Radical Ideas

Kamm

INTRODUCTION

Most people are hostile to most new ideas and are at their most creative when devising objections to new ideas. (Kamm’s Law)

There are many new ideas and proposals below, and my wife says…but they just won’t do it. So why publish them? An ego trip? Partly that. One’s work, like one’s child, is a bid for immortality. The other part is a continuing search for intellectual companionship. I hope you will find some of these essays worthy of arguing back.

These are not soothing essays. There is something to antagonize - or please - everyone, liberal, conservative, or eccentric. It is not my purpose to irritate, but it is my purpose to display ideas which are the result of free thought, let them please or displease whom they may, and to invite dialog about any or all.

You will not read these hundred or so essays with your head nodding in continual admiring agreement, but I do hope that they will stimulate your own thinking and ultimately nudge our world toward being a slightly better place.

You will find some redundancy but that was the evolution of thinking so I limit essays on similar subjects. But some things I just wanted to say.

I expect and encourage argument.

Inventions and Inventors

In my every job and consult I was expected, and paid, to invent. So I am a professional inventor. Yet many great inventions were made by amateurs; Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. However there is a steady stream of inventions, good and bad, by amateurs, many based on ignorance of science. Perpetual motion machines keep coming and I disillusion inventors’ dreams of wealth.

Most inventors, including myself, invent without knowing that someone else has beaten them to it. (The telephone is a famous example. Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent application hours before Gray did.) Most of the work of the Patent Office is determining how much of the applicant’s work makes him a First Inventor, and not just a re-inventor. The ‘First Inventor" of an invention rates a patent from the U.S. Patent office but independent invention by others is common (including by me) and does not detract from the invention’s value when used.

My proudest invention was the decimal keeper slide rule which could have been invented, manufactured, and used for the past hundred years, but wasn’t. It became a commercial success - until the sudden death of all slide rules when electronic calculators appeared.

Creativity

I offer for comment this hypothesis of the creative process. It is based on my own experience as an inventor and entrepreneur, discussion of the process with my mentor, the late Jacob Rabinow of the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), an immensely productive inventor, and my observation of other creators and their creations in many forms other than invention.

The process is one of mental free association and combination of all the ideas and images accumulated in one’s lifetime, modification of those ideas in size, shape, color, material, function, etc. which are also accumulated ideas, and continuing rejection of undesirable combinations. In addition to this introspective process is experiment which extends the process into the external world.

For example, in my own experience, the large stagecoach wheels and road ruts in a comic western movie evolved into the tiny wheels recognizing digital address codes in the first US Post Office letter sorter, a patented invention of a mechanical digital device.

Creativity results from genetic talent, plus an upbringing which does not suppress the practice, plus an accumulation of observations and experiences. Creativity results from the obsessive and compulsive motivation of the creators to do the mental, and sometimes physical, hard work of doing the creating. This motivation may include egotism, a passion for knowledge, a passion for public service, a passion for fame, and a passion for money.

Who create?

Artists in all fields of art (painting, sculpture, literature, dance, music, others)

Business people (deals)

Lawyers (deals, arguments)

Scientists (hypotheses, experiments)

Engineers (designs)

Inventors (inventions)

Diplomats (treaties)

Politicians (laws)

Crooks (frauds)

There are creators who work in more than one field, Leonardo da Vinci being the most famous. Mr. Rabinow did. Many businesses have been created by people who first created a product or service.

A calling is a creative career. Those with a calling do not watch the clock as do the unfortunates who do uninteresting work only because they need the income.

Kamm’s Law:

Most people are hostile to most new ideas, and are at their most creative when thinking up objections to new ideas. They are in favor of creativity in the abstract, but detest the concrete products of creativity, and sometimes the creator too.

Common responses to a new idea:

They won’t pay for it.

I think someone already did that.

It’s impractical.

Authority X disagrees.

It’s an old idea.

Who needs it?

The trouble with that is…[pause to think up a trouble]

What if…[some bad effect].

What we do now is just as good.

It would cost too much.

Someone used to do that. (Implying abandonment)

If it were any good we would have done it already.

There must be a reason they don’t do it now.

Someone must have tried it already.

If it were any good, one of the big companies would have done it already.

It’s merely engineering, not science.

We tried it and it didn’t work.

There is no budget.

