Thursday, February 02, 2006

A Short Blurb on Ideas

I was just reading on Slashdot today and found this article about some people at UC-Berkley doing research on the connetions between language and thought. Whcih is something I wrote about 5~6 months earlier. It seems that this idea was thought of over 70 years ago 1930, otherwise known as the Saphir-Wharf Hypothesis (SHF).

It's just kind of amazing to realize that random people in different parts of the world and eras comming up with similar ideas.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Look! My first comment!

Anyways, I'm actually not surprised about this since I work with patents and the issue pops up quite often. Actually, one time my company filed a patent just days before someone else published a paper containing a very similar idea. One could postulate that 99% of your ideas have been thought of before. That 1% is where true innovation lies.

Of course, then there are those ideas that you wish nobody would have thought of, like the ass-shocker patent: http://www.patentlysilly.com/patent.php?patID=6901884

Paladiamors said...

Well there is that saying by Thomas Edison made waay back that went along the lines of "1% inspiration, 99% expiration." Lots of ideas, thought of just randomly but not many people do anything useful.

Now that ass-shocker... duuude, what was he thinking about on that one!?