Response to article on runamok science and technology

Reference article
http://www.naturalnews.com/035790_scientific_suicide_humans.html "Human race being terminated by 'scientific suicide' "

Well, sometimes I consider some of my blog posts here as "ranting," but the referenced article outdoes my rants by several orders of magnitude. Yet it has much food worthy of thought, if one can look past the ranting.

Skipping the many detailed points the article brings up, the part that I came away with is the assertion that "science and technology" is insufficiently balanced by application of wisdom and wider understanding, and that with most "science" being led down channels that maximize profit for businesses (of necessity, because they pay for the science being done) instead of for maximizing benefit to the ultimate wide customer base. And that "ultimate wide customer base" is largely unaware of what is being done, in order to make profit for businesses, by offering products that in narrow focus provide benefit to a limited part of the wider customer base. The author points out ten potentially runamok technologies that could spell disaster for civilization.

(He did not bring up the assertion of the Malthusian-math-based groups that say the only problem is that there are far too many people on the planet, and so the solution is to ....)

Well, I resist the urge to bring up lots of quotes from the article, yet this post won't make much sense unless the reader actually reads the hard-hitting article by Mike Adams; it speaks for itself. What I need to write about is the effect on me.

I have written posts several times that attempted to explore what happened to me in my freshman year in college, which made major changes to the course of my career and life. Many of those disruptive changes continue with me today, like 24/7 loud tinnitus in both ears, and difficulty in remembering what I had read. From being what Adams would have called a "super-geek" but of the mid-1950's, entering college as a physic major with a tentative goal of becoming either a nuclear scientist or a thin-film researcher, yet also to learn all the sciences as a side activity. This would have been possible back then (not now) and I was well on my way as of entering college - for example, I had been looking forward to college chemistry due to my enjoyment of chemistry, but college entrance testing had found that I already knew more chemistry than one who had taken their college chemistry course. I had been reading intensively in high school, averaging a book a day in addition to my studies, mostly in the sciences and of course the science fiction which doubtless kept it all exciting for me. 750 wpm reader with comprehension, I was going to learn all of physics of the time, then on to chemistry which was based on physics, then biology that was based on chemistry, then on psychology that was based on biology, then on to sociology that was based on psychology; progress from there would depend on what I had learned in the meantime, was the way my reasoning went. To be a scientist was my primary career goal, my ultimate ideal; surely a fine woman would be my partner and mate through all of this. Well, the problem was that I needed to already know the sociology part to be able to adequately connect to my beloved girlfriend, and Aspergers (they had not given it a name yet back then) needed intensive sociology-psychology working understanding to have a chance at not making the interpersonal goofs that cost me my girlfriend when I left for college, and the resulting deep despair along with other hardships such as financial, stopped me from taking care of myself, and I had no support structure then and wheat gluten sensitivity destroyed me from the inside and Asperger's destroyed me from the outside. I changed my major to psychology for a semester but did not finish it, and became a "college dropout" and that was a position from which I lived my career.

Nonetheless my dreams of becoming a scientist were never forgotten. I continued to read and learn about all the sciences for relaxation while I was on the rough road of the real world, ever struggling to get some kind of work so as to pay my bills. After retiring I did volunteer work in the sciences at a natural history museum in the research and collections department; and still do the data processing part of that work from far away, via my computer and the internet; this activity provides me a bit more self-esteem (and my boss at the museum sends me Care Packages on my birthday and for Christmas, another incentive.)

Now reading the subject article "Human race being terminated by 'scientific suicide' " my buttons get pushed. And pushed in lots of ways; my life has covered lots more ground since those high-functioning high school days. Having to survive as a grunt in the physical world of bottom-level workers, instead of the high-flying theoretical world of my preparation for life, provided much opportunity for change of point of view.

The subject of lack of wisdom in the application of science, dredged up one of the things that I sought in my high school years, that I had two modes of thinking. There was the mode I liked the most, that was wide-ranging, big picture processing mode; and there was an analytical, detail processing mode that schoolwork required. The problem was that when I was in the well-practiced analytical reasoning mode, I could not voluntarily get switched over to the big-picture delightful mode; and worse, when somehow I found myself in the big-picture mode, whenever I had to get into the detail processing mode to resolve some item, I found I could not get back over into the big-picture mode to continue what I had been exploring.

And now I suspect that is the problem with scientists of today that Mike Adams so harshly grouses about in the subject article. I suspect that it is this unbalanced aspect, that supplies the "lack of wisdom" major problem.

