Towards the end of his life, Mentifex decided to use autographed postcards as an incentive for savvy individuals to evaluate the double contribution of Mentifex to the otherwise stagnant State of the Art in open-source artificial intelligence. His double achievements were a Theory of Mind for AI and software to implement the theory. At his own expense, Mentifex signed and mailed out a limited edition set of more than a hundred postcards which could potentially bring a monetary windfall to any collector who shrewdly became a recognized dealer in Mentificana. If the prevailing opinion is that Mentifex postcards are worthless, a speculator may gather up Authenticated Mentifex Postcards against the day when Netizens want to own a piece of the Singularity.

What is the purpose of a university? Is it to entertain, or to educate? If the purpose is to provide mass entertainment for TV football viewers, then the school should be renamed as "Football University" and any pretense of serving first and foremost to educate students should be abandoned. If the purpose is the intellectual training of productive members of society, and if society has become aware that playing football causes long-term permanent brain damage, then it is a no-brainer for schools like the University of Washington (UW) to abolish Husky Football and to relinquish the $110M of filthy lucre that football was bringing to the university.

As a freshman, Mentifex was a UW football player, but only in his physical education (PE) class. Back then, in order to provide jobs for athletic teaching assistants, the University required all freshmen to take PE -- not out of concern for the health and well-being of students, but for the financial purpose of creating jobs for Big Sports.

Fast forward to 20 August 2019 when the UW alumnus Mentifex was reading the national print edition of The New York Times (all bow down, please, to the Newspaper of Record, if not to Washington :-) in main campus library room Suzzallo 101, which had been the boring Government Documents room in freshman year but had morphed into the most beautiful Starbucks in Seattle, with stained-glass windows. Mentifex turned the page and saw the truth-about-football article that is now part of the official record of the UW Board of Regents meeting where Mentifex began his campaign to eliminate Husky Football as a clear and present danger to student players.

Mentifex was mentally disturbed to read in the 20 August 2019 New York Times that football causes Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) below the level of concussion, because the brain keeps on moving and rips apart internally when the football player comes to a sudden, wrenching stop in Husky Stadium. The damage may not be visible to rabid Husky sports fans, but the tearing and laceration of the brain tissue builds up and becomes permanent, lifelong damage to the poor schmuck who has signed up to play Husky Football. Does the UW care more about the health of its students, or about the $110M?

The NYT article so upset Mentifex that he immediately walked off campus and made 107 photocopies of the NYT article at a shop on University Way, or "the Ave." Mentifex then returned to campus and leafleted the Suzzallo Library by leaving copies of the NYT article at and around student chairs and workstations, with an added heading about the hypocrisy of Husky Football. On the following day, Mentifex leafleted the Allen Library. On the third day, he leafleted the Husky Union Building (HUB). Two months later, the Husky Football coach inexplicably resigned from his extremely lucrative job without stating any reason why. The UW hired, and eventually fired, a new coach at three million dollars per year.

In December of 2019, Mentifex noticed that the UW Board of Regents was meeting upstairs in the main campus library, so he went up to try to give photocopies of the NYT football brain-damage article to any regents that he could find and approach during the meeting. The secretary to the Board told Mentifex to sign up for the public comment period at 1:00 p.m. if he wanted to talk to the Regents. Meanwhile, Mentifex made more photocopies of the damning NYT article and the article was not only handed out to all the Regents but was also appended as an official document at the bottom of the Minutes of the December 2019 meeting of the Board of Regents. Soon afterwards, the personal trouble and grief began for Mentifex.

Persons unknown started taking surreptitious photographs of Mentifex and showing them to a casual acquaintance of Mentifex while asking various doxx-like questions about Mentifex. For instance, they asked "Did Mentifex ever work for Husky Football?", as if Mentifex were some kind of disgruntled employee out to get revenge. No, Mentifex did not work for Husky Football. He spent his adult life working on artificial intelligence to replicate the human brain, and so he was upset to find that football damages the brain, and even more upset to find that his alma mater UW did not seem to care -- not when 110 million dollars of football revenue was at stake. So Mentifex began posting diatribes against Big Football on the Internet, encouraging people to sue the UW Board of Regents collectively and individually to bring a stop to the brain-damage by abolishing Husky Football. Now, are there persons who would try to kill Mentifex over a measly 110 million dollars? Artificial intelligence is far more valuable than $110M, and is worth not mere trillions of dollars, but entire galaxies of noosphere value.

