Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Dumb-ness and Innovation


nbohr1more

Thomas Edison style  

9 members have voted

  1. 1. Can poor understanding still lead to breakthoughs in modern times?



Recommended Posts

I have always been fascinated by the rise of Thomas Edison and his nemesis(?) Nikola Tesla.

 

While I believe that Nikola was clearly the superior of the two, Thomas Edison seemed to embody this naive sense of "Can do" that we associate with the golden era of American innovation. Edison was cranking out gadget after gadget that the engineering minds of Europe had deemed "impossible", he was too dumb to know that these things "shouldn't work".

 

Now that America has mostly "grown-up", it seems that all the "impossible" innovations are coming from Pacific rim nations that still seem to have a sense of mysticism about what is within the realm of possible rather than a stern engineering mind-set.

 

I think this concept of "just try it, even if it makes no sense" can be applied even here to this mod.

 

For example, many of the better veteran mappers had concluded that Melan's "Return to the City" was simply a design that could never be made to visportal well, yet Bikerdude simply put some elbow-grease in and "trial 'n error"-ed his way to 60FPS.

 

Until the Ground Zero mod, LOD was deemed a wash for any performance benefit by most of the smartest folks at Doom3world.

 

Conversely, Rich_is_Bored pulled-off a more Nikola Tesla style innovation by carefully studying Vertex blending properties for his "Real Translucency" method.

 

Are there any other examples that you know of where not knowing what's "impossible" has lead to a break-through?

 

Would it be better all around if we encouraged more random trials for things that engineers and scientists have "written-off"?

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tesla famously had an almost mystic's streak of trying "impossible" things too.

 

Anyway, last week I visited the National American History museum and there was a major exhibit on Edison and the age of electricity, with a lot of Maxwell and Tesla and other guys too, with original design notes and inventions ... early batteries, generators, motors, lights. And this is not long after I took the online MIT course on Electricity & Magnetism.

 

What I loved about that era, which the exhibit and class both brought out for me, is that spirit of entrepreneurship and independence. You learn the basic principles, then you come up with a clever design and make it. (It wasn't just in America, btw. Also England, France, Germany, parts of the A-H Empire, all had this spirit.) One of the EM class projects was to use a battery and some wire and make your own small motor with the highest RPM, and it's a fun design challenge. Then I could look at the earliest generators and motors in the exhibit and I could see how they were thinking, and why it was clever, and how it evolved. (Working a little with Dark Mod has also brought out that independent design spirit too.)

 

I just love that people can make their own light blubs and games and they can work. They're fun design challenges and no massive corporate entity has to hold your hand and do it all for you, then force you to pay them for the privilege. Fuck 'em. I want to be able to open up the lid and try it myself. (That's the spirit, anyway.) 100 years ago people had that spirit. They'd have some inspiration and try to bring it to life. Now it's almost unfathomable a person would make or tweak their own light blubs or car, and we're lucky we can still make our own computer applications (though each new device is trying to make it harder.)

 

This is actually a good story to think about these days since they are phasing out (outlawing) incandescent bulbs in the US. There was a news story I read on its implications just yesterday. It's hugely symbolic of the end of an era and the strangling of that independent spirit IMO.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

saw a show on tesla awhile back.

 

very interstying but i took it bit diiferently than what you stated

 

first, tesla was from europe , he was recomended to go to america and work with edison. edison promised money for inovatiob which tesla did, edison screwed himout of cash. much more telling of the us way of doing things imo.

 

also a european had a working telephone before edison.

 

and when tesla invented a new light bulb edison then did everything he could to make sure it was never used. luckily for tesla he invented alternating current, which led to niagra falls being able to send electricity long distance cheaper, which led to him winning the bid to light the first electric world fair using his light bulb designm which eventuaaly led to the us power grid and energy effecient light bulbs of today.

 

edison was good at stealing inventions and had the power and wealth to get away with it, but certianly wasn't as much of a genius as a good thief. he paid employees at the patent office to show him designsm which some of his stuff resembled exactly.

 

i think it's good step for the us to outlawwastefull and archaic tech. that pushes for better tech and uses of resources, the stiffling comes from big business like edison and oil conpanies fighting against new tech for greed an profit. we have plenty of inovation going on, it just has to fight the beaurocracy to see the light of day.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

Link to comment
Share on other sites

and i wouldn't say it's a niave attitude to believe that more can be done, quite the opposite, it's niave to belive we have ever reached the peak of what can be done.

