Lateral Thinking and Common Sense

When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens wouldn’t work at zero gravity. (Ink won’t flow down to the writing surface) In order to solve this problem, they hired Andersen Consulting (Accenture today). It took them one decade and 12 million dollars.

They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, under water, in practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C.

The Russians used a pencil…

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Of course, this may not be a real story. It was received in forwarded e-mails.

But instead of thinking whether really NASA is so stupid or not, we can look at how many problems of day-to-day life can be easily solved using two best techniques of thinking - Lateral Thinking and Common Sense!!!

Also, this has reminded me of an experience. One of my friends had made a documentary (small 20 mins video shot from his cellphone and edited on his PC). He lives quite close to my house and came over one day to give me a copy of that video. While talking to him he told me about the pains of the Internet. He wished to show that video to his uncle who lives on the other end of Mumbai. He had uploaded the video on Rapidshare and told his uncle to download it.

There seems to be no problem in this till the time I tell you that the video was 250 MB and both my friend and his uncle have a ‘broadband’ connection of 40kbps. It took ‘only’ 12 hours to upload and 12 to download.

If my dad had to do the same work, he would climb down the stairs, hand over the cover containing the CD to the courier officer with a note of 10 rupees. And it would take less than 24 hours to reach anywhere in the state.

By going deeper into this and meditating , I came up with this formula:

TECHNOLOGY - COMMON SENSE = STUPIDITY/INEFFICIENCY

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