And, the scientists rarely get to follow their heart in their research, since they must make a living, and their employers tell what they are to research and try to find; and their employer is probably mostly motivated by making a big profit, to gain wealth and power for himself. This "wealth and power" of the businessman, small business or corporate, motivation has almost nothing to do with wisdom for humanity, the ecosystem and the civilization on which his life so intimately depends. As well as do all we others on the planet, hapless bringer-alongs in all this.

Anyway - along with the occasional opportunity to learn a little more of the sciences by reading during my working years, I also struggled to get clues to the two modes of my thinking. And at this point I have found many such clues, and protocols that look promising for finally bringing my two types of thinking into easy back and forth mode.

Much of this, of course, was also explored starting back in the "left-right brain thinking" that was so in vogue before blood flow imaging found "left-right cognition" was a vast oversimplification as to anatomy; yet, the dual processing phenomena remains. And men, like me, have fewer corpus-collosum connections between the two halves of our brains, than do women, thus making it harder for men to integrate the two cognitive processing modes.

So my pursuit of skill at "wisdom" has long focused on the union of left-right brain thinking. Would that automatically provide wisdom for humanity, resolving the problem of insufficient integration of small scientific applications into business-profit-directed endeavors?

I suspect not adequately, because of opportunity. Scientists have to get paid, enabled to live adequate lives, get married, raise families and so forth. Their scientist skills tend to not approach that subject; employers and their management will do that part, along maybe also with investors in the company. And, those non-scientists are picking out what among the many possible paths of science and technology, that get followed. And the drive for wealth and power that businessmen and many managers, has little interest in supporting humanity and civilization, and the ecosystem, despite their very lives depending on it.

There have been many comedian teams that have shown this difficulty, by their acted out portrayals, such as Bud Abbot and Lou Costello. We can laugh at it all, and that helps see the problems and de-stress about it a bit; and I wonder maybe we learn a bit of wisdom to practice as a result, given the freedom and opportunity to do so along with remembering the lesson at the right time.

But the "left-right brain integration" stimulation and practice, looks to me like the most fruitful way to resolve the blind scientific endeavors as driven by business profit - and egos galore all over the place - of civilization blindly ending up in the ditch, as is being proclaimed by Mike Adams in the subject article.

Thus I am trying to say that it is not my beloved "science and technology" that is the leader into the ditch of civilization's destruction, but something else is. I'd grouse that it is caused by the bullies that romp amongst us; but really, the bullies often can learn to be fine managers, since they are people-oriented. How to give wisdom to bullies? Well, right now that looks harder to do. As it is said, if one does not learn the lessons of history, one is doomed to repeat the lessons - and they can be hard lessons the next time again too. Bullies tend to get the girls, often far more of them than their share; and that ensures their contributing to the future, while the other thus-mateless men vanish into the dust and the pages of the textbook knowledge.

If the article is accurate, Mother Nature seems about to get tired of our childish romps and say, exterminate-yourselves, so she can start rebuilding something else from the ashes. We were just not good enough.

But - I'd like to think we still can do it right.

Electroherbalism and we see what we are looking for instead of at

Responding to a post directed at me, on the electro-herbalism list (which seems to be undergoing a blitz from unrelated subject posts, possibly just more of the clever attacks against alternative health explorers) which started with appreciation for my earlier reference to the wisdom I am reminded of, the wisdom that "we don't see what we are looking at; instead, we see what we are looking for." What do you see in the above response to you?" - - she then went on to ask why that was; also asking about the nature of "truth" and also what other kinds of electroherbalism instruments had I experience with, particularly referencing Bob Beck's early device too. (The late Bob Beck was a PhD biophysicist mostly involved with early struggles against use of use of radio waves to cause illness or injury, or control people's brainwaves without their consent, back in the Cold War days.) Responding to her post - someone I had not heard of before - I seemed to write things possibly worth repeating in my blog here, as copied below.

"Yes, I agree that is a profound wisdom well worth pondering, that we see what we are looking for.
I wonder what it would be like to be able to fully see what one is looking at.
I suspect that would be an overwhelming experience: all that is present but filtered out by our preprocessing system, that selects out that which is deemed significant to the person at the moment. It would be my Asperger's inability to filter out enough data, far worse than it is already for me.
Long ago I read that one's sensory system is delivering a sum of about a million bits per second to the brain, in large part from the visual system. It has to be heavily pre-filtered so our conscious mind will be able to deal with it. This is done by delivering the physical sensory data coming as wrapped in a container formed of an offered "meaning" as derived from possibly related past experiences.

