Yup. I’ve seen the model of Abe Lincoln’s invention, dunno if it went anywhere.
“..Lincoln started work on his invention between sessions of Congress in 1848. On his way home to Illinois his boat became stranded on a sandbar. As Herndon told the story, “The captain ordered the hands to collect all the loose planks, empty barrels and boxes and force them under the sides of the boat. These empty casks were used to buoy it up. After forcing enough of them under the vessel she lifted gradually and at last swung clear of the opposing sand bar.”
Herndon observed, “Lincoln had watched this operation very intently. It no doubt carried him back to the days of his navigation on the turbulent Sangamon, when he and John Hanks had rendered similar service at New Salem dam to their employer the volatile Offut. Continual thinking on the subject of lifting vessels over sand bars and other obstructions in the water suggested to him the idea of inventing an apparatus for this purpose.”
Lincoln created a scale model of his invention with the help of Walter Davis, a Springfield mechanic, who provided tools and advice. Herndon recalled, “Occasionally he would bring the model in the office, and while whittling on it would descant on its merits and the revolution it was destined to work in steamboat navigation. Although I regarded the thing as impracticable I said nothing, probably out of respect for Lincoln’s well-known reputation as a boatman.”
With some relief Herndon said, “the invention was never applied to any vessel, so far as I ever learned, and the threatened revolution in steamboat architecture and navigation never came to pass.”
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/patent.htm
The crap that schools pass off as “science” won’t get us anywhere.
I actually temped at the front desk of the Patent Office library at the new HQ in Alexandria several years ago.
Quite an inspiring foyer, unfortunately there’s more money made in the much-advertised-on-TV industry designed to fleece the would-be inventor. I have a friend who is a patent researcher, he tells me the system is stacked against the little guy with the Big Idea. You actually have a revolutionary invention, chances are it will be stolen from you and you’ll die in poverty with those many others.
Patents won't sell their vote in return for an EBT card. For that reason, the politicians in DC don't give a fat excrement about them. End of story, Mr. Will.
THAT would be a proper function of the federal government.
Will flips between Hamilton and Jefferson and here’s he in full Hamilton mode:
” But the public should not now be punished by penalizing, with diminished funding, the scientific disciplines that have been mostly innocent of the behaviors that have sometimes made academia a subject of satire.”
He tells how the ‘humanities’ have been corrupted but puts ‘faith’ in the sciences - typical nerd posturing as an ‘intellectual’ - when in fact, it is the junk science that the universities have used to help corrupt the ‘humanities’ and political science.
Fed funding of education should cease as unconstitutional and let the best succeed on their own feet. Junk science is driven by gov’t grants.
How does this fit into Will's thesis that research universities need more money? Microsoft and Apple were founded by college dropouts.
Will and others like him still cling to the belief that big government can do good things, that it just needs to be better directed.
That idea that we need to redistribute wealth into research is just as destructive the idea that it should be redistributed to a class of people.
It’s not what the redistributed wealth is used for, it’s the forced redistribution that’s important.
Will will never get it.
Science has been corrupted by politics. Will should stick to baseball.
Pray for the Tea Party Congress
Try it without millions of men in new manufacturing starts, and the “scientific engine” won’t “rev” very high. We’re in a depression caused by the vanity of rebellion against Creation (political correctness), and men of ingenuity are preparing for the consequences. They’ll work again, when that work is properly appreciated and compensed.
I’m gonna be blunt:
I took some advanced computer classes at a large university. They were so happy to see a white American they could barely contain themselves. The fact that most of the faculty were none white immigrants didn’t stop them from their excitement. I was a novelty conversation piece. The rest of the student body was composed of arrogant Chinese, cheating Indians, and scary, smoking Russians. It was a very depressing atmosphere. There was an easy undergraduate track called “Management, Information Systems” for our domestic minorities and women. It was non-technical (one introductory programming course), but corporations are so desperate for minorities and women “in science”, they hire them for more money than the technical “Computer Science” graduates.
The world is up-side-down.
The cure would be to balance the tax and mandate burden of foreign and domestic production. Our over burdened domestic producers cannot compete with unfettered foreign producers.
Naturally, reducing domestic taxes would be the proper solution, rather than adding tariffs to imports.