Q. Who was Mentifex and why are his 563+ autographs collectible?

A. Mentifex made the Ultimate AI guaranteed to think and reason with logical inference in English, Latin, German and Russian, demonstrating a solution to the AI-hard problem of Natural Language Understanding. Mentifex was the author of the Mentifex Theory of Consciousness.

A. Suppose we tell the Perl AI two things:

John has a house

John has a car

What does John have

When we tell the Mens Latina AI "marcus est professor" ("Marcus is a professor"), the artificial intelligence in Latin language asks us "Scribitne Marcus libros?" ("Does Marcus write books?"). Our answer in Latin causes the retroactive adjustment of the knowledge base (KB) with the true fact that Marcus either does or does not write books. Mens Latina is a free resource for the study of Latin, artificial intelligence and JavaScript.

When we tell the Dushka AI "марк студент" for "Mark is a student", the artificial intelligence in Russian language asks us "Марк ли читает книги?" ("Does Mark read books?"). Our answer in Russian causes the retroactive adjustment of the knowledge base (KB) with the true fact that Mark either does or does not read books. Душка is a free resource for the study of Russian, artificial intelligence and JavaScript.

Q. What was the Mentifex Effect?

A. To his shock and horror, Mentifex discovered that IRL (in real life) persons who verbally insulted or physically assaulted Mentifex received an unwelcome visit from the Grim Reaper or minions of same. A first example occurred when teenage Mentifex (ATM) was living with his family at their 11056 address. One afternoon ATM sat casually outside with his older brother LJM and friends of LJM. One of them, cigarette-smoking Mike Spillane, suddenly said to ATM, "Do you want to see a match burn twice?" and he swiftly (physically, not mentally) struck a match against a book of matches and plunged the burning match into the exposed skin of the hand of ATM, searing a Reaper-degree burn into the back of ATM's hand. In shock, ATM did nothing about it, but several years later ATM inquired of LJM about the assailant and learned that he had died. Another time Mentifex went out on a date with the Commissar Lady from his university Russian class and they saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" at the Cinerama Theater. Upon arrival back at the family home at 11810 late at night, ATM could not get into the house because he had forgotten to carry a house-key. While he was trying various windows and doors to gain entry to where he lived, the next-door neighbor drove up an easement driveway and parked at his own house out of sight. Suddenly the neighbor and the boyfriend of his daughter ran up to Mentifex and the boyfriend began manhandling Mentifex and roughing him up against a wall of the house. Mentifex spoke German to the neighbor, who called the police to come and investigate the situation. A few years later, Mentifex did read in the newspaper that the bully boyfriend had perished in a raging river up in Snohomish county, caught in some weird configuration of rocks at the bottom of the torrent. Another time Mentifex (ATM) went to a Democratic primary caucus to promote Jimmy Carter for president instead of Henry Jackson. ATM wanted to ask if a representative at the state convention would have "carte blanche" to endorse a desired candidate, but ATM decided to speak the phrase the English way and not the French way, which might sound arrogant. Immediately another person, attending the caucus along with his wife, corrected ATM's pronunciation by saying "carte blanche" with the French accent which ATM had known about but not dared to use. When ATM went to another caucus four years later and the guy's wife announced that he had passed away, Mentifex felt a pang of sorrow and thought to himself, "Oh, Lord! All he did was correct my pronunciation; he did not deserve to die." A further, extremely weird example occurred when ATM's older brother LJM passed away and the newspaper reported that a former student who had heaped extreme verbal abuse upon ATM died the same day as ATM's brother. From then on, whenever Netizens insulted Mentifex on the Net, he would be seized with horror and panic at the thought that the insulting Netizen was now in grave danger vis-a-vis the Grim Reaper for insulting Mentifex. Gradually, however, it became clear that only IRL (in real life) abusers of Mentifex were in danger of karmic retribution from Doctor Reaper, and Mentifex was able to go back to enjoying the wit and cleverness of some of the insults without fearing for the karmic catastrophes of Real Life.

