[Ahban]

My favorite crumedgeon-opponent! How are you guy? I hope your organs are not still making your life a burden? Just live another ten years, and we will get a fix for just about anything- except hard headedness!

All your point in the last post are true, but not terribly relevant to the discussion. A mousetrap that is NOT IC can be imagined, but that is not what we have meant by "mousetrap" on this thread. I use the term according to standard useage for a specific mousetrap type, not a guy standing over a mousehole with a large cinder block or any other abstraction!

[VadeRetro]

My favorite crumedgeon-opponent! How are you guy? I hope your organs are not still making your life a burden? Just live another ten years, and we will get a fix for just about anything- except hard headedness!

The organs I have left are behaving themselves for the moment. In the broader picture I'm just kind of hanging in against the torrents of change. Yourself?

I use the term according to standard useage for a specific mousetrap type, not a guy standing over a mousehole with a large cinder block or any other abstraction!

You're defining away your difficulties, then. A mousetap has to have all your elements because you say it does. Empty exercise.

[js1138]

I use the term according to standard usage for a specific mousetrap type, not a guy standing over a mousehole with a large cinder block or any other abstraction!

The dirty little fact being ignored is that ideas and inventions also evolve but because of language and drawing, the intermediate steps do not require a physical implementation. This results in gaps in the intellectual fossil record. There are zero nontrivial inventions that have not evolved.

As a thought experiment I suggest you concoct a plausible story about the invention of the mousetrap that does not involve precursor elements having non-mousetrap functionality.

[VadeRetro]

Gotta split for the evening.