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Mental Kaleidoscope

Ran into this little gem by Mark Twain while reading a post about old ideas being paraded as novel in the world of technology. 

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.

In the technology business that ends up being a slew of new jargon, definitions and catch-phrases that everyone who keeps up with technology must now be able to spew with fluency. The vast majority of the folks a merely spewing, a much smaller minority actually understands what they are talking about - by which I mean they are able to take the jargon they learned and explain it in simple terms to a lay-person. 

But even this group of folks is not questioning the validity and the point of existence of this new technology. They accept it must be good because it is new - so the implication is there was a problem the old and tired stuff was not solving that this new thing does. This trust is almost blind. The more the jargon shows on-line and gets quoted by trusted authorities the more confirmation that the new stuff is good and we must all know about it to be professionally useful. 

Every once in a while someone will question the very foundation of such things and clearly separate fact from fiction. I love reading the opinions of this very very small minority of technology professionals. 

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