Sick & Tired

So I've got this sinus infection thing going on. Still. Doesn't bother me much, but it does make me really tired. When I get tired and I have to do things, I get grumpy. It occurred to me over the last day or so that this is pretty much how I have felt for a good part of my adult life. Which might explain why I act like a jerk some times.

When I am tired I don't do much but sleep and watch TV, and when I can't sleep, and TV is hopeless, I think to keep myself entertained. Which may explain how I come up with with some of my screwball ideas.

I read a story some time ago about betting on your golf game. One piece of advice that stuck in my head was "don't play/bet against someone who is sick". There wasn't much of an explanation in the story, but I surmised that the reasoning behind this advice is that someone who is not feeling on top of the world is going to focus his attention on the game, and is less likely to be distracted by anything else, and so is going to beat you. This, of course, is assuming he is a competitive player in the first place.

And then we have Steven Hawking who looks like he has been at death's door for the last ten or twenty years, but by all reports is the world's foremost cosmologist. Even if you can't do **it, you can still think. Well, at least he can.

So I'm wondering how much of our accumulated scientific knowledge is indirectly due to disease and illness?

Update November 2015. Replaced missing picture.