Executive Brief: While I have straight-out invented plenty of things, I have a long history or reinventing tools that already exist.
Details…
During the import of Residual Trace, I decided that this list worked better here than being relegated to the ice cream bread recipe. I will add to this list as stuff occurs to me.
- When I was just a kid, I was trying to figure out what size jar I would need to hold all of my marbles. I reasoned that if I just added up the amount of room needed by each of the individual marbles, plus that needed for a bunch of increasingly smaller marbles, then I’d know exactly how much the jar would hold... thus infinitesimal calculus.
- In my adolescence, I was drying off after a shower and thinking that it might be cool if the towel were made out of recyclable paper, like a napkin, only bigger, realizing too late that it would simply be a paper towel.
- Many years later, in my first year of college, when I heard about stealth planes being coated in a paint that absorbed electromagnetic wavelengths used for radar and so on, it occurred to me that an object might be rendered invisible to ordinary sight if that paint could absorb the radiation in the visible light spectrum, to which my roommate (Daniel “Dan” R. Knighton) replied, “We could call it black paint.” Oh yeah. That sort of insight is why he became a chemistry badass.
- “The Cannon” mentions the rediscovery of encaustic painting.
- After I had experimented with ice cream bread, I found out it was also a reinvention. I had been lamenting my inability to work with dough, and make bread, when a colleague suggested that bread should actually be considered advanced (despite the simple ingredients), and I should start with something easier, like cookies. So I was trying to figure out something that used most of the same basic ingredients as cake while leaving out the most bready part (i.e., the flour mainly), and decided that ice cream could cover milk/cream (sort of standing in for butter), sugar, and maybe eggs. I guessed that if you added that to self-rising flour, which would include the salt and yeast, then you’d have cake. But the term “ice cream cake” already meant something, so I settled on “ice cream bread” as a better label. After getting that worked out, I discovered that the idea was already popular online.