 

at best we are probably a very primitive tech society, we alreadyknow how to do many things that we refuse to because of big lobby interests, we are in fact holding ourselves back to shortsighted greed.

\

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah,

 

Edison wasn't an angel by any means, but I idealize Nikola so much that I like to portray him as "engineering inside his mind". Most of the European engineering establishment had written-off Nikola's ideas as well (or at least that is what is written in our sensationalized versions of the story :laugh:).

 

Foolish corporate activity is definitely another wet-blanket.

 

Maybe the idea that half-baked ideas can lead to cool new stuff is just comforting to me as I am always running around with partial understanding under my belt :laugh:

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

as im bored ill rant more on the tdm side.

 

i knew melans mission could improve too and actually helped get the original portals working better. but he got bored, moved on, so i did too.3 months later greyman asked to fix it.

 

same with other such issues. i was sceptical about lod not because i didn't think it could be done. plenty of games do it, but more about it's usefulness and trepedation about wanting to open up a whole new venue of work for the very few people who would even work on it.

of couse it also takes a good programmer to implement that stuff.

 

but there have been other issues in the mod like animated objects which can easily be done, but opens cans of worms in otherways and the team decided at the time it was best touse entites,etc... instead.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see that my examples are also a little "sensationalized" as well.

 

I just like the narrative of TDM members coming up with miracles. It's a better story in my mind.

 

For example, I like to think that Baddcog could make the worlds best looking low-poly objects. He has one of the best eye's for "economy of style". So it's legendary that he would help with LOD which needs that skill. (I would love to see Baddcog's really high-poly stuff too).

 

See, it all makes for a good story when it's exaggerated a little. :)

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Demagogue has introduced a more interesting angle on this discussion.

 

We have "smart-phones" that self-destruct when an end-user tries to open and modify them. That has to be so much more stifling than <whatever-impediments-may-have-been-present-in-the-past> for innovations.

 

I dread the days when the very raw materials themselves are embedded with these kinds of self-destruction methods. You won't be able to make a popsicle-stick bird-house without corporate approval...

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Would it be better all around if we encouraged more random trials for things that engineers and scientists have "written-off"?

 

Well I am a scientist and I have to say that random experimenting would yield wonderful results. I'd love to be a able to focus on things freely. However, the problem is -as always- money. Nowadays, when everything boils down to money and making quick profit, research funding is quite application based. You research only the kind of stuff, which has directly some kind of commercial application coming out of it. There is not much possibility for free basic research. The quality of finnish research has drastically diminished in the last few years because of this trend. Our universities are soon governed by businessmen who have no interest in the science! :o Professors spend 80% of their time fighting bureucracy and running after funders. Brilliant minds go to waste for petty and meaningless administration.

 

While commercial application research provides profits in the short run, basic research would lead to more groundbreaking innovations, but research "dead ends" are also more possible.

 

Back in the good old days, researchers were 'seeker of truths' trying to understand the universe around us. Nowadays we are more like workhorses laboring for the company stock holders to gain maximum profit in the minimum amount of time. Or that's more the direction we are heading. Sad. :(

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most of the European engineering establishment had written-off Nikola's ideas as well (or at least that is what is written in our sensationalized versions of the story :laugh:).

 

I wouldn't really be surprised about that. I now several cases where the europeans ignored some invention because they feared that it wouldn't market well and then it went over the sea and succeeded. ;)

 

Europeans are that stupid. :)I think Americans are more open to such risks.

Gerhard

Link to comment
Share on other sites

:laugh:

 

I don't know what you are up to Sparhawk but that comment amused me...

 

But, yes, now America is riddled with the malady of risk aversion and "know-it-all". Look at the story of the VCR, we scared the inventor overseas to our former enemy, Japan (when we were still ambivalent about the Japanese even, rather than now where we enjoy and mass-consume their cultural contributions...).

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you may not find out that a lot of american history has been re-written to make stuff look better than it actually was, and edison was a thief, he stole most of his so called inventions, they were actually made by other people.

 

Like velcro was invented by a swiss guy and not aliens.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I voted 'no' in the poll, but I do think innovation is definitely possible, just not the "break through" ones that require a break through in science.

 

We live in times where if you want to witness not understood phenomena you need a (few million dollars) particle accelerator or something like that. Back when these people were making science or inventing the world was different, if you rub a pencil on your shirt to attract tiny pieces of paper you have something unexplainable right there!

