2min chapter

Patented: History of Inventions cover image

Small Inventions, Big Impact

Patented: History of Inventions

CHAPTER

An Ant and Ant Mandibles for the Surgical Staple

Justito magine: We can thank an ant and ants mandibles for the surgical staple. He says it wouldn't work if you're on a camping trip, say, in this country at all. Justito Magine: If he hadn't been in maine, new england, and had been in clerkenwell, i don't know.

00:00
Speaker 2
I'm going to include links to your brain in the show notes. I think you got Jerry's brain right with the space between it.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I own Jerry's brain calm, which is the place to go for general info about the brain. I also own inside Jerry's brain calm, which is a bunch of calls I was hosting for a while. And then I own pictures, brain calm, and so on and so forth. So it's
Speaker 2
very funny. And because this is audio only, I think it might be worth describing to folks what they might see when they go there,
Speaker 1
right? Absolutely.
Speaker 2
The way that I'm going to use the word mind map, it looks almost like a mind
Speaker 1
map. That's the first thing I was going to say. So
Speaker 2
keep going. But I was about to say, I think that calling it a mind map, does it know favors because it's so much more?
Speaker 1
Well, it's not a bad, it's a very good place to start. And sometimes the place I start is, hey, have you ever drawn like a lily pad diagram on a sheet of paper where you have a word with a circle around it and then a link that you draw a line to another word with a circle around it and then you make this sort of little context of ideas that are related to each other, either as a brainstorming tool or to map out a thesis that you're trying to prove or whatever else. So that's the start. And that's kind of a primitive sort of hand drawn mind map. And the brain is very much that. And also the brain doesn't force the user to use it in a particular way. There's no, it's very interesting because I like you, I've been watching information architects and people who've got methodologies and all of that. And there's some really serious thinkers with some super interesting programs in the space. But from my perspective, if I had been told I have to do first degree thinking, then second degree thinking, then third degree thinking before I categorize things and put them into a tool in this way. And then I would never have done it. I would never have 25 years of curating this one brain file. Part of the magic was that the brain was very simple to use. I took to it like a duck to water for other people, it's a big ball of twine. So what they're going to see is a blue background because I've never changed the default background of the interface of the brain. And you can easily make it any other image. But I find that all other images or colors make the text less readable. So I've stuck with the navy black. It's a, it's a faded, navy background with words on it that are linked by little slightly curvy lines. And it looks inoffensive when you first get to it. It has one magic trick that nobody else seems to emulate, which is when you link these nodes to each other in each note, because it's called the brain, every node is called a thought. And it's just a little, it's a word or phrase of text. That's all, that's all that's in each thought. Although you can attach lots of things to a thought. And then when you look around, each thought has things that are either above it, below it or beside it. That's the magic trick up, down or left. That's the only way you can connect thoughts. And there's no right. And when you listen to that, you're like, what? And when you see it in action, you're like, oh, I get it. That's why it works. And I had a really interesting conversation with a tool maker recently where I had to sort of sell him on the idea that those lateral links are crucial. Because he was convinced that the hierarchy is enough. Up down is enough. And up down is not enough. It actually is not enough. It's not rich enough. And then in the brain, in some mind map methods, it's like a rubber band display. It's called a sort of force field where you're putting thoughts near each other, depending on some variable of proximity. In others, it's very outlining. This one is not. There's always one thing in the middle called the active thought. And then when you click on anything else, you can see it rotates into the middle and becomes the active thought. And then you see what is above below and beside that new thought. And that's how you traverse through it. And then it has a very nice, quick search. So you can leap through the brain of any size to whatever thought you're looking for just by typing in some part of a some string that's in its name. And without that search function, the brain would be half as valuable. Because if you had to traverse always to get