¿Why didn't I think of that? ("Obvious" ideas I missed)

¿Why didn't I think of that?

["Obvious" ideas that never dawned on me.]

		*It never dawned on me when I was in "prep school" or college that, even when the graders gave me an "A", being graded is demeaning (degrading...)....*

		My schoolteachers, in "prep school" [high school] even called themselves, a century after the abolition of slavery: "masters". Free citizens of a republic engage collegially in peer discussions and deliberations, not some of them grade others, as if the former were UDSA meat inspectors, and the latter were beef carcasses destined for market.

		It never dawned on me that commercial jet airliners could be repurposed as incendiary kamikaze bombs....

		Osama bin Laden thought up this powerful idea, which enabled him to leverage an approximately US$500,000 investment into > US$40,000,000,000 damage to the United States (that's ca. $80,000 return on each $1 invested!).... [Note: This idea had the logical defect that it could only be used once, since after that, everyone should be on guard for attempted repeats.]

I have read that, in 1974, one Mr. Sam Byck attempted to hijack a jetliner in Baltimore to assassinate President Nixon by crashing the plane into The White House. Mr. Byck killed a security guard checking boarding passengers, and was able to get into the cockpit, where the crew refused his demand to takeoff. Mr. Byck then wounded the plane's pilot and killed the copilot, and finally, seeing that his plan was not working out as intended, Mr. Byck killed himself, with the plane still at the departure gate. (Mr. Byck did not know how to fly an airplane.)

		It never dawned on me that spreadsheet software would transform corporate executive decision making into an addictive video game....

		Much of business executives' "creative accounting" and risky finance speculations during the past 20 years can be explained by the illusory sense of plasticity that comes from being able to "run the numbers" in a spreadsheet program and see the results instantaneously in real time, and then run the numbers different ways and immediately see the changed results. Spreadsheet programs derealize assets and other business factors like online gambling derealizes gambling stakes, so that "the players"(sic) do not feel the real effects of what they are jeopardizing -- except that, in spreadsheet cyber-risktaking, one is not just playing with one's own money, but also with shareholders' equity and employees' lives....

		The art genre: "Capitalist realism" never dawned on me....

		Gerhard Richter, an artist who began his career doing Socialist Realist art in East Germany, and who moved to West Germany, invented this art style in the 1980s. Living in capitalist America, and hearing endless self-righteously self-congratulatory mockery of the "Socialist Realism" propaganda "art" behind the "Iron Curtain", I should have recognized that the one art movement nominally missing from 20th century art was the movement which most if not all art in the capitalist west was: "Capitalist Realism". The realistic aspect of this art is not just some superficial formal quality, but the underlying structure of being a commodity to be bought and sold for real money in "the art market".

		I did, however, [partly...] recognize that computerized word processing could transform the relation between persons and their writing in a way that could powerfully enhance reflective thinking....

		Computerized word processing transforms the relation between persons and the text they write by changing process of revising text from an ambivalent burden to an appealing challenge. Instead of asking: "Is this change worth the effort to make it?", because, with hand-writing or typing, making the desired change would entail stupifying clerical recopying unchanged text too, word processing facilitates the person unambivalently looking for things to change, and asking: "How can I possibly make this better?" Revising unencumbered by clerical copying hassles has the potential to facilitate free play of reflective thinking and imagination in writing.

		In 1972, in my first programming job, I was offered a chance to evaluate a primitive text markup program, to format business letters for printing from source text on punch cards. I rejected this assignment as something uninteresting I felt I was being stuck with. Here I failed to see: (1) the potential of word processing as an aid to reflective thinking, by making revising text painless, etc. I also failed to see: (2) the potential for markup tags embedded in the source text to thematize and empower the writer's engagement with the relation between the structure and content in his or her text (generative grammar, SGML).

		By 1981, in my experience using IBM's Script/VS word processing software to write up my thoughts about the nature of computer progranmming (The Gift From the Machine), I clearly recognized the first point I had earlier missed: The potential of word processing to inspire and nurture reflective thinking via ease of revising text, liberation from having to recopy anything that one didn't change, etc.

		But still in 1981, I missed the second revolutionary idea of thematizing text structure in markup tagging, because I perceived the tags as nothing more than formatting directives ("italicize this!", "boldface that!"...). Consequently, I dismissed Script/VS's primitive GML (Generalized Markup Language) tagging template facility as a repressive attempt by manangement to take away my freedom to format my text to look the way I wanted it to look.

		Only in 1997, when I learned about SGML, did I finally recognize the creative potential of structure-specifying tagging to open up a new dimension for the writer to creatively engage with the relation between the logical structure (form) and the content of his or her text.

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important engineering contribution my maternal uncle, Isadore Znamirowski, made to WWII: How the Star acquired Bars and saved lives.

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11 April 2006 (2006-04-11 ISO 8601)
v02.14