Great Ideas

A few Ideas to improve the world:

1. The automobile apology light: This is device could cure road rage as we know it. All I propose is to add a simple light (any kind of signal works, though) to the top of the car that when lit, indicates an apology. Imagine you accidentally cut somebody off, and you realize you were at fault. Instead of exchanging honks and profanities, the entire dispute could be resolved with the easy pressing of a button. This invention may sound trivial, but it could save lives. According to Wikipedia, 300 road rage-related altercations result in serious injury or death.Now, you may be thinking that in really serious traffic disputes, neither party is willing to accept blame. Maybe the invention won't really save lives, but it might at least make the world a friendlier place.

2. Treadmill Power Generator: Every day, millions of Americans climb atop a treadmill or elliptical machine or exercise bike, and try to burn calories. These machines convert calories into mechanical energy, but this energy doesn't really ever do anything. If there were some way to harness this power, just imagine the possibilities. American is a country obsessed with exercise, but it is also an overweight nation. That means that there are billions and billions of fat calories out there that we could be burning. As long as out-of-shape people are willing to slog away for 45 minutes on an exercise bike, we should have some way to harness that energy. We could literally convert our fat into power.

Thar be Giants here

There was a time when giants roamed the Earth. Intellectual supermen like Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart cast shadows that tend to obscure the accomplishments of individual latter-day artists, scientists, and thinkers. “Where are the Shakespeares and Mozarts of today?” aficionados sometimes ask. Were these men’s talents so rare that they may never again to be matched?

These men were certainly of transcendent genius; transcendent in the sense that their prodigious creative power either surpassed the limits of their professions, or redefined them in a radical way. Leonardo Da Vinci, a prototypical “Renaissance Man” was simultaneously an inventor, artist, and philosopher. To his contemporaries, Isaac Newton was simply a “Natural Philosopher.” Were he alive today, however, he would be considered a chemist, physicist, mathematician, and theologian. Moreover, the creative strides these men took were gargantuan. Today, even highly intelligent researchers are lucky if their names are transcribed in the footnote of a textbook, whereas Charles Darwin managed to radically redefine the entire field of biology with the publication of a single book.

Logic and probability tells us that men of equal brilliance must still walk the earth today. Where, then, are their monumental accomplishments? The sciences and the arts continue to progress, but advances increasingly resemble a steady shuffle of baby steps, instead of the leaps and bounds of a giant.

The geniuses have not changed; their environments have. During the Enlightenment, the potential gains to be made were enormous. Moreover, the pursuit of scientific progress today requires a degree of specialization that thinkers like Newton simply never needed. Science had not yet become delineated into thousands of subfields. This rule applies to the arts as well as the sciences. The advent of music theory, for example, allowed truly brilliant artists like Mozart to venture far into the unexplored depths of his artistic medium. Composers today have to watch carefully not to tread where Mozart has already set foot.

Stephen J. Gould makes a similar argument to explain, among other things, why legendary baseball player Ted Williams was probably no more talented than Alex Rodriguez, despite putting up much better numbers. Conservative baseball fans cling to the notion that Ted William’s accomplishments surpass those of modern players, but logic tells us that the increased average excellence of play in major league baseball imposes a more confining ceiling on the limits of human ability. An exceptionally talented baseball player in the 1940s might bat .400, while in the 1990s, bat only .350. Likewise, there are undoubtedly men as gifted as Shakespeare alive today whose work cannot match that of Shakespeare simply because of the difficulty of avoiding treading on the toes of past authors.

Thus, the reign of the giants seems to be ending. Nowadays, scientific knowledge advances incrementally, and progress within established artistic genres is likewise slow and often retrograde. Art differs from science, however, since the innovation of a new medium can create new avenues for creative expression and critical discussion. There will never be another Mozart who writes classical music because the genre is almost exhausted. Brilliant directors like Ingmar Bergmann and Stanley Kubrick, however, have only just begun to explore the potential of cinema. Likewise, popular music has attracted some true visionaries, from the Beatles to Pink Floyd to Radiohead. Conservative critics will be tempted to dismiss these newer genres as inferior to established ones like literature or classical music, but who is to say whether cinema and music may not be scrutinized some day with the same vigor we reserve for Dante or Milton. The next Shakespeare will likely not be a playwright; he may well be a director, screen-writer, or, god-forbid, a rock musician. The ways we communicate today are changing in profound ways, and giants always roam the frontiers of artistic progress. We should therefore keep open our eyes, lest we miss one.