Negative Nancy
I felt creative this morning. This happens occasionally, but what was unusual about this morning was that it happened after a short night, while walking the dog, and as I was mildly pressed for time to get to San Jose for a meeting. And during all that, several coherent ideas started to form in my head. Sometimes such random ideas are grand unification theories that are trite and untrue, like a stoner who starts to see atoms and molecules as possible planets and stars. Luckily, I have a reasonably good internal BS detector to shoot those down before they become embarrassing (more about my negative talents later). Sometimes they are correct (or sort-of-ballpark correct) rediscoveries of insights found long before by others. I once re-derived a whole bunch of logarithm math from first principles and felt very smart, even though John Napier had done the same thing in 1614. Same for figuring out some clever stuff about π and sines and cosines and the lot, only 300 years after William ...