We need to supply significance to what we are experiencing at any given moment. I can see why that is a survival trait: is that a pile of brush over there, or is it a crouching tiger, for example. Is that slightly visible shape in the bush over there possibly a critter that would go well in the stewpot. Is the person approaching me going to be helpful or will I get bonked instead. It is the meaning of what is being perceived, is what provides life or death data, and data in between.

Thus, we learn to "see what we are looking for." Instead of seeing what we are looking at.

However, much of that "meaning" is learned through life experiences. Parroting the meaningfulness that is being spread around in one's supportive group helps carry on that set of traditions, as well as proving group membership. Thus we learn that the folks wearing my team colors are on my team, and the ones wearing that other set of clothing are opponents intent on undoing me and my team. Soldiers that are wearing my kind of uniform are to be obeyed, and soldiers wearing that other kind of uniform are evil monsters to be killed if possible. The clothing becomes the meaning, and the meaning triggers the response. The person under the clothing becomes labeled with the associated meaning and thus the triggered response.

As for "truth" … I think it is a relative thing. Science is ever attempting to shear off the fluff to find increasingly generalized truth observable by all people in all situations and viewpoints.

Yet the original raw data comes from specific perspectives; and since presumably no two things can occupy exactly the same space at the same time, it could be said that any given thing as seen by any two different observers, will always look different, have a different truth for them.

One could take a tennis ball, roll it around between your hands, roll it along the desktop, toss it to a neighbor who does similar things, and then discuss what is a tennis ball: round, a bit bouncy, a fuzzy texture. It also might mean it has potential for being batted around by a tennis racquet, to some people with that kind of prior experience with tennis balls. Thus the two people assign somewhat different meanings, truths about the tennis ball; yet quite likely they are unaware of the different truths between them and the equal validity for each of their truths. As they describe their observations to each other and share physical experiences with the tennis ball, it is likely to increasingly produce a more similar truth between them, on that subject.

A person might ask, does routine use of a Clark zapper significantly help maintain a person's health?

One person, who has actually done that experiment for several years on a usually daily basis, and had in that time period experienced a major reduction in sick time off work and of feeling sick-miserable, might answer that: yes, it did, and it still does.

But a doctor, asked that same question and having no experience whatsoever with a Clark zapper, might declare that it could not possibly help maintain a person's health better than the doctor, with a hypodermic needle in one hand and a scalpel in the other hand, can do… and besides if the zapper could do that, the doctor would lose a lot of income, and that would make it hard to pay off his long and expensive education expenses, an intolerable situation: no, the Clark zapper is quackery, it cannot work because it was not taught in school that it is an acceptable tool for a doctor to use on his patients.

The two people are both speaking truth as it is for them individually. Truth from their viewpoints; both quite different viewpoints. Now, if it were possible to include the description of the detailed associated viewpoint of the person speaking his or her truth (what a huge pile of data that would be ! ) then there might be a way to harmonize the truths so as to find some common truth that might also significantly apply to some third person at another time and place.

For example, the doctor with a hypo in one hand and a scalpel in the other, might be the only way to save the life of a person freshly mangled in a car accident, unconscious and heavily bleeding. A matter of life or death.

Yet also a person suffering a large dirty wound in a situation where no medical help is economically or physically available, might find that a simple flushing the wound out with tap water, taping the pieces of flesh back together with masking tape, and using a Clark zapper powered from a car's cigar lighter 12 volt power outlet, heals rapidly and without pain, swelling or redness; and has fused back together with only the outline of a scar, all in three days, without the doctor. The otherwise major infection might have eventually become fatal; the proper use of the Clark zapper would then have saved a life, much as the doctor did in the prior hypothetical example.

… As for what other devices I have used in my also "modest means" lifestyle, I have bit the financial bullet and bought the programmable zappers sold at the drclark.com site over the years; but, they occasionally are under attack by the authorities and have to get their instruments built overseas, and that source could get cut off by the special interest groups.

