F. Frank LeFever <flefever at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:7luf9v$a8h at dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com...
>> One often hears this basic argument (especially in the internet
> newsgroups): Some great ideas were initially rejected. This idea is
> rejected. Therefore this is a great idea.
But this is not what I argued. I simply pointed out that because YOU see no
value in "pursuing such schemes", this does not mean that such pursuits
aren't worthwhile.
> Life being short, we do have to make some choices , without full
> knowledge of the facts, as to what ideas are likely to be worth
> pursuing. Sometimes one guesses wrong, but my impression is that some
> people ALWAYS guess wrong and they seem to have a special attraction to
> "rejected ideas". (as Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute)
The world is full of evidence to the contrary, the Xerox Parc example that I
provided being but one. Do you need more? Here are the documented opinions
of other men such as yourself. Brilliant and educated men who were proven to
be simply wrong in their pronouncements of pursuits that are of no value...
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas
Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with
the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that
won't last out the year." - The editor in charge of business books for
Prentice Hall, 1957
"But what ... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing
Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken
Olson, President, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered
as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -
Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" - H.M. Warner, Warner
Brothers, 1927.
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca
Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin,
president, Royal Society, 1895.
> Given that this fellow seems to have no idea at all of how the brain is
> actually organized, i.e. doesn't just disagree with the data others
> have developed but seems not to KNOW of more developed concepts of
> brain organization and/or lacks the capacity to see any contradiction
> between them and his own armchair "analysis" of brain organization, I
> think the probability of his somehow coming up with a novel but useful
> idea is vanishingly small.
I'm sure he has a better idea of how the brain is organized than you give
him credit for. Hey, time will tell, eh?
> Conceivably, a group of monkeys banging on
> typewriters will eventually (re)produce the complete works of
> Shakespeare, but this charming hypothesis has so far not been been
> tested in actual practice. Meanwhile, some of us will place our bets
> on other schemes for authorship.
Actually, it's a matter of simple mathematics to prove that the proverbial
group of monkeys couldn't even get close to accomplishing this task by
chance.
Go ahead, run the numbers. Try considering monkeys the size of electrons,
filling a sphere 20 billion light years in radius, typing at an unimaginable
rate of 1000 characters a second, for 20 billion years.
Even allowing for all of that, I would put all of my money on them *NOT*
even being able to produce a page of say, the first 1000 words in Romeo and
Juliet, by random chance!
- Bill Zimmerly
http://www.zimmerly.com mailto:bill at zimmerly.com
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." - Spencer
Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It"
Notepads.
