Does not compute

Got into an online wrangle with a voter of different persuasion - one who works for an oil company, no less - and he met my comments about a reluctance to move to alternative energy sources with accusations of stupidity. It was like being back in school!

I suspect, like a lot of people, I AM 'stupid' when it comes to certain things. I have a rhetorical blindness honed by years of experience and the mind is so powerful that I have incorporated the daftest notions and made them my own, so that they make perfect sense.
But then there are things I 'don't get'; my brain is just not hardwired that way. Where a scientific temperament may have trouble working out what's what with the bon mot, I have the opposite experience. I can understand abstract philosophical points but have trouble dealing with fractals and loops. I barely understand what they mean. And this isn't because my interest lies elsewhere; it largely does but even when I take the trouble to come to grips with mathematical equations and hard science I can't seem to get my head around it.

Sometimes it's fun to speedread a book on chemical properties and emerge from the library with my head spinning. But should I try to apply what I have just "learnt", it would literally blow up in my face. And then there's computers. Programming languages specifically. When things start going into themselves, and things equal but simultaneously do not equal other things; when they thread and loop and repeat and dissemble and disappear up their own fundament I'm lost.
I rub my hands with glee at the thought of Trivial Pursuit, I'm an avid follower of game shows, and happy to join a table at music trivia, but there are some things that just don't add up.