Thus, most of my more recent experimentation has been using instruments of my own design and construction, that keep evolving as I learn about it more. My goal is to come up with a design that others could build here in America with surplus parts at low cost, that are essentially able to do the Clark bioresonant frequencies (mostly 100 to 450 KHz) along with the Rife-associated signal sets (0.05 Hz to 10 KHz, usually.) It is a hobby that keeps me entertained in retirement, anyway, and saves me lots of money and misery so far (also has saved the gov't over $6000 in the medicare part B payments I have made but not drawn from, too.) The instruments generally reflect the evolution of my designs, and the current design one includes the long-proven zapper that has a single frequency around 32 KHz with a stiff buffered output from 9 volt source, and has a LED that glows in proportion to the body current from the zapper, providing feedback about the condition of the circuit including oneself. The second part takes audio tracks, recorded as if music but are the sequences of signals such as are found on the electroherbalism site, usually three minutes each, compressed and put on a music player, and fed into the zapper which converts them into zapper-type pulsed-DC waveforms, that then drive the aforementioned special zapper output circuitry including the LED showing body current, throughout the Rife-specturm; it uses square wave recordings for below 100 Hz and the instrument reconstructs the original low frequency from that, as low as one wants to go. The third section is a frequency multiplier, multiplying the frequency being played back by the music player by 100, so it provides an extension on up through the Clark bioresonant frequencies. Then I play the audio tracks (that I had previously chosen for myself and recorded on my computer) while holding the wet-paper covered copper tubing handholds, watch the LED's brightness, and see what, if any, effect it has on myself. The Stenulson stimulation and balancing frequencies are of special interest to me. As well as several parasites in the Clark bioresonant range that are much faster treated than the Rife-spectrum signal sets, and I have found I need to do them about every day, or the glooms start to set in and handicap me - Salmonella typnimurium and Shigella flexneri seem to be my own personal nemesis brain parasites if I don't beat on them daily with the signal sets recorded as audio of 1/100 the Clark bioresonant frequency range of each of them, then multiplied by my instrument to produce the actual bioresonant frequencies; takes over half an hour of my day to run them - although I can two-finger type on keyboard while running them, holding the pipe handholds while doing so.

I think the current programmable zappers sold at drclark.com site are possibly too expensive for those of modest means - in the $600 range even before buying the programs - and also consumes way too much power from 9 volt batteries as compared to their previous model that ran far longer on a pair of AA batteries - but is no longer available, and was built in Italy - although it too was in the $600 range back then. But, is the most versatile of the commercial ones that I have experience with; and some of their program sets are quite effective, I think, such as their one for "headaches" seems to significantly improve my memory, for example, if used every few days.

I have no experience with the instruments that use plasma tubes. I have long thought about building something vaguely resembling the capacitive instrument or inductive-capacitive varieties, but I get lost in the further design complexities I would do with them for better characterization and application, and so has not gotten done. Yet. My current design zapper could pulse a pocket laser am sure; it has current limiting at 4.5 mA - and I hope to do such experiments some day - I have tried it with a common LED and works nicely but physiological effects if any are yet to be explored.

But, I can do only so much; and the disdain I generally get re this effort is no fun either. The part that they especially don't want to hear is about their being sick and miserable and doctor trips and medical expenses - that I did not experience. That does not match with their truth, their group-taught viewpoint.

I buy and give out the $10 SMD 30 KHz zappers now available on ebay, excellently made devices for the money, whenever I can find someone who will pay attention to me long enough for me to hand one to them; I do this at my own expense; I ask for feedback, but the folks generally either won't talk about it; how to use it, as well as how to get functional handholds, is a problem with all that - still, I fantasize it might save someone's life in an emergency, if enough of them are out there, one at the right time and place. There also is one of similar type for $15 on ebay that produces a Rife frequency - 15 Hz, but I have not personally gotten one, since my device will do the 15 Hz easily.

Re Beck's device, long ago I did get a copy of Beck's device's schematic, intending to use my technician skills to freely make some of them to give out to the unfortunate people in need, but I never ran across anyone with the disease, so it never got built and thus never tested. Attending Beck's lectures at the WLE several times, it sounded like the use of that device could have saved enormous pain and suffering of people, including inhibiting the spread of the disease, but the authorities were adamant about blocking that from happening. Tragic, what people do to each other; yes, I know that folks say the world is overpopulated (or at least overpopulated with people not of their own religion or particular family or ethnicity) - am familiar with Malthusian theory and number crunching - yet even in high school when the teacher said that mice reproduce so rapidly that in a few years the whole world would be covered by mice six inches deep - and as far as I could tell, I was the only one who looked down and did not see six inches of mice there covering my feet - or even see one mouse anywhere in sight: there must be more to it all, than that. I also have heard that the more people there are on the planet, the higher the rate of accumulation of knowledge and capability to use it, so a larger population might well be able to solve the big problems that they thereby create, too. It could be a race between expanding population's intelligence, vs the rate of accumulation of trash ruining the air-water-land environment, will the damage be beyond any repair, too many species gone extinct, before people get smart and responsible enough to pull the fat out of the fire, I wonder.

