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The Polymath: Lowell Wood Is America's New Top Inventor (bloomberg.com)
pacopico writes: It's taken more than 80 years, but someone has finally overtaken Thomas Edison as America's top inventor. The dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Teller. On July 7th, he received his 1,085th patent, breaking Edison's record. The article says he has 3,000 more inventions awaiting review at the patent office. Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days and has become the right hand inventor for Bill Gates and his philanthropic endeavors. He's making efficient nuclear reactors, universal vaccines and anti-concussion football helmets. Quite the life.
"Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. 'I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,' he says. 'It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don't read them, I'm doomed. I'll never come back to them because there will be the next day's journals and the ones after that.'"
"Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. 'I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,' he says. 'It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don't read them, I'm doomed. I'll never come back to them because there will be the next day's journals and the ones after that.'"
"speculative schemers who make it their
business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the
form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the
industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of
the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehen-
sions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious ac-
counting for profits made in good faith."
You bastard. I had friends on Alderan.
Finding someone to fund the patenting process. The rest is quite trivial.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...is a really BAD way to identify "top inventor". This doesn't mean the guy isn't brilliant, but - to use the old example - I'd rate Tesla as discoverer ("inventor" is such a misleading term) over Edison any day. Tesla was much more about quality and scholarship than rapacious exploitation of his own and others' talent for his own ego. Or, to quote T on E:
If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
Overall wealth increase (as opposed to mere transfer of wealth) is about application of the mind to improve efficiency.
But if he has one good publication - just one real classic that everybody reads - then he deserves uttermost respect.
Didn't someone patent the wheel recently?
I too can vomit onto a piece of paper and submit it with a 50/50 chance of it being approved.
This guy is basically a patent troll, patenting everything and anything.
dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Teller
Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days
Okalee dokalee
>> He's making efficient nuclear reactors
He is? Where can go see one?
He works for Intellectual Ventures, so he is an idea man. Maybe he is like Edison but Edison's ideas were built into products, deserving a patent. At Intellectual Ventures the ideas, which maybe good, are patented without building the product. There is a difference IMHO.
I have a lot of broad domain knowledge and do some of the same, but not with this kind of vigor. The dude's got a lot of *deep* domain knowledge in a lot of broad domains, so can pull more together. In either case, you face some of the same challenges.
The first problem you get is expert bias. Experts tend to filter things, because the brain processes information in such a way as to minimize effort. Using the prefrontal cortex is costly, so the brain uses every other facility to link together structured memories and behave habitually; even your beliefs and primary knowledge are an advanced form of programmed reflex. You can override your habitual behaviors by expending energy to make an analytical decision in the prerfontal cortex, and then apply immense mental effort via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to direct your brain to do things differently--that's called "willpower", and your reserves of willpower are limited to the exhaustion of your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Ways around this include reprogramming (building new habits) and reframing (associating one behavior with another automatic behavior, so that the internal automatic behavior reduces the amount of willpower required to carry out the associated action).
I've developed a habit of working everything into my models of consistency. To a point, I research everything internally: when given a new fact, I build out from it by using my knowledge resources to explain it fully. I'll run into conflicts, and straighten out my own misconceptions; often, I find that the new fact gives me new information, but also has its own flaws that I must correct using my existing knowledge--this even happens with state-of-the-art knowledge which happens to be wrong, although you'll frequently find non-concrete situations where you need to import more data to decide which set of information is wrong. You become *quite* aware of where your understanding is limited and how to work around your limits doing this. The typical method is to compare the fact to internals, and reject it immediately if it doesn't fit in with your body of knowledge--using the new fact to explain your existing knowledge, rather than using your existing knowledge to explain the new fact.
The second problem you'll encounter is analogy fallacies. Analogies are the single most powerful tool you have. Many domains, ranging from biology to atomic physics to psychology to economics to computer programming, behave in roughly the same model, or roughly the same set of models. Most people miss the "roughly" part, the "set of models" part, or both: they assume any hint of X behaves like Y means X *is* Y and all things related to X have the same relationship and analogous behaviors to all things related to Y and to each other.
If a computer is like a human brain, with its processing facility (CPU), its working memory (RAM), and its long-term storage (secondary memory), then the computer must shuffle things between these like the brain does, and needs to compact and organize and associate its long-term storage while sleeping to operate efficiently, and every 1 and 0 is essentially a neuron, and those bits in RAM interact with each other in strange ways like in the brain... no, no, none of that is true. The computer needs to copy things out of long-term storage into RAM and then push that data through the CPU to perform computations, like a human brain; it doesn't operate in any other way like a human brain or a human body, and has a lot of functions which are quite different.
Get those things right and you can make yourself a quick-and-dirty genius. Not on that level, but impressive enough. The human mind can be trained in all sorts of ways to operate at an extremely high level of intelligence, and it's fairly trivial to turn schools into genius-mills. As I said in the beginning, though, the brain operates by internal reflex and habitual behaviors; you will need a lot of mental energy to rewire your brain into the kind of ridiculously powerful machine a guy like Wood carries around in his skull. Once you do it, it's done; but doing it is ... exhausting.
