Thinking
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Have you ever noticed how people are trained from birth to think a certain way? We have these patterns of thinking that seem correct on the surface, but they may be limiting our useful thought process. We are taught that when you research something, such as a cure for a disease, the way to do this is to try and find a cure by hard work. Well many people would say what is wrong with that statement, isn't that the way things are done? Yes they are done that way and maybe that is part of the problem. Lets look at things in a little different way. Pretend with me that we are cancer researchers and we are spending many hours trying to find this elusive cure. Maybe there is another avenue of research open to us that hasn't been tried. I know, what the heck am I talking about? What if we took a known poison, that if ingested kills cancer cells but also kills human beings and instead of looking for a cancer cure, we tried to find a way of surviving the poison That way we would have killed the cancer and still lived. Chemotherapy is a bit like what I am talking about, but not quite. I am talking about administering large fatal doses of poisons that could be targeted to the cancer cells. Look, I don't pretend to know anything about curing cancer or even medicine, this is only an exercise in the thought process.

Automobile designers and engineers spend years trying to design cars that are more slippery in the airstream. They know that wind resistance is an enemy that requires bigger engines and more fuel. The more slippery the vehicles is, the bigger bang you will get in performance and gas mileage. If we apply the method of unorthodox thinking to this problem, we have to ask the question, has anyone designer of current automobiles thought about having the air pass through the car instead of having the car cut through the air? What about a combination of both? If we did this, might we be able to use the power from the airflow to somehow run some of the devices on the auto? For example, if the energy could be stored it could run wipers, defrosters and such leaving us free to use lighter alternators. The problem is that cars are going the other way today with heavier and heavier electrical systems. While we are on the subject of cars, companies are trying to develop better and better oil. What if we had engineers try and design better engines that wouldn't require oil at all? Of course the oil companies would have a fit, but with all the new materials available today, maybe this could be done. Think of it, an automobile that you would have to worry a lot less about.

People go to doctors for many different things, but one of the most heartbreaking is mental illness. Today psychiatrists treat people with mental illness by administering drugs, giving electroshock therapy and even group and individual talk sessions. We are learning so much today about the human brain that it is incredible. Why couldn't there be a nation wide or even world wide database where all the different symptoms that each person has is cataloged, along with each type of treatment and the part of the brain that is effected, with the results of any tests, including photos of scans and such. Maybe a better method of treatment would emerge from all this data. The database could be used for physical illnesses also. The only problem I see with this is that you can bet that those that have access would copy some files onto a laptop and loose it as surely as I am sitting here, thus making our records available to the world, so while we are at it, lets have jail time for anyone that copies confidential info to a laptop and looses it and lets have him fired if he just copies it. We can throw in liability for all damages.

Every once in a while we have all been forced to either paint our homes ourselves or hire someone to do it for us. The paint companies keep developing new paints and we continue with our messy jobs. I have to admit it is a lot easier to paint now that most paints are water based, but why paint at all. Why couldn't builders develop inside walls that had some sort of layers built over them that you could bring out with a certain type of light? Think how great that would be. With a method like this, you could change the appearance of the inside of your home almost instantly. Hey honey, pass me the infrared light, my boss is coming and loves blue. Yep, I could go for that.

Here is something that has bugged me for quite a long time and it is our dependency on power companies. Everyone knows that they are connected to a power grid that is vulnerable to breakdowns, blackouts, and even terrorist attacks, not to mention the fact that we are also subject to enormous cost for power in some areas like New York. We have to start thinking about individual power generating capabilities for homes. It could be a fuel cell, solar cells, wind generating facilities or a combination of any or all. Notice that I said nothing about gasoline generators, they are just too noisy and polluting. My first choice in this area today would be the fuel cell. Some claim that for about $10,000 you can get one that is sufficient for all the electrical needs of the average home. If you live in the New York Area and are serviced by either LIPA or Con Edison, you might save enough to have the fuel cell paid off in under 2.5 years.

This has only been a short exercise in trying to look at things from a different point of view. The items I choose were not picked for any particular reason. This concept can be applied to anything, even politics. In the area of politics it is already used by many. How many times have you heard someone state that they were not voting for their favorite candidate, but for the lesser of two evils? If we wanted to apply it to picking the best college, you wouldn't read the college reviews, what you would do is pick the most prominent people in the field you want to pursue and see where they went to college. Actually it isn't that hard to think a little differently than most people. The next time you are thinking about something, try the unorthodox method.