But, tragically it seems that people like to squabble more than work harmoniously to responsibly tend our wonderful home, strange a thing that that is - time will tell if the various alpha-male-wannabe men in their in-bred efforts to be the sole progenitors of future generations, will pull the curtain down on humankind's show when they fall - depending on the resulting mess they make, Mother Nature will anyway eventually produce a new kind of intelligent being to replace us - maybe based on the sturdy cockroach - I hope with much better responsibility than we are demonstrating currently.

In the meantime, I do my best to do my part as best I can with what resources I have, despite the hazing I frequently experience.

I hope this has answered your questions, written from my viewpoint, of course … I can ask of you too: what do you see in the above response to you?

Jim Cline"
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BTW, no reply to this has appeared on the list.

On the ongoing subject of Patent Reform

The ongoing subject of Patent Reform has pushed my buttons a bit;
"White Board: Austan Goolsbee on Patent Reform"
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/07/white-board-austan-goolsbee-patent-reform

The subject of the U. S. Patent system and far more generally, giving credit for the contributions of ideas and the development of physical means to explore application of those ideas, has been of interest to me. And decades ago I had read of calls for revision of the Patent system, although just how to do that were not described.

I recall back in the '60's when I had a couple ideas that I had suggested to my employer, who eventually wrote me a release for them, a friendly co-worker who had once worked as a patent lawyer, told me that a patent does not protect one's idea, it only gives one a right to sue those who use the idea after you have a patented granted on it. He said the only useful patents were for processes, and the patent also written to not include some key part of the idea so others could not really copy it from the patent data.

Plus even back then the cost of a patent was huge, many months of my salary. (My then-wife, who was very pragmatic and preserved only "#1," who I so desperately needed as my mate, always demanded my uncashed but signed paycheck, and in return I got $5 for lunches, and no other spending money ... she would not even allow me to buy a 4-function calculator while I was struggling to do my hobby project of calculating the materials stresses on my "Mooncable" anchored lunar tether to see if space-rated fiberglass would be adequate strength/weight ratio if designed with a constant-stress tapered cross-section, so I had months of hand calculation in my spare time and only had my slide rule as a help)

But later in the early 1980's when I worked for Shugart Corp, a division of Xerox, and had been promoted to have the Electronics Design/Development Engineer title (despite lack of a formal degree) I was in the loop to read the patent summaries that went around in the engineering department. Xerox and IBM had a mutual sharing of patents agreement, so the latest ones were listed there. I always really enjoyed reading those patent summaries, seemed to really brighten up my interest as a technically creative person by nature. Very stimulating reading. Those patents tended to be on electrical and mechanical things, which were both things I was long interested in and knew a lot about, so the patent summaries gave hints that instantly blossomed in my imagination for a few seconds, fun. So, I got a bit more acquainted with that subject.

And years before that, I had helped write the patent application wording that ultimately was granted, with the senior Electronics Engineer and I listed as the inventors, that eventually years later got granted. But I later heard that the company, Pertec Computer Corporation, only got the patent to prevent some rival company from seeing and patenting the idea and thus preventing Pertec ourselves from using it in our disk drives we developed and manufactured. (U S Patent 4,055,814 Abraham et al - I was the "et al" - "Phase Locked Loop for Synchronized VCO With Digital Data Pulses" - 1977.)

So, I have some awareness of the subject of patents.

I vaguely remember that back in the mid-1980's I had written up my ideas on how to possibly acknowledge all the idea inputs involved in making something new and useful. It went far beyond the original intent of the patent system. The patent system was originally created so as to give rights to the creator of some new product, often after years of tinkering on it, since there was a propensity for some other persons to just make money by copying the invention and selling it, cheaper because they had none of the costs of creating the idea and developing it into a manufacturable product, costs that would have had to be added to the product otherwise. Also the original patent was there with a time limit - 17 years I think - after which the patent would expire and everybody could then use its ideas; this encouraged inventors to disclose their processes in a patent, ensuring it was theirs for at least the 17 years, and to the larger system it meant that the ideas key to the invention would not be lost to civilization when the inventor passed away, as so often happened before then.

