Headline, December17, 2013

''' INVENTIONS : WHEN THE GENIUS 

COMES FROM THE HEART'''

----In 2002,    -47% of U.S. patents to Foreign Inventors.------

An airline ticket became a commodity. The airlines haven't looked this feeble and sick, ever; their crises rivals the downfall of the passenger railroads.

Where have all the ''inventors'' gone? They haven't gone away, just underground. These days innovation is coming from just about everywhere but the aviation industry.

The Air Force hated the unmanned Predator. That's why the patron of tomorrow's robot aircraft was the CIA. In the question-mark labs of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and in academia's engineering departments,

Attention turns to aircraft tinier and slower than ever known, basically:

''Video Cell Phones With Wings and maybe armed with 22-caliber pistols.''

These lines of aviation inventions are truly off the wall, and have little to do with the stolid, shrinking, conglomerated world of the big defense contractors.

They were not invented here; they came over the transom from Silicon Valley. After a hundred years of manned flight, it takes a major leap to reinvent aircraft as unmanned microchips with teensy little wings.

Perhaps the weirdest and most telling symptom in the world of invention today is the strange allegiance between dot-com entrepreneurs and the ailing, dusty world of space flight.

It is very strange indeed to see space rockets, those symbols of cold-war pre-eminence, becoming the toys of private computer-entrepreneurs. Fiercely independent inventor Burt Rutan   -his financier is whispered to be the former captain of Microsoft-

Builds SpaceShipOne, a major upgrade of the hallowed X-15 rocket plane. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com forms a start-up to build a manned rocket ship. Elton Musk, a founder of PayPal, aims to enter the satellite-launch biz..

John Carmack    -a mere videogame programmer, but no less fierce in his ambitions   -plots to show up NASA with a hydrogen-peroxide space launcher. 

The money-swallowing failures of the Iridium satellite system, or even the busts within their own industry, cannot daunt these people.

Those guys don't need or plan to make money or sense. Their rocketship-hobby labs are not traditional enterprises in business,science or government, but eccentric bursts of raw Jules Vernian invention that will cheerfully consume tens of millions of rising-star dollars.

This practice is every bit as romantic as art for arts sake, for this is techno for techno's sake,    ''when only the useless is beautiful''. 

It is invention for the sheer joy of what technology can do in the way of stretching the probable and........  blowing our minds.

That's why the lone inventor compels us in ways that good-sense, comfort, profit, military security, predictability, and mere industrial rationality never can. 

We live in technological  society, and we cannot help but stop and marvel when our genius comes from the heart.

So, in the end, remember that even as research grows in scale, the lone inventor persists.

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Good Night & God Bless!

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