"Go out alone if it suits you, don’t expect profound thoughts"
Often, I consciously decide to use time along to think. I don't think anything would happen without that conscious decision. But I've gotten some good results from that conscious decision. Once in the '90's I was driving back to my home in Maine from an internet conference in Boston. I had come up with a mathematical technique to recommend things to people based on their interests, and at the conference, there was a session on how it was hard for web sites to get advertising because they had to have "space salesman" to find advertisers.
On the drive I asked myself, what do I know that might be able to help solve problems I saw at the conference? Before I'd gotten north of Massachussetts, I had the idea that advertisers could send their ads to a central hub that would distribute the ads to web sites based on people's interests; so the web site wouldn't have to do anything and ads would be chosen automatically. Interests would be discovered by keeping track of which ads people tended to click on and other factors.
But I didn't know how to keep track of those clicks. Over the next couple weeks I looked into using Netscape's cookie mechanism along with other possibilities. But cookies had built-in privacy constraints. From my write-up at [1]:
"""
At first blush, cookies didn't appear like they could help, because they could only be written or read from the internet domain from which they were written. So, if a cookie was written by, for example, a CGI at golfing.com, it couldn't be accessed by a CGI at boating.com. It followed that the idea of having the servers for golfing.com and boating.com both accessing a central server at some other location to track user activity wouldn't work; there was no way to know that the same user had visited both sites because any cookies written at one site would be inaccessible to the other.
But as I looked further into the general topic of Web programming, I noticed that a Web site running on one domain could invoke a CGI running on another domain. And there seemed to be no reason why that CGI, running on that other domain, couldn't write its own cookie to the local computer.
"""
Now, Google owns the patent that came out of it (which did NOT claim the "tracking cookie" on its own, but only using it with MY particular mathematical algorithm for picking ads.) As far as I know the patent has never been used offensively, but even last year Google and Twitter were using it defensively against a patent troll. ( In their petition[2] in that case, Twitter and Google repeatedly refer to the tracking cookie as "Robinson's Cookie.")
So anyway, my advice is that you consciously CHOOSE to think when alone, while doing something like walking or driving. Somehow that low-level, automatic activity makes a huge difference to me in my ability to think, and most of the best ideas I've had in my career have come while driving. Other people have their best ones while walking. I don't HAVE to be alone, but I pretty much have had to say to my wife in the passenger seat, "Please don't talk to me now, I'm thinking." She doesn't mind because the results have sometimes been good in the past!
Thanks for sharing, maybe the intention does make a difference. Or maybe I'm a bit too self-critical. I probably get some kind of breakthroughs or profound thoughts after all, but only on a fraction of all walks and rides – which is okay.
Yes, expect to have major insights on only a small proportion of walks or rides! :) But that's fine! Just make the conscious effort to solve problems, usually using pieces you already know about!
For me, it's fun. There have been a number of times I've done the 5-hour drive from Boston to my Maine home, and then didn't want to stop, because I was chasing interesting ideas in my thinking!
Often, I consciously decide to use time along to think. I don't think anything would happen without that conscious decision. But I've gotten some good results from that conscious decision. Once in the '90's I was driving back to my home in Maine from an internet conference in Boston. I had come up with a mathematical technique to recommend things to people based on their interests, and at the conference, there was a session on how it was hard for web sites to get advertising because they had to have "space salesman" to find advertisers.
On the drive I asked myself, what do I know that might be able to help solve problems I saw at the conference? Before I'd gotten north of Massachussetts, I had the idea that advertisers could send their ads to a central hub that would distribute the ads to web sites based on people's interests; so the web site wouldn't have to do anything and ads would be chosen automatically. Interests would be discovered by keeping track of which ads people tended to click on and other factors.
But I didn't know how to keep track of those clicks. Over the next couple weeks I looked into using Netscape's cookie mechanism along with other possibilities. But cookies had built-in privacy constraints. From my write-up at [1]:
""" At first blush, cookies didn't appear like they could help, because they could only be written or read from the internet domain from which they were written. So, if a cookie was written by, for example, a CGI at golfing.com, it couldn't be accessed by a CGI at boating.com. It followed that the idea of having the servers for golfing.com and boating.com both accessing a central server at some other location to track user activity wouldn't work; there was no way to know that the same user had visited both sites because any cookies written at one site would be inaccessible to the other.
But as I looked further into the general topic of Web programming, I noticed that a Web site running on one domain could invoke a CGI running on another domain. And there seemed to be no reason why that CGI, running on that other domain, couldn't write its own cookie to the local computer. """
Now, Google owns the patent that came out of it (which did NOT claim the "tracking cookie" on its own, but only using it with MY particular mathematical algorithm for picking ads.) As far as I know the patent has never been used offensively, but even last year Google and Twitter were using it defensively against a patent troll. ( In their petition[2] in that case, Twitter and Google repeatedly refer to the tracking cookie as "Robinson's Cookie.")
So anyway, my advice is that you consciously CHOOSE to think when alone, while doing something like walking or driving. Somehow that low-level, automatic activity makes a huge difference to me in my ability to think, and most of the best ideas I've had in my career have come while driving. Other people have their best ones while walking. I don't HAVE to be alone, but I pretty much have had to say to my wife in the passenger seat, "Please don't talk to me now, I'm thinking." She doesn't mind because the results have sometimes been good in the past!
[1] https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-co... [2]https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ptab-filings/IPR2021-0048...