Posted by Jill in ND on 8:53 Jan 13
In Reply to: Please help re: gifted son -- PLEASE posted by Dawn K
...like a lack of a social skill - in this case gassing on about something the listener may not care about - can also be interpreted as the speaker's all-consuming passion. For example this quote:
"Good programmers will have a tendency to talk your ear off about some technical detail of what they re working on (but while clearly believing, sincerely, that what they re talking about is really worth talking about). Some people might see that as maladapted social skills (which it is), but if you want to recognise a good developer, this passion for what they re doing at the expense of social smoothness is a very strong indicator. Can you get this guy to excitedly chat up a technology that he s using, for a whole half hour, without losing steam? Then you might be onto a winner."
Though the central topic here is finding a good computer programmer, I imagine it is applicable to many engineering fields, possibly even researchers and music teachers, in my experience, just substituting field-relevant terminology in instead of the computer tech terms.
http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer/
As a military buff, your husband may be able to draw the correlation between roman military tactics and football - if that game ever comes up. We discovered from playing "Legion Arena" that there are many similarities.