Changes the subject

Polite laughter

Derisive laughter

Silence

It won’t work.

Anger and hostility

Ridicule

During WWII President Roosevelt ordered the creation of the National Inventor’s Council to solicit inventions to help our war effort. It was a success and ultimately became the Office of Energy-Related Inventions in the Department of Energy. The head, for many years, was Jacob Rabinow of the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) with over 400 patents as the tip of his iceberg. The NIST annual ‘Rabinow Award for Electro-Mechanical Research’ was created in his honor. I worked for Mr. Rabinow and he changed my life…

Rabinow believed and demonstrated that creativity could be taught, or at least encouraged, and was angered by the present low state of our education in this respect. In technology, outside the digital world, creativity has reached the level of national scandal.

Few people ever change an opinion so I am sorry that my innovations had to include Kamm’s Law.

Dominance

Along with food and sex, dominance is a genetic motivator of our species and of most other mammals living in groups. ‘Alpha-male’ wolves, wild dogs, cattle bulls, and lions compete for leadership by fighting each other for dominance of their groups.

Among humans there are many modes of fighting for dominance, both by individuals and by groups up to national and international size.

All forms of sport, from martial arts to chess, are fields of dominance competition.

In organizations, rank and position are fields of job dominance.

Government people use the legal powers of the government to dominate others. A policeman dominates his conversation with a driver.

Political power is dominance.

Sovereignty is dominance over a territory.

Among intellectual activities there is dominating competition in achievement and recognition.

Bargaining is a dominance competition.

All forms of rank create dominance either by actual power, as in the military, or by feelings in a relationship in any rank such as academic.

Paranoia is psychotic fear of imaginary dominance.

Helpfulness and charity may contain dominance.

Dominance may be yielded for benefits.

Man dominates nature both constructively (e.g. agriculture) or destructively (e.g. mining). And may be indifferent to dominance, as in pollution.

Most competition for dominance is by males, but in human families the wife and mother are sometimes dominant.

There is dominance in sex, usually by the male.

All of history is tales of dominations.

Dominance is sought by acquiring pets, adopted children, and perhaps normal children.

Being dominated is sought with doctors and with religion’s gods and priests.

Death

A species evolves with enough health to survive through reproduction time. Afterwards there is little benefit to reproduction other than some assistance with the young before slow death takes the aged, so little has evolved to prevent health from deteriorating slowly until death.

Therefore most people die in misery from a fatal disease. It is illegal for them to accelerate their own deaths (suicide) and it is illegal to help them do so. We are expected to prolong their lives, despite their suffering, under threat of murder prosecution even to help suicide. (An exception is when doctors permit palliative care by professional hostels when his patient faces certain painful death in the very near future.)

As a result of such law I read of a man who took a gun into the hospital, shot his dying wife to end her suffering, and then shot himself to prevent prosecution. Can you dispute his thinking and his actions? And the sacrifice of his own further life to end the suffering of his wife?

Since these laws apply to our entire population they perpetrate the greatest amount of cruelty in all of history.

Forest Fires

A lightning stroke occurs when sufficient voltage develops in a cloud to ionize a path through the air to ground and the cloud discharges to ground through that path. If there are trees near the point of contact with the ground, the heat from the lightning current through them ignites them and starts a forest fire.

With the ‘Lightning Trigger’ I propose, a lightning stroke strikes the ground at a chosen place and time where firefighters can be ready to extinguish a forest fire before it spreads.

An electrically conductive ionized trail is left by the exhaust of a rocket. The ‘Lightning Trigger’ is a rocket shot from the ground into an electrically charged storm cloud and conducts a lightning stroke down its ionized trail into a prepared place on the ground. (A trailed wire can be used in addition to the ionized trail. Such trailed wires are used for certain controlled military rockets.).

The lightning rocket waits on top of a water tank until it is launched by remote control by a forest ranger. The triggered lightning strikes the grounded water tank and its energy is dissipated in boiling the water.

The Lightning Trigger fire prevention SYSTEM is a network of cleared rocket launch sites in the forest triggered by radio by rangers watching for dark, charged clouds.

This propellant triggering of a natural phenomenon is suggestive of the use of military artillery shells to trigger avalanches.

(I sent this letter to about 50 forestry officials but received only one reply, from USDA. He said he receives lots of suggestions but certainly was not going to pay for one.)

