All of the good ideas are taken

In the movie Knocked Up, Seth Rogen and his buddies think they have a great idea for a website, one that identifies the nude scenes in non-porn movies. Then they find out someone else has already done it. That’s the problem with the Internet. With a couple of billion users, what hope is there of thinking of something original? As my previous post shows, even an original pun is hard to come by.

I swear I had the idea for a blog like the Paleofuture blog. That is, look at people’s predictions about the future to see if they really came true. Of course, I wouldn’t have done anything much with my idea, so it’s just as well someone else has been doing it. As I suspected, the blog shows how difficult it is to predict the future, and how foolish those who try to wind up looking. This month’s Atlantic carries an item about a 1999 piece it had published predicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average would fairly soon rise to 36,000 or so, then plateau. Ten years later, a reader who’d bet the authors that it would be closer to 10,000 at the end of 2009 won.

My predictions: legal marijuana in states with over half the population within ten years. Printed books begin to become specialty items by then. People commonly use iPad-like computers. Possibly they can fold up. More to come.