Sometimes observation and deduction can help you with something in the distant past, something that happened before you had become a sherlockian.  I believe it was in the mid fifties, when I had been sent to stay at my grandmothers house for a few days. When i awoke on the next day I thought I would play on her piano for a while. I couldn't play anything but "chopsticks". This drove my grandmother to distraction. She told me to go outside and play with the other kids in the neighborhood. i went outside and looked for some other kids to play with. Eventually I found about four or five kids and asked them if I could play with them. They said they didn't have any toys to play with. I told them if we cold find a few things we could make a scooter. I told them what we needed, but we could only find roller skates and at 2 by 4 . We needed an orange crate to finish the scooter. We nailed some parts of the skates to the 2 by 4. I told them we could try to ride it like it was. I was about to try it but one of the other kids wanted to go first. I was amazed at how well he rode that thing. Before I could try to ride it a new girl came to us and said the scates were hers.. She had her father with her and he took our board and skates and they went home. I pretty much forgot about this event util many years later. When I had read Sherlock books and learned observation and deduction, I realized that those kids must have made another "skateboard" xand taught themselves how to skate on it. This all happened in Venice California. I have recently deduced that this must be how skateboarding came about. I would have loved to have skateboarded back then, but due to my mothers illness I was sent to live in an Episcopal Church Home For Children. 

ojisan is Japanese for honorable uncle. In Japan, when you encounter an elderly gentleman it is common to refer to him as ojisan. It fits me well because I have many nephews and nieces .

Thanks again for the welcome.


....still Ojisan  

First, I want to say that I believe that being gay is a potential superpower. While I am not gay myself, my good friend and the cofounder  of the OSH, (Organisation for Security and Happiness), the late Eddie Zap was the one who introduced me to Sherlocks' methods of observation and deduction. Alan Turing, a gay person, was the key person who helped to break the enigma code and end World War 2. Eddie and I agreed that observation and deduction could be used to achieve results that would do good things and help to make the world a better place. I am just pointing out that the recent loss of many Young LGBT people is a very great loss to all of us. 
  May they rest in peace......Ojisan.   

Thanks for the welcome, Sherlock Holmes. I really like this forum. The people here are really nice, and I have never encountered trolls or trolling here, which is rare in most of the forums I have participated in. 

Most of these posts are about practicing observation and deduction. This is a good thing but I would like to see more Sherlockians using observation and deduction to help people in the real world. I know this is possible because I have done it many times. For example there was one time I was standing near the large swimming pool of my apartment building. About six people were standing around the pool fully clothed except for one young lady wearing a bathing suit. Her boyfriend was clothed. For some unknown reason  she attempted to push him in the water. He dodged, and she went in instead..at the deep  end.
She started splashing around like she couldn't swim. We all heard someone say "she can swim, she's just faking.". I decided to ignore that statement and moved to the side of the pool closest to her. While I was still moving, I examined her movements. She was only a few feet from  the edge of the pool but I could tell from her movement she had no idea how to swim even a few feet. Nobody was helping. Since I was not a good swimmer. I decided quickly to stoop at the edge of the pool, and taking advantage of my hight and length of arms, and reach under the water to one of her hands as she was slowly rising to the surface. I lifted my hand to bring her up more quickly. When she broke the surface she started breathing rapidly, but not coughing. Observing that she hadn't swallowed any water I started pulling her toward the edge of the pool. Others began helping to steady me and help her out of the pool. After a few minutes she told me "thank you for saving my life". I said "you're welcome."  One point here is, you can't fix a problem until the problem occurs. 

Ah young ones. I'm so old my younger friends tease me by trying to guess my age. But since I look younger than I am they are never very close..
  I finally figured out why Eddie and I couldn't do much with our observation and deduction. We hadn't encountered a problem. Sherlock had that same issue, He was very bored when he didn't have a problem to solve. We were still in High School, and there just weren't any cases to solve. I was the first to leave school. I enlisted in the USAF and became a medic. While I was training as a regular medic I came upon my first real case which took me years to solve. Someone in the medic school was stealing things from the students, Mostly field jackets. There was nothing I was able to observe or deduce. 
Soon I was given the opportunity to attend the Medical Laboratory School at Gunter AFB in Alabama.
This was during the Civil rights era, just after the shooting of JFK. I was surprised that the thefts had followed me to Gunter, which was just outside of Montgomery Alabama where Governor George Wallace presided. All at once I had many problems to solve and the Vietnam war had started. 

When I was in junior High school I would hang out with a group of friends who were mostly geeks. We were into things like science fiction, fantasy and horror, but not mysteries. One of the group, named Jeff McKnight called our group "The Weirds ." Some of the Weirds were making super 8mm films of horror scenes remeniscient of something out of H. P. Lovecraft. The leader of that group whose name was Eddie Zap invited me to join, and so I did. As time went by, Eddie and I became good friends an he often invited me to his house to talk about fiction. It turned out he was very much into James Bond novels and also Sherlock Holmes stories. Now, up until this time my only exposure to Sherlock had been the Basil Rathbone  movies which I did like, but not a lot. Eddie told me that the thing that made Sherlock unique from all the other fictional sleuths was his methods of observation and deduction. It was enough to get me to read the books. After the first book I was hooked and read the whole series. Since then I have watched every movie and TV series that came out. In addition, Eddie  and I would practice using observation and deduction every chance we could get. We would smoke pipes and pretend to be Holmes or Watson. And all this was just the beginning. 
 

An interesting post. I think that the difficulty of analyzing Sherlock comes from the shortcomings in modern psychology. I think we still have a lot to learn about the human mind. For example: A.D.D. refers to attention deficit disorder. I and my brother both have this condition. My brother took medications for it, but I did not. I felt that the condition was neither a deficit of attention, nor a disorder. My mind tends to avoid outside interruptions to its thought process. This has both positive and negative effects. On one hand it makes it difficult to switch my attention to a different subject than it is currently on. On the other hand it enables my mind to remain uninterrupted and I can achieve a deeper state of concentration than someone who does not have the condition. I consider it a potential "superpower".  Potential, because all powers have a downside. One must learn to handle it. 

Hi, Fran.  From one noob to another, welcome to the forum.