Why I've not made a million turning my dreams into reality

[major_clanger]

Yesterday morning I awoke from a very vivid dream, in which I had invented... the Slide Rule Drawer.

This is an extending drawer, OK?



Something in my subconscious clearly connected this with a slide rule, because my dream very clearly featured something like this:



This would be a brilliant idea, with only two drawbacks (or should that be drawerbacks?):

- Electronic calculators were invented over 40 years ago.
- Even if they hadn't been, a slide rule you can remove from your desk drawer is rather more convenient than one glued to the side of it.

Comments

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

Please don't take this the wrong way. I frequently say it to most of the people I'm fond of, and to myself.

You have a WeirdFreakBrain.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think having to kneel by the drawer to read it might be a small problem too...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Ah, but you have instantly solved the problem of how many inches/centimetres of *file space* a specific item takes up. Any Humanities academic will tell you this is crucial for all games of 'my research is more rigorous than your research'.

[davidwake.livejournal.com]

Also, you have invented a slide rule that cannot be 'borrowed' and not bought back.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

I still have my old slide rule, but I've discovered in the last forty years the print has got smaller and the gradations closer together so I can't read it now.

I also inherited my father's slide rule, but he only had a six inch, mine was a twelve inch (which sounds a bit Freudian).

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

I have a hypothesis that a lot of "new" ideas come from miss-remembering and muddling existing ones; the first step in making any use of them is to recognise them as different. This means you need an unreliable memory to come up with them, but a reliable one to recognise them as new.

The idea of originality through data corruption is rather like genetic mutation - most of which happens in DNA copying errors, rather than being due to radiation or chemicals - but ideas can happen rather faster than mutations in long-lived creatures like us, and are easier to test.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

This assumes, of course, that you are not, as I am, dysnumeric! :o)