The was an interesting question posed on the electronics StackExchange: how do you measure the capacitance of a cat, and more importantly, how do we harness it?
While not very practical, I love this kind of curiousity. You never know if it will lead to something real and useful. Richard Feynman won a Nobel prize in 1965 for work in quantum electrodynamics that was inspired by a silly wobbling plate.
It’s so true. I read somewhere recently that the key difference between a creative scientist and one that is technically competent but unimaginative is that the former has a much larger breadth of interest.
Where Good Ideas Come From is an interesting book on the subject. Here’s one of those short whiteboard doodling videos that summarizes it.
This kind of out-of-the-box thinking is so much fun. It’s so cool to think about what we can accomplish if we alter our thinking just a little bit.
My cat wakes me up every morning by poking and pawing at my face, and during the winter it’s always accompanied by a few good shocks. So far the only thing it seems to be good for is getting me out of bed a little bit faster.