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My CBR (cognitive background radiation, the thing you think about when you’re not thinking about something else) for the last three years or so has been women or some aspect of dating. With the advent of a job with an exam schedule and a few other things that has died and a certain creativity has popped back into my life. I’m singing more, I jot down more things on napkins and notepads, and I’ve been cooking more.

This evening at a Scout meeting, the other participants were talking about an event and how to improve it when I felt something at the back of my head. Initially, I scratched at it and found that there was nothing physically stuck to my head that shouldn’t have been there. It felt like it was getting larger and I was having trouble making out what other people were saying I was so distracted by this thing. After a bit of reflection, I realized what it was: an idea.

Good ideas are almost material to me. They feel like actual things in my brain. Photography related stuff tends to be in the center top, artier stuff behind my eyes, and more complicated systems-level stuff feels like it’s going to pop out of the back of my skull. This was a tickling of how to make a Scouting Alternate Reality Game. This is what an idea felt like, and I had forgotten.

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Someone debuted a tool very similar to one I was working on except with the added bonuses of having an awesome publicity stunt, better name recognition, some novel features, and a company that someone has heard of backing it.  People I’ve told responded as if I lost a child to measles or whooping cough and I thank them for their courtesy but, much like someone kicking over your sand castle or someone coming up with a similar song hook, it at least tells me that I was on the right track (or they shared my wrong one).

Briefly, I had something neat to work on that was mine.  I do again but it isn’t mine in the same way as this one will require more collaboration and involves a lot of me tugging on people’s pant legs and saying “what’s a good algorithm I can use to find the K-th nearest neighbor within an arbitrary point cloud in 4-space?”