…you start to see new titles.

My forth­com­ing con­tri­bu­tion to the patahis­tor­i­cal cor­pus: The Rodale War. Look for it some months after I get my first advance check.

Cut­ting Through the Patent Thicket:

I say this as some­one who grew up believ­ing in the value of patents. As a teenager, I sat raptly in the U.S. Supreme Court gallery lis­ten­ing to attor­neys argue Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Foun­da­tion v. Blonder Tongue Lab­o­ra­to­ries, a land­mark patent-​​infringement case involv­ing my father’s com­pany. As an inven­tor, I earned some 70 patents. And as a sci­en­tist, I man­aged research labs gen­er­at­ing hun­dreds of patents a year.

…

SCIENCE OR INVENTION? More quan­ti­ta­tively, I have observed first­hand how easy it is for experts to gen­er­ate good, but sim­i­lar, ideas. While at AT&T … in the early 1990s, I spon­sored two sep­a­rate ideation ses­sions around a poten­tial new mar­ket, bring­ing in 50 experts each time to brain­storm for appli­ca­tions. Both groups gen­er­ated ideas with real com­mer­cial value.

Both groups, how­ever, gen­er­ated more than 95% of the same ideas in com­mon. They were “obvi­ous” in the fullest sense of the word and would have been com­mer­cial­ized with or with­out the incen­tive of a patent. But the Patent Office found them “novel,” and issued AT&T claims by the bas­ket­ful. I would argue that none of those ideas deserved a patent.

(Via Danny Yee.)

An inter­est­ing piece on the President’s attempts to dom­i­nate by repeated admo­ni­tions of our help­less­ness, at Factesque:

Only a Trai­tor Wouldn’t Trust Dear Leader to Keep Us Safe. You’re Not a Trai­tor Are You?:

Bush is a mas­ter at induc­ing learned help­less­ness in the elec­torate. He
uses pes­simistic lan­guage that cre­ates fear and dis­ables peo­ple from
feel­ing they can solve their prob­lems. In his Sep­tem­ber 20, 2001, speech
to Con­gress on the ⁹⁄₁₁ attacks, he chose to increase people’s sense of
vul­ner­a­bil­ity: “Amer­i­cans should not expect one bat­tle, but a lengthy
cam­paign, unlike any other we have ever seen.… I ask you to live your
lives, and hug your chil­dren. I know many cit­i­zens have fears
tonight.… Be calm and res­olute, even in the face of a con­tin­u­ing
threat.” (Sub­se­quent ter­ror alerts by the FBI, CIA and Depart­ment of
Home­land Secu­rity have main­tained and expanded this fear of unknown,
sin­is­ter enemies.)

When will the word “fas­cism” first be used by a main­stream media out­let, in any con­text, let alone to describe the United States?

I haven’t heard the word, or vari­ants thereof, for quite a while.

Must’ve fallen out of favor.

Or maybe peo­ple don’t remem­ber what it means.

Thus do I link to some­thing that rein­forces things pre­vi­ously read and said. Scott Eric Kauf­man on psychoanalysis.

Be espe­cially care­ful to read the dynam­ics of the com­ments there. This ten­sion, this wrestling with unre­solved issues—what can it mean?