We have repeated evidence of good designs being ignored for a decade or more; hence the Silicon Valley axiom: “10 years ahead of time is as good as wrong.” Similarly, good designs can be appallingly simple, and go unnoticed—for example, Torggler’s swinging-door design (watch on YouTube; there is no way to explain it properly, because it is so bizarrely simple).
Another example is the original river-clean-up buoy-net system, debuted decades ago, and promptly ignored, despite grabbing all the plastic before it entered the ocean. We continued to hope for ‘something to clean up the plastic’ and grasped, later, at the Ocean Clean-Up guy who gave a TED talk. He got millions of dollars, and eventually he heard about the river-scooping buoy bot, and he began promoting it. Without that TED-talker’s promotion, it’s likely we’d all still not know about the more-effective and simpler and safer river-bot. This happens all the time.
Similarly, in 2007, Leapfrog licensed from Anoto a unique dot-pattern, to print on regular paper (tiny dots, you can’t see) such that an optic on a ‘pen’ could read the coordinates, and use an on-board computer and audio to output based upon what it saw you writing. So, you could draw a drum set, and tap each drum to hear it play. Leapfrog was making kid’s workbooks and tailored software. I told them to put the dots on clear adhesive plastic, to convert any existing computer screen into a touchscreen. I faxed them my details, granted them license (they held all the others, and I didn’t want to compete), and they proceeded to ignore me for six years. Leapfrog spun-off the pen and dots, to Livescribe, who was still stuck on how ‘paper is the answer’. By 2013, they’d licensed my touchscreen to Panasonic, who bottled it up inside their $400 tablet that wowed the Germany Electronics Expo with its artistic precision. Artistic precision you could have had in 2007, and you still can’t, because Panasonic is camping on the license.
Don’t pretend that every simple idea must have already been discovered, or must obviously come into use, if it is known. Human reticence to new ideas is often the bigger barrier.
The primary reason no one already mentioned such a solution is: you can’t capture the water. Just like Tesla’s hope for free energy, rain from the sky is difficult to market. Yet, I propose it for the governments who have viable lands; they would see tax returns which would make it valuable, as long as it rained in some of the desert.
We have repeated evidence of good designs being ignored for a decade or more; hence the Silicon Valley axiom: “10 years ahead of time is as good as wrong.” Similarly, good designs can be appallingly simple, and go unnoticed—for example, Torggler’s swinging-door design (watch on YouTube; there is no way to explain it properly, because it is so bizarrely simple).
Another example is the original river-clean-up buoy-net system, debuted decades ago, and promptly ignored, despite grabbing all the plastic before it entered the ocean. We continued to hope for ‘something to clean up the plastic’ and grasped, later, at the Ocean Clean-Up guy who gave a TED talk. He got millions of dollars, and eventually he heard about the river-scooping buoy bot, and he began promoting it. Without that TED-talker’s promotion, it’s likely we’d all still not know about the more-effective and simpler and safer river-bot. This happens all the time.
Similarly, in 2007, Leapfrog licensed from Anoto a unique dot-pattern, to print on regular paper (tiny dots, you can’t see) such that an optic on a ‘pen’ could read the coordinates, and use an on-board computer and audio to output based upon what it saw you writing. So, you could draw a drum set, and tap each drum to hear it play. Leapfrog was making kid’s workbooks and tailored software. I told them to put the dots on clear adhesive plastic, to convert any existing computer screen into a touchscreen. I faxed them my details, granted them license (they held all the others, and I didn’t want to compete), and they proceeded to ignore me for six years. Leapfrog spun-off the pen and dots, to Livescribe, who was still stuck on how ‘paper is the answer’. By 2013, they’d licensed my touchscreen to Panasonic, who bottled it up inside their $400 tablet that wowed the Germany Electronics Expo with its artistic precision. Artistic precision you could have had in 2007, and you still can’t, because Panasonic is camping on the license.
Don’t pretend that every simple idea must have already been discovered, or must obviously come into use, if it is known. Human reticence to new ideas is often the bigger barrier.
The primary reason no one already mentioned such a solution is: you can’t capture the water. Just like Tesla’s hope for free energy, rain from the sky is difficult to market. Yet, I propose it for the governments who have viable lands; they would see tax returns which would make it valuable, as long as it rained in some of the desert.