Better Hearing

My only health defect is poor hearing, specifically inability to understand slurred pronunciation in a noisy environment, but perfectly able to understand clear speech in moderate noise. A common problem. I wear hearing aids that amplify moderately and do some compensation for normal aged frequency response. Not good enough.

Existing hearing aids filter and amplify sounds between the acoustic input and the ear canal. They cannot distinguish signal from noise and cannot correct poorly pronounced words. A well working brain does both but a poorly working brain fails to understand poorly pronounced speech, especially in the presence of noise. Even the speech of the stage, movies, and TV can be obscure to many patients.

I propose a computer program that uses linguistics to improve the performance of existing hearing aids. It consists of speech recognition software such as Nuance Dragon, followed by one of several existing speech synthesis programs to clearly pronounce, in an artificial voice, the original words.

Conventional hearing aids cannot do this at all, so this invention would be a new product for an existing hearing aid company. The circuitry may need more space than in a behind-the-ear case so the instrument may need a neck pendant and a pair of earphones. Well worth it to the user!

If we insert a program transmitting the speech, a computer could correct the speech before it reaches the hearing aid. A microphone feeding the recognition program replaces the hearing aid microphone. (To work with an unchanged existing hearing aid the synthesizing program output is fed to the existing hearing aid microphone circuit.)

Even correcting a limited vocabulary of common words would be of great value and there may be rules of English speech that work with a large vocabulary.

Rocket Revolution

The battlefield hosts an economic competition in weapons as well as a human competition in people, all subject to competition in management, strategy, and tactics.

Most battlefield power in the 20th and early 21st centuries has been based on manned fighting vehicles with guns as their principal weapons, with high economic cost but with fewer lives than previous fighting means. The guided rocket has now made vehicles easy to destroy by soldiers on the ground, with much less material cost and lives lost than before.

For examples:

Tanks are destroyed by infantry carried guided rockets.

High flying aircraft are destroyed by surface to air guided rockets fired from non-armored ground assemblies. These rockets are equipped with proximity fuses and need not even hit their target planes.

Defending rocket soldiers do not need the skill and training of the attacking tank and aircraft soldiers. In the case of tanks and soldier-carrying ‘fighting vehicles’, fewer defending infantry with rockets can kill more attackers than beforR&D and manufacturing costs are part of the competition of war. The cost of defending against tanks and planes with rockets is less than the costs of the attacking tanks and planes.

We would also benefit from a light weight land mine, time limited, to be thrown in quantity by rockets to forbid areas to enemy soldiers.

Anti-aircraft rockets obsolete manned airplanes, thus obsoleting aircraft carriers, those great money sinks of the Department of Defense.

Big ships are killed by small rockets and torpedoes so many small ships with guided rocket and torpedo weapons are a more productive investment than aircraft carriers. (Torpedoes are, in effect, underwater rockets.)

Tenured generals and admirals continue to be the greatest obstacles to progress.

Immigration Criteria

Some criteria are needed both for selecting new immigrants and for sorting out and treating old illegal immigrants.

Everyone has a preference, typically for the same ethnic or national or religious or educational category as oneself; bargaining is interminable; and the number of illegal immigrants, and their costs, grow.

Consider health as a criterion inoffensive to everyone; we all want a healthy population and good health costs less than bad. And there can be no forged documents. Standards of acceptable health for all ages can be established within tolerable levels of controversy and those below standard can be returned to countries of origin together with such family members as wish to go.

One is tempted to kick off the acceptable standards debate with addictions included as bad health. Everyone can play and it is plausible that compromises might be reached.

My own value is proficiency in the English language. It is the key to cultural and political integration; we have Canada as an example of two language troubles. Most immigrants are eager for language integration and achieve it within the first or second generation, but Spanish speakers have more resistance.

Israel

ALL the earth’s land has been taken by force, or was purchased from a country which had taken it by force, and has held it by force. The diplomat’s phrase is by right of conquest. (Small areas of Antarctica used for scientific research are excepted by treaty.) For example, the American southwest was taken from the Indians by Spain, then taken from Spain by Mexico in its revolution, then taken from Mexico by the United States in the Mexican War. Our original thirteen British colonies were taken from England by the force of the American Revolution. Much of history is a record of land taken by war force.

After World War One the victorious British and French partitioned the five hundred year old Turkish Empire, by force, and created