What's in a Name

Today I did a Google search of my Blog title “This Little Idea Went to Market” to see if a crawler had picked it up yet. I did a Google search before I started my blog to see if the title had been used, however forgot to put it in the quotation marks. Nothing came up then. However today there was a hit again without the quotation marks. Somebody posted an entry on June 16, 2010 in another blog using my title “This Little Idea Went to Market”. So I did another search of the title this time placing the quotation marks around the title. I got approximately 6 hits, using this exact word grouping. One of them dated back to an article written in 1996. So my blog title was not an original idea, but it was mine. The interesting thing is over the past 16 years there have only been six instances of this word grouping on the web; however two of them were in the last three days.


Imagine working at an office building with about 1000 other people. One day you wake up and decide you are going to be different so you put on the Hawaiian shirt in the back of the closet that is normally reserved for picnics. When you get to work you see that Bob, Larry and Suzy all decided to wear a Hawaiian shirt too. What are the chances? Mathematically it could be figured out but who wants to. You just rack it up to odd in your head. On your way home from work you notice a billboard advertisement that you swear you have never seen, with a guy relaxing on the beach wearing you guessed it a Hawaiian shirt. Then you realize that maybe that billboard had been there for a while and Bob, Larry and Suzy all probably pass it every day too.
Now expound this out to the internet with millions and millions of blogs, web pages and news stories, only six accounts of this word grouping but two within 3 days. That is odd. The posting of my blog title ‘This Little Idea Went to Market” was this person’s own idea because the only person reading my Blog right now is my wife (Thanks honey!).
The paragraph about the Hawaiian shirt is how I explain random occurrences of ideas. It is what I attribute that feeling of having that great idea in your head, to only find out later that someone is already selling it in Wal-Mart.
By the way, the chances that the six words in my blog title “This Little Idea Went to Market” were to happen at random with someone just picking 6 random words out of the English language are 1 in 3.4E31 chance. That means 3.4 with 31 zeros after it (or 34 with 30 zeros). I made some assumptions to make this easier to calculate. I assumed 180,000 words in current use for the English language. This included replacement (math geeks know what this means), assumes no sentence structure (engineers don’t need sentence structure or spelling), or looking for something that would stick, words could be in any order.

Engineer Process

I am an engineer so I need to make the chaos work in my world. I know what I have (an idea) and I know where I want to go (to market). So I am going to use an engineer’s solution process to make this work
Given:
Find:
Assumptions:
References:
Solution:
The Given here is my idea, or any idea. The Find is Marketable Goods, with the Solution being the path or my Road Map.
Assumptions are used by the engineer to simplify a problem. If I was calculating the weight of a 2000 linear feet wall, I could look at a one foot slice of that wall and then multiply it out at the end. This would be an assumption that the wall is similar throughout the 2000 feet. A common assumption that I make every day is that is reinforced concrete weighs 155 pounds per cubic foot the actual weight could be a little less or a little more, but when doing calculations on a building or foundation this assumption suffices. If it was discovered later that the reinforcement steel was going to be much more, the calculation could easily be redone by changing the assumption.
The first assumption that I am going to make for this project is that my idea is a great one and it will sell. Will it? I do not know, only time will tell. I could spend years and lots of money trying to figure this out and never proceed any further. At some point I do have to fill in an answer for this assumption, I will need to know if my idea is marketable, but I can figure that out later.
References for an engineer may be a design standard, test method or building code; for this project it will most likely be patent law, the USPTO and others.
So I plan on breaking the solution (Road Map) into smaller problems each with their own assumptions, and references then reconstruct the whole package back together at the end.