doubt that many actual events from western criminology from the early 19th century heavily influenced first modern detective stories from the time. The very first one in this genre is widely attributed to Edgar Allan Poe and his short story "The Murders in th...

My first encounter with Intelligence Quotient, aka IQ, was 25 years ago during my preliminary exam for the mandatory military service. In those years Serbia was part of a former socialist federation of Yugoslavia along with couple of more countries and avoiding army service was impossible. Everybody had to go to serve the "time" for one whole year and they used those preliminary tests to better fit you into suitable unit and doing a form of an IQ test was part of it. They didn't give us the result, but I probably did it pretty well since they put me to be main operator of a ground-to-ground missile unit. At least my little bit higher intelligence than average "soldier" spared me from the mud, dirt, long marches, carrying heavy weaponry and other meaningless activities of the service. So I spent most of the time in a classroom surrounded with state of the art simulators, playing video games made specially for practicing real time guidance of the missile in simula...