Yet as I pointed out above, a patent can be used to squelch the availability of an idea-based invention. This can be done by a company to prevent the use of a potentially rival technology, to keep it out of the competition; the patent would be gotten with no intent to actually make the products available to the customer base, but instead was gotten with the intent to prevent customers from utilizing those products, and thus would have to buy the company's established products. In 17 years the originator of the idea is likely to have perished from starvation or other neglect, so the advantages to such corporate stuff is likely to be permanent. There have been many stories floating around where this kind of thing was done, particularly in the automotive field, often said to have the motive of preventing fuel-saving mechanisms from being available to cars, so as to sell more of the highly profitable gasoline.

So, I think the subject of Patent Reform needs some heavy thinking and wisdom applied to it, far more than what is being now proposed by the Obama administration. But what they are dong is a good start, I think.

Perhaps I will re-think all the ideas I had for acknowledging all the idea input and craftsmanship involved in making an invention and producing it, and write them in this blog. I will let this urge stew while I go about my daily survival chores now.

Later - I need to point out that my purpose in this blog post is not so much as to point out rule changes needed in the patent system, but rather instead explore the need to find ways to encourage and support the idea-makers and creative crafts people that produce the innovations and inventions that are needed quite rapidly as civilization adjusts to its own expanding self, as humanity moves away from the animalistic hunter-gatherer predatory exploitative mode of life, and into the nurturing responsible mode.

Yet I realize that there is a tendency for some non-creative types of people to assume that inventions and their patents only come from the highly degreed (and highly paid) scientists & engineers who toil away in the bowels of some corporate lab, producing hugely complex and expensive prototype gizmos for the corporation to manufacture and make big profit for the investors; but exactly what the scientists and engineers focus on to invent for the corporation is only defined by the corporate managers, and the managers expect their defined patentable inventions to be produced as a result. Any other ideas the scientists and engineers might have are mere rubbish, wild cards, possibly disruptive jokers in the nicely laid out plans of the management staff, and are to be suppressed by every means. Management rules, period. Our system has painted itself into a corner, it seems to me.

Gone is the earlier notion that ideas for innovations and inventions come from the lone inventor who spontaneously comes up with ideas and then finds possible uses for them, preferably applied to some kind of endeavor he/she is interested in enabling happen. But that is the actual kind of thing I am attempting to encourage through reward of any and all who participate. This is what America needs to return to the fore in innovation. And yes, the corporate controlled scientists & engineers are also needed as part of that system too ... but just not being the top level of the system. The top level of innovation is the creative individual, whether a CEO or a janitor, an explorer of the nature of things, tinkerer with concepts and/or physical stuff with their hands, whose minds are busy integrating their lifetime of experiences to find matches of patterns produced in their mind, with patterns of needs and benefits that civilization would better thrive with as a result.

Most likely what is needed is to create a larger system to help promote and reword innovation of any and all types; the Patent System most likely would only be a subset of that system, dealing with only the aspect of protecting the efforts of those who toiled in mind and body to make some new innovative process or device that would help civilization, protecting them from those who would simply rob the invention and make it cheaper as a rival business to make money for themselves, not rewarding those who had produced the invention at all. Or, those business interests who would grab an invention's idea and patent it to prevent civilization from utilizing it, so as to maintain some pre-existing business products and services.

Exploring the mechanisms of how ideas come to be, seems a necessary step. Oftentimes we hear of ideas being produced in a generally similar time frame in far-apart areas of the world, too. Yet a patent is awarded to only one of them, excluding the others. How about a system that rewards all of those who independently came up with the same or similar ideas? Yet there are always copycats in the world; and indeed, our education system is based on copycatting the knowledge provided by others in the past eras; we tend to be thus conditioned to do that. And each innovation is built on other innovations, otherwise, to make a new Smartphone one would need to dig the raw materials out of the ground and figure out how to process the materials and put them together all the way up to the final assembly and test of the devices, all over again each time. So the ideas in innovation are actually a flow of ideas, being assembled this way and that in the mind or hand of the creative person, like clay that is squeezed in the fingers and the eye sees what it looks like as a result, and decides if that is interesting or not.

How to appropriately reward that kind of thing, regardless of when and where and who does it, seems to be the question.