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I see no social-media links for him in the article. No Twitter, no Facebook, not even a Slashdot ID. How can he possibly be anyone of importance?
"That's how he preserves his mental capacity"? I don't understand. Is that a meme?
1085 patents granted and 3000 more submitted. That's 4085 patents. Assuming that he's worked on patents for 50 years, that's an average of over 80 patents per year. That's a lot of patents. The implication of the such a large number of patents is that all the patents are equally valuable. However, I'm not sure it's humanly possible to perform the work for 80 valuable patents per year.
This reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who made waves with 60 publications over 2 years, including 15 in leading journals such as Science and Nature. It was eventually determined that he made up important data for his papers, leading to retraction of many of his papers and even his PhD degree.
I'm not suggesting that there's any fraud in the case of Mr. Wood. Rather, there are many very common and even accepted ways to accumulate a huge number of patents. It's not unthinkable that many/most of the patents are
(1) work mostly performed by others for which he provided guidance, review, or management,
(2) black-box patents that describe what should be done instead of providing sufficient detail to allow someone else skilled in the art to actually utilize the idea, or
(3) incremental ideas based on existing patents or prior art.
It may very well be that Mr. Wood is a genius that has contributed significantly to science and technology and has made a difference in the world. However, the number of patents is not a believable metric of that contribution. To convince me that he is a genius requires only a description of his impactful ideas, as encapsulated in a few (or even one or zero) patents. The large number of patents simply invites skepticism.
Edison did not share credit with his employees who produced the majority of his patents.
He isn't making shit. More like playing a legally enforced game of "dibs".
If the number of patents is supposed to be a measure of top inventiveness, Lowell Wood has nothing on the likes of Kia Silverbrook (4,665 US utility patents) or Shunpei Yamazaki (4063 US utility patents).
SDI continues today. Helping to bankrupt the USSR and avert the Warsaw Pact vs NATO blood fest seems to be a net good.
Wow. I guess a 20 year patent term, after which the invention joins the public domain and becomes part of our heritage, doesn't discourage inventors from inventing. Why wouldn't the same apply to creators if copyright is limited to 20 years?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Wasn't Edward Teller parodied by the mad scientist guy in Doctor Strangelove?
Dunno, but Teller loves Tesla, it says so right here: http://www.teslamotors.com/cus...
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days . . .
A nuclear missile defense system and national defense is using his powers for good.
Only delusional liberals would think otherwise. Apparently, pacopico couldn't help himself.
Claiming he's beat Edision's record but no tally of the number of stray dogs, cats and elephants he's electrocuted?
Before Edison's innovations, we had to hang any rogue elephants we wanted to dispose of!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Jony Ive has 5000 to his name! Who knew there were so many non-obvious, novel ways to change the radius on the corner of a rectangle!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In a way this is kinda of an abuse of the patent system.
It's radically different to take something from a PPT into the real world. Even for something that some might consider to be "simple". When you have to make it from the ground up, certain things come into play that you never knew.
It's like running a business. You think it's easy until you do.
How many are actually valid patents that could be built into a product? How many patents could be defended in a fair court? With the fact that the PTO has been extremely lax in their duties, often rubber stamping patents and expecting the courts to decide on validity, I don't think something as simple as a number of issued patents is a valid comparison.
I am pretty sure he gets all the good ideas from Slashdot.
Um I think we have a bit of an exaggeration here ....what he's making is something he can market as such, not the actual item. \
The brain is encased in fluid, in which it floats. If you accelerate that brain then bring it suddenly to a stop, it's going to obey Newtons Laws of motion and tend to stay in motion until something brings it to a stop. That something is the inside of the skull.
Nothing this guy invented or is going to invent is going to change that. In car accidents where they have air bags, the brain STILL bounces against the inside of the skull and people STILL end up with concussions.
In order to make good on the description of a such a helmet, you'd have to intercede between the brain and the skull with some structure which holds the brain (which remember is floating in fluid) still while absorbing the impact.
Either that or you can thicken the fluid in the brain so it absorbs the impact and the brain doesn't hit the inside of the skull.
Safe to say he's not going to do either of these.
So he doesn't have such a technology, not really anyways. He has something he can market to anxious parents and liability wary schools and make money off of because when it comes to football and concussions god knows someone has to do something and , hey, this is something.
Thomas was a thief. Most of what he gets credit for, his employees did for him.
We don't need no stinkin' fact checks here!
Edison did invent the research equivalent of a sweatshop.
dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Telle
Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days
Okalee dokalee
Goes double here.
I'm betting the author of that didn't live through the Cold War - as an aware adult or child, at least.
A few decades of waiting for a nuclear surprise attack and going through elementary school "duck and cover" (and kiss your a** goodbye) drills can make using tech to actually try to intercept enough incoming missiles to avoid total extinction (and using the threat of being able to do so to end the saber-rattling) seem like a VERY good idea.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Boondoggle.
Cutting entitlements is an even bigger boondoggle.
Clinton cut welfare now 10 times the amount of hungry and homeless.
I will pay any Republican politician 10,000.00 to let me take his wallet ID and passport and drop him off in a country without entitlement spending for 1 year.
There is no reason we cant take care of our own at the same level we did under Reagan.