Search The Oil Drum with Google
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Streets: Utilitarian Corridors or Livable Public Space
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
TOD:Europe
- Oilwatch Monthly - November 2008
- The 2008 IEA WEO - Production Decline Rates
- The EU Strategic Energy Review: maybe not so depressing after all
TOD:Canada
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
TOD:ANZ
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.”
—Francis Bacon, Essays
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
The legendary Skeptic and magician James Randi mentioned in some of his lectures available online about the steady flow of nonsense that gets patented regularly in the US (toast, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, "perpetual motion machines"). Thus as you point out the actual number of truly ingenious, realistic and useful patents may not show up at all in those quantitative graphs - I think what it shows mainly is the greed factor. Here I think of David Cross and his hilarious stand up bits on electric scissors, the "egg wave," and a zillion other truly unnecessary informerical garbage.
"There's got to be a better way!" ;)
And of the very small percentage of patents that are both realistic and useful, how many can be produced sustainably? Energy descent has begun IMO, and the best one can hope is that the truly important innovations will be ones that benefit society in a sustainable fashion, instead of just trying to make corporations and individuals rich.
I'm currently reading the book Shock of the Old by David Edgerton, which has the premise that much of the technology introduced since 1950 was just regurgitated in a slightly different form from what previously existed.
In essence, nothing we have now is really "novel", it's just repackaged and presented that way. I think the term "diminishing returns" is most appropriate.
Tom A-B
To say that nothing (in essence) is "novel" after 1950 is to stretch the meaning of the word "novel" until it has no meaning at all.
1947: invention of the solid state transistor
1955: invention of the laser
19??: invention of the integrated circuit
19??: invention of the microprocessor
19??: invention of the internet
19??: invention of PCR (polymerase chain reaction)
1995: release of the Netscape browser
19??: invention of the fake yellow scrimage line for football fans watching Hi Def Flat Panel TV
It's incredible how many whiny non-creative minds there are out there to pooh pooh the creations of the few who do contribute to society.
One thing that is truly not novel is the existence of the jealous, nonproductive brother: Cain & Abel 2000BC.
Well the solid state transistor didn't come out of the blue.
1883 The Edison effect (U.S. patent 307,031, the first patent for an electronic device)
1904 Fleming Valve later called diode
1915 The first true vacuum triodes
1931 The 845 power triode extensive used in RCA AM radio transmitters
1943 Colossus Mark I was an early binary electronic digital computer. Colossus used state-of-the-art vacuum tubes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/845_%28vacuum_tube%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
What are you trying to pull, and over whose eyes?
How does high voltage control of electron flow through a vacuum (in, yes, "vacuum" tubes) after having been released from a filament heated cathode have anything to do with formation of defect free single crystal silicon and semiconductor fabrication processes?
Please keep the discussion civil - "dumbest reply" doesn't help that. Thanks.
Picture me contrite.
Apologize accepted.
Sure tubs aren't made of same materials and operate at much higher voltages. But the principles behind the transistor, controlling & amplifying currents, were already in used in vacuum tubes 50 years before the first solid state transistor. In that sense transistors aren't really novel.
Like biological evolution, technological evolution seems to me to follow a process of selection for successful small variations (mutations) on previous ideas (traits). When viewed in the near term, these micro-scale evolutionary changes don't appear to be very novel. However, I believe that Darwin's finches evolved different beaks (no matter how subtle) because there were ecological niches/food sources (i.e. marketplace opportunities) available for those who evolved ways to tap into them.
When viewed at a macro-scale, a series of seemingly minor evolutionary changes actually creates novel innovations such as single-cellular lifeforms and eventually humans. We share approximately 90% of our genome with rats, 98% with chimpanzees, and 99.9% with other humans. I'd say novelty is in the eye of the beholder (and the spatial and temporal scales at which it is being viewed).
Alternatively I noticed that the number of patents went down drastically during WW2. Yet the atomic bomb was developed, incredible fighting technology was thought up and brought on line as well as management methods to run the war machine and an incredible atmosphere of willing sacrifice to accomplish a shared goal.
Good god I sound like a cornucopian.