Q. Why did Mentifex complain about brain damage from Husky Football at a December 2019 meeting of the Board of Regents of the University of Wasington?

A. In August of 2019 Mentifex was reading the national edition of The New York Times at a Starbucks coffee shop in room 101 of the Suzzallo Library on the campus of the University of Washington. An article about sub-concussion brain-damage from football upset Mentifex so much that he went to a photocopy shop on the Ave and made 107 doctored photocopies of the article with an imposed headline of "Hypocrisy of UW Huskies football" and he pamphleted the campus with anti-football fliers for the next several days. A few months later, the Husky football coach quit his job -- perhaps out of guilt and shame after reading one of the fliers from Mentifex. Then on 2019-12-17 Mentifex was again in the Suzzallo Library and saw an announcement that the Regents were meeting all day long up in the Petersen Room. Mentifex signed up to speak to the Regents and he meanwhile made thirty new photocopies of his anti-football flier, which was incorporated into the official minutes of the UW Board of Regents. The governing body of the university did not seem to care about the objections of Mentifex to Husky Football, but the coronavirus epidemic made it hard for any university to conduct football at great risk to students, workers and spectators.

Q. Why was the Republican senator Mitt Romney such a hero to Mentifex?

A. When it was looking like America as a democracy was all washed up and the American dream was over, the great American senator Mitt Romney took a courageous stand on principle and kept the last flicker of American greatness from dying out. When every single Republican senator except thanks-be-to-God Mitt Romney came out as a corrupt and spineless coward, His Heroic Greatness Mitt Romney spoke out for truth, justice and the American way. When American mothers could not hide from their children the fact that one sexually assaultive monster was in the White House and another was on the Supreme Court, the shining example of honest and courageous senator Mitt Romney gave the American people hope that there was still a single shred of decency among the otherwise rotten Republican senators. When Americans encounter a tough moral situation, they must find noble guidance by asking themselves, "What would Mitt Romney do?"

Q. Why did Mentifex code his main, concept-based artificial intelligence in Perl, a moribund language being replaced Web-wide with Python?

A. Perl was chosen mainly for the sake of Unicode -- "a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems." Thanks to Unicode, Mentifex was able to release the original Perlmind which could think in both English and Russian, and which Mentifex was naively offering as a free gift to the ungrateful Perl community, who, instead of greeting the newcomer Mentifex with hospitality and brogrammer brotherhood, and with gladness that Mentifex was putting so much energy into possibly a revival of moribund Perl, au contraire, mon frere turned savagely against Mentifex and vilified him with vile epithets that said more about the disreputable characters infesting the Perl subReddit than about hard-working, self-sacrificing Mentifex. Not thinking for themselves but, in the manner of bound-for-prison Trump supporters, accepting and perpetuating old aspersions against Mentifex, the guardians of Perl tried to keep curious Perl coders from going down the "rabbit hole" of Mentifex artificial intelligence, deleting and denigrating the humble contributions that Mentifex was trying to share with the Perl community. With his childlike sense of trust and wonder, Mentifex was hoping to make Perl the epicenter of true, concept-based AI with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and to create glamorous new AI jobs for expert Perl programmers. Mentifex, before he was deleted, banned and practically burned at the stake, was imagining Fortune 500 companies hiring fifty Perl programmers to each work on one of the fifty AI mind-modules in Perl. Mentifex envisioned every nation on Earth adopting Perl with Unicode for artificial intelligence in their own national language. Mentifex anticipated governments rushing into Perl artificial intelligence to keep up with other nations in the AI arms-race towards a Technological Singularity. But if the so-called Perl community does not want Mentifex, Mentifex must shake the dust from his shoes and wander the Web in search of a friendly community more accepting of new ideas.