Change the H1B fiasco. There is no need for greater than 60% of all engineers employed in high tech companies to be foreign nationals when there are literally tens of thousands of US engineers un and under employed.
This will require a tariff to level the playing field in place of corporate income taxes, but it can be done. Lord knows US companies face significant barriers when attempting to penetrate the protected markets of the countries we are exporting our manufacturing to.
Silly article. Economic nincompoops like George Will often have absolutely nothing to say, but their bread-and-butter requires them to fill up a page in a magazine, so they bluster about something.
How about this:
Quality, not quantity. Despite our “paltry” 16% in science and engineering, we get most of the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and most of the world’s modern inventions — everything from the lightbulb to the computer — came from us.
How about this:
Despite their higher percentages, South Korea and China garner no Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and have contributed little in the way of innovation.
How about this:
The same idiocies used to be spouted by the George Wills of the world in the days of the former Soviet Union; i.e., “look at how many degrees in science and engineering they hand out; they will surely move ahead of us in science and technology!” The facts were these: (i) many bright students in the Soviet Union personally would have liked to go into one of the humanities — history, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, journalism — but DARED NOT DO SO, because those fields had been completely taken over by the State for the purposes of propaganda. If a historian or economist, for example, told the truth about Marxist history or Marxist economics, he would find himself in a gulag or a re-education camp. So many otherwise fine historians, economists, etc., went into the “hard” sciences and became mediocre engineers, physicists, and chemists, instead. They went into so-called “value-free” fields to keep themselves out of possible trouble with the political authorities. (ii) Despite the high number of students who became engineers and scientists, it didn’t help the Soviet Union; they still crashed and burned.
U.S. public education is completely screwed up, but it appears to be so across the board: it’s as screwed up in the quantitative sciences as much as it is in the social sciences, so the “paltry” 16% that somehow manage to tolerate the system and get through it to earn advanced degrees in science, probably represents exactly that proportion of the population that actually WANT to go into those subjects. There is absolutely no reason to force a greater number into a field that they have no gifts for.
George Will — like many ignorant journalists — doesn’t understand the idea of division-of-labor under conditions of freedom: everyone contributes, in his or her way, to the total economic health of the economy and therefore the country as a whole. The social sciences have as much to contribute to a country as the quantitative sciences do. And like everything else, it’s the quality of the contribution that counts, not the quantity.
I would hate to live in a country where a first-rate economist like Thomas Sowell was forced, for political reasons, to work as a third-rate engineer.
All of the official institutions of “science”, such as the National Academy of Sciences, have been taken over by religious crackpots styling themselves as “climatologists”.
Giving them any more money is not a wise idea.
As I recall Nikola Tesla didn’t revolutionize our world with the help of tax money, he did it with risk capital from an entrepreneur named George Westinghouse.
Government is the problem, not the solution!
Right out of “Atlas Shrugged”.
As an alternative, one of the big drags on the consumer marketplace and business is patent and copyright “farming.” This means that companies who contribute nothing, make their money from the buying of patents and copyright, the sitting on them, wanting royalties from those who want to put them to good use.
Or worse, as with the immense media libraries: sitting on them, not marketing them, but not allowing anyone else to market them.
So the question should be raised: should the government grant or continue patents and copyrights that are anti-competitive, and a drag on the markets?
Comparatively speaking, the General Mining Act of 1872 was perhaps the most pro-business, pro-consumer, pro-industry law ever written.
It said that the mineral rights to land are separate from the ownership of land, and that anyone had a right to stake a mineral rights claim on any land not claimed, and could not be prevented from mining it.
Importantly, it had a “use it or lose it” clause, so that if you struck a claim, you had to either “improve” it to the tune of $500 a year, or sell its ore to the gross profit of $500 a year. If you didn’t, you lost your claim.
Of course, if you mined on someone else’s land, you had to pay negotiated, reasonable royalties. But the land owner could not stop you from mining.
Now imagine if these concepts were transferred to patent and copyright law.
You could patent or copyright your original idea or product, but to keep your government protection, you had to “use it or lose it”, and let others use it.
This is not impossible, and would cause an explosion in the marketplace, of a huge amount of content available to consumers.
It would be a huge shot in the arm to business as well.
And while they are at it, ban research into global warming. That will force them to focus on topics that we all agree on.
George Will: Faux conservative, and friend to elitism.
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