The world is both incredibly limited — how many times must we repeat mistakes, replay history, watch reruns? — but also incredibly unlimited. Every time I get dragged down by the muck of ignorance (e.g. abstinence-only education), pettiness (e.g. bodysnarking, via Feministing), or hostility (e.g. the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act), I then find something really cool to life my spirits again.

I can never have enough Malcolm Gladwell, and in his New York Times article In the Air, he describes the phenomenon known to every math and science student: people are constantly re-discovering and re-inventing the same things… at approximately the same time. Ideas, he exclaims happily, are hardly rare at all. Well of course not! But as the author of The Tipping Point, Gladwell knows quite well that it takes more than an idea to get something off the ground. One needs the resources and connections, and sometimes a new perspective. He talks about the Intellectual Ventures’ 32 inventions over a single casual dinner, and their hundreds of patents, which are all perfectly stimulating; but the really exciting part is hearing about those that are actually happening!

For example, in Technology Review I read about a garbage-fueled power plant with no harmful byproducts. Very cool — let’s build one! Maybe the reason genius seems so rare is that the big ideas are so rarely put into action. Thankfully, the simple and the small ones are often just as thrilling. Like the turbid tale of vegan marshmallows (don’t forget part 2).

You can’t trust good ideas will get follow-up, and you can bet bad ones will. Obviously that’s not actually the case — plenty of bad ideas are forgot during the hang-over. But you never remember the rain when you have an umbrella, now, do you?