 

This distances normal people from the break through innovations. You will see a lot of creative use of existing technology, though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There always have been and will be breakthroughs in technology. Just the density of discoveries and the feeling of scale of the breakthroughs decreases over time because in the early days a few educated guesses and semi-random experiments lead to great results, but I don't believe this is possible today anymore, hence I voted "no". Have a look at some example breakthroughs in the last decades: Microelectronics with semiconductors lead to computers and microchips, MP3 and other widespread codec like jpeg etc. , hybrid energy-saving cars, 3D TV, IEEE 802.11n (Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output WLAN).

 

There are still soooo many breakthoughs being made, it's just that you have to sort of be a scientist on your own to detect most of them or even identify them as breakthroughs. And these breakthroughs were definitely no lucky guesses. As Sotha says, you have an application and you start experimenting, but I really don't think there is a lot of random uneducated experimenting involved...

 

Would it be better all around if we encouraged more random trials for things that engineers and scientists have "written-off"?

Maybe the idea that half-baked ideas can lead to cool new stuff is just comforting to me as I am always running around with partial understanding under my belt :laugh:

Haha, I knew you would eventually use this thread as an excuse for your endless rambling... ;-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As Sotha says, you have an application and you start experimenting, but I really don't think there is a lot of random uneducated experimenting involved...

 

 

But there are certainly a lot of experiments which start from a random educated guess! Usually they fail. But when you get it right, you can progress from there with the next experiment. :wub:

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Haha, I knew you would eventually use this thread as an excuse for your endless rambling... ;-)

 

Yeah, I can't resist making with the "peanut gallery" \ "color commentary" et al. :laugh:

 

One of my superiors at work has an email signature that I really have trouble abiding:

 

Listen a hundred times; ponder a thousand times; speak once--Turkish Proverb
Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some fields of science are more mature than others. I think the really mature, well established ones require a lot of careful planning for experiments, and you know pretty much what you want to accomplish and aren't going to get much latitude to play around. Less established ones have more space open to "play" since part of the challenge is even knowing what questions to ask; so you do some pure investigation just to figure out what doesn't make sense. (I watched some program on oceanography & have an oceanographer friend and this is how they describe their field; quite liberal and on the playful end. My friend was part of a team that just mapped some sea-mount around Indonesia and he was like a kid in a candy store talking about it, like they were investigating the surface of a new planet. Everything they learn is absolutely new and opens so many new questions to explore.) But I guess even more importantly it comes down to how much experiments cost and how the funders feel about it, since they're the ones ultimately giving you whatever latitude you have.

 

I mean, think about the Large Hadron Collider. It's so expensive, I can't imagine they can do just *anything* on it that strikes their fancy. But it is still about making new science, so they don't know *exactly* what to expect or what things will bring out the new science best. So I imagine they can't afford *not* to be a little venturesome either; but I imagine they have very well-established ideas of where the question marks are and how to poke at them. And of course as soon as they get results, the field is so established they know how to interpret it. (I'm no expert so don't know if any of this is right, though.)

 

But then there's something like cognitive science and neuroscience (the field I did study in undergrad). Not only are experiments costly and it's hard to get data (you're limited pretty much to fMRI & PET scans, clinical & lesion studies, behavioral studies, and computer models; there's still no observer-independent way to even measure consciousness or a single credible theory of what it is or how it's caused, and it's one of the most basic units of investigation), but the field is still so young that even when you get data for a lot of things there's almost no good theory to know how to interpret it. But I like following the literature because it's such a young field; most of the most basic discoveries have yet to be made, and it's making such large progress so fast. It's exciting to follow.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recent Status Updates

    • Ansome

      Finally got my PC back from the shop after my SSD got corrupted a week ago and damaged my motherboard. Scary stuff, but thank goodness it happened right after two months of FM development instead of wiping all my work before I could release it. New SSD, repaired Motherboard and BIOS, and we're ready to start working on my second FM with some added version control in the cloud just to be safe!
      · 0 replies
    • Petike the Taffer  »  DeTeEff

      I've updated the articles for your FMs and your author category at the wiki. Your newer nickname (DeTeEff) now comes first, and the one in parentheses is your older nickname (Fieldmedic). Just to avoid confusing people who played your FMs years ago and remember your older nickname. I've added a wiki article for your latest FM, Who Watches the Watcher?, as part of my current updating efforts. Unless I overlooked something, you have five different FMs so far.
      · 0 replies
    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
×
×
  • Create New...