Since i’ve landed back in Sydney, one thing has been pretty much in my face the whole time, i cant ignore it and now dear reader, i have to tell you too.
It’s the idea’s, too many ideas to ignore, Sydney is a very stimulating place to be
I was watching a Tedx talk last year, by O.E Wilson and he was asked to give a talk about advice to budding scientists.
His advice was.
- Learn as much as you can in your own field
- Learn as much as you can in fields outside your field
- With technology and emerging technologies branching out and creating new fields, some of the new fields will cris-cross and hey presto, something irrelevant is a hot topic.
Sounds like good advice? Take a look for yourself.
Some examples that come to my mind are:
Original Mac fonts
1, When Steve Jobs was going to college, the lectures he attended were not the ones he was supposed to attend, one of his favourites was on ‘fonts’, so by the time of the apple computer he had all kinds of fonts loaded on, which became his ‘killer app’ advantage, a bold start to a global dominance for Apple.
James Dyson cleans up the competition
2, When James Dyson was fixing his wife’s hoover (men helping women with house work is called ‘Chore play’, it frees up time for ‘other activities’ in the bedroom (and apparently it works too?)
Anyway, Mr Dyson on his knees realized the problem he solved with a spray painting device was the problem with the hoover, and over 1000 proto-types later, he’s in the hoover business and he spends 10 million pounds protecting his ideas in court too.
The idea being that unrelated industries are related, all you have to do is make the connection
I’ve been going along to the Sydney Ideas series too and i have been learning all sorts of interesting things outside of my usual IT profession, but i think ideas that could prove useful in anyones profession.
I went to a talk entitled:
The globalisation of Chinese porcelain and their significance for history, archaeology and antique collection by Dr Baoping Li
In this richly illustrated presentation, Dr Baoping Li will rely on over twenty years of research to explain the significance of Chinese porcelain to our understanding of history, archaeology, cultural studies, and the collecting of antiques in China and the world.
Chinese porcelain
Dr Li has first-hand experience working with porcelains found at the site of a lost city in North China that was part of the Mongol Empire, ancient Angkor in Cambodia, and an Arab merchant shipwreck of c. 826 CE found in the Java Sea that provides the earliest physical evidence for direct trade between China and the Middle East.
I learned:
- By the procalain found at a site they were able to prove the site was not unoccupied for what was previously thought for a 100 years
- From the porcalain Dr Li was able to tell what social class the occupants belonged
Another i went to was entitled
Who Built the Long Wall of Quang Ngai? Territory, Security and Trade along a Vietnamese Boundary, By Dr Andrew Hardy
Dr Hardy historian of Vietnam, associate professor at the French School of Asian Studies
I learnt:
No documented evidence could be obtained for the wall (127km) that would separate indigenous people of Vietnam and the Vietnamese in question
Quang Nagi
Another similar wall had been build between Cambodia and Vietnam, both kings sent 5000 men to build the wall, since evidence could be obtained for that wall, we can safely assume it was a similar agreement.
Also, when it comes to territory, Vietnamese had markers to indicate their territory’s and if anyone moved the markers, this was taken as an act of war and all hell broke loose!
How does this relate to me?
Well there are times when there is little or no documentation for a project, but at the same time you need to construct testing documentation and you need evidence to support what your are trying to achieve, the idea is, its been done before, all you need are the ideas and you can pretty much do most things.
But whats the idea?
Kieran O' Callaghan 