While I (and Gladwell) would argue that 'genius' has some bearing on what is obvious, I fundamentally adhere to the notion that what you perceive in the world reflects your vantage point, the particular mountain of experience that you are standing on. He claims that is why scientific discoveries are so often made simultaneously by mutiple individuals. Leaders in the field, whose perspective or experiences allowed them to see the evidence laid out before them, jumped to the obvious conclusion. For example, the double helix became obvious in the field of biology because of the maturation of the underlying evidence. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in his recent essay, 'In the Air' and expands on the idea in his recent book, 'Outliers.' He suggests that breakthough ideas are a reflection of the perspective of a field. I am not convinced that genius has anywhere near as much to do with interesting thoughts as does experience. What will I write about? From my point of view, an individual's interesting ideas come from the unique perspective they develop through their life experiences. This is a long slow loop that I hope the blog can shortcut and expand. Usually we develop our ideas alone or in very small groups, write them in papers, and hope for some written feedback in other people's papers. From a community point of view, I hope that the ideas in the blog foster discussion that might not have taken place and lead to a richer community discussion that elevates ideas from all who are participating. Like an artist who more completely explores ideas by sketching, I am hoping that I will more completely explore ideas by writing.

From my point of view, the blog is like a sketch book where we can explore and get feedback on ideas, some of which can become part of complete works.

I am totally enthusiastic about the idea. The motivation for the blog as a whole, which comes from Kim, is to explore new ways of sharing ideas about geoscience thinking and learning. With that as background, my hopes for this blog are that that my posts will help you see the world differently and lighten your day. Blogging is mostly a new thing to me, my primary experience being reading my son's blogs while he was traveling in China.

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