003.9 - Aptitudes
Known Languages
Colette's native language is Yorkshire; she is also fluent in English and Japanese.
Notable Skills and Abilities
Software Engineering
This is Colette's bread and butter aptitude; it is, quite literally, what puts food on the table. It is, also, arguably, that which, alongside her broader interests in computer science and artificial intelligence, best harnesses her innate intellectual capabilities.
Just how good she actually is might be difficult to gauge. She is creative, innovative and alive to the latest advances in software engineering, certainly more than capable of contributing to advancements in the science at the highest levels. Her reluctance to do anything that might bring her too far into the limelight has, however, meant that few have seen, at first hand, what she is actually capable of. Perhaps if Jennifer were ever to succeed in persuading her to return to academia, that might change.
Iaido
Iaido is a Japanese martial art that develops skills with a katana. The art involves learning how to draw the sword, cut with and handle the sword in various ways, shake off any imaginary blood and re-sheath the sword in a pre-set way(1). Colette has dabbled in a few different marital arts over the years but Iaido is her first love and the one in which she has been a practitioner her whole life.
Colette might take issue with Iaido being described as a mere “aptitude” because, for her, it is so much more than just a set of technical skills to be learned and demonstrated: it is a whole philosophy and way of life. It is not for nothing that some have dubbed her The Last Samurai of Yorkshire.
Just How Clever is Colette?
In so far as it might be possible to accurately and objectively measure a person’s intelligence on a one-dimensional scale (a point upon which Colette, herself, is sceptical) and which, therefore, ranks everyone in a given population from least intelligent to most intelligent, then in almost any random gathering of people, Colette will be the most intelligent person in the room. But, whilst she might, just maybe, accept the possibility that, based upon one, narrow criterion, she is one of the most intelligent people on Earth, she would always maintain that “cleverness” — the ability to cope with and solve problems in the real world — requires so much more that raw intelligence: wisdom, experience, imagination, objectivity, motivation, state of mind. Add into this multidimensionality traits such as creativity and it soon become apparent just how unimportant intelligence is in the grand scheme of things.
Jennifer, off-handedly, gives us an estimate of Colette’s IQ as 200 but in a way that might have us believe she meant it as an exaggeration. Jennifer, nevertheless, recognizes Colette as at least an intellectual equal. It is perhaps testimony to Colette’s unassuming nature that 200 is, in fact, somewhat of an underestimate.
Now it might be supposed that an IQ of 200+ is pushing the bounds of credibility and there is a case to answer there. However, because of the way in which IQ scores are calculated, it is inevitable that some small number of people must have scores in excess of 200: Colette is one of that small number.
Footnotes
(1) This definition of Iaido has been paraphrased from that given on the website of a dojo in Sheffield - where else?
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