The Idea Blog

“He also figured out how to stabilize the sand and make the soil arable, coming upon a solution almost by accident.  After noticing that barley spilled from a horse’s feed bag sprouted in the sand, he sowed quick-growing grasses along with native lupines and other species.”

From “Urban Oasis,” about San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and its original designer Wiliam Hammond Hall’s first efforts in the 1870s to carve a green park out of an expanse of sand dunes, in the March-April 2010 issue of Via, published by AAA.

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“The play was inspired by the real-life case of David Hampton, who gained lodging, meals and money from a number of notables by pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier.”  From a review of The Old Vic’s revival of John Guare’s 1990 play “Six Degrees of Separation” in the Financial Times (January 25, 2010).

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Two sea creatures doing what comes naturally were the genesis of two ideas written about in the December 12, 2009 issue of The Economist.

Idea #1: The glue “secreted” by the sandcastle worm “to stick bits of sand together to form its casing” (instead of building its shell directly from its own body minerals) may be used to help heal compound fratures of human bones, especially the fragments that are too small to be screwed and pinned together.  ”Medics have long sought a glue to do this work, and now Russell Stewart of the University of Utah may have found one in the secretions of a marine worm.”

Idea #2: Inspired by “a Japanese company (that) hooked up the lights on a Christmas tree to a tank containing an electric eel,” researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland have developed a photocell — an actual battery that can power things — based on the way the eel’s “living cell membranes and their proteins” communicate back and forth.

When we speak of “harnessing nature,” we generally mean in some grandly visible way, like a hydroelectric dam.  But two sea creatutes, doing their hardly observable little thing?

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“Mr. Lindsey’s productivity was a source of as much admiration as curiosity in the music press, and he was often asked to explain his compulsion to create so much music so quickly.  ’I'm just trying to get the idea out before the inspiration is gone,’ he said.  ’Everything I do is motivated by the fear of running out of time.’”  From The New York Times obituary (January 15, 2010) of Jimmy Lee Lindsey, 29, a “creative tornado” known as Jay Reatard in the punk/garage rock music world.

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I fell for “Jane Eyre” the first time I read it, so many years ago, and I re-read it every five years or so. I have met others who do the same thing. Right now, one of my plans is to paint a picture of the chestnut tree that is split by lighting the night that Jane agrees to marry Mr. Rochester (the first time, that is, before the wedding that doesn’t take place, causing Jane to run away, of course, later she comes back — oh, read it yourself).

So when I found “Becoming Jane Eyre,” by Sheila Kohler, on the shelf at my public library, I checked it out.  This novel imagines how Charlotte Bronte came to write her masterpiece. Early on, this passage struck me with some force, as I thought it viscerally expressed what it can be like to grow the tiniest germ of an idea.  Here, at a time when she is also tending to her blind father, Charlotte is wrestling with what to name her book’s heroine:

“It comes to her out of thin air.  She is not sure if she has heard such a name.  Was there someone she knew with that name?  Does it come from the family arms she once saw in a church, or the river she knows well, the beautiful valley of the Ayre?  Or is it a name that comes from air, perhaps, or fire?  Fire and ire will be in the book: rage at the world as it is.  Unfair!  Unfair! Ire and eyer: she is the one who now sees in her father’s place.  She has become the voyeur, the observer.  Plain Jane, Emily Jane, her beloved sister’s second name, Jane, so close to Joan, brave Joan of Arc, Jane so close to Janet, Jeanette, little Jane.  A name that conjures up duty and dullness, childhood and obedience, but also spirit and liberty, a sprite’s name, a fairy’s name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth and hypocrisy, the name of one who sees: Jane Eyre.”

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“The idea of saving for a rainy day originated with farm hands whose work depended on the weather.  Conservationists are thinking similarly about climate change and freezing the cells of threatened animals as a sort of insurance policy.”  From an article about “trying to save a frog from extinction” in the January 30, 2010 issue of The Economist.

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“‘I found the slot that was missing in rhythm education,’ he told The New York Times in 1985.  ’I found a way to activate the silences between the notes.’”

From Peter Keepnews’ obituary of Ed Thigpen, jazz drummer, on January 26, 2010.

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The headline of the story caught my eye — “Reshaping a Surfboard To Reshape an Experience” (The New York Times, July 14, 2008) — because reshaping anything starts with an idea.

Briefly put, an industrial designer named Thomas Meyerhoffer who lives in Montara, CA, and surfs, grew disappointed with his surfboard (actually, all 40 of them) and decided to design a new type.  I leave it those who know about noseriding, tailriding, wipe-outs and such to judge the merits of his new design (which the Times called “the most radical leap in board design in 50 years”).  What resounded with me was the spirit driving Mr. Meyerhoffer.

Quoted as saying “it’s about creating a different feeling,” Mr Meyerhoffer seemed to say that his design took on its own life: “I never designed the board to look this way.  It became this way.”  To me, this undercores the importance of letting ideas go free, of being comfortable knowing only the starting point and not the end point.  Recognizing the end point when you get to it is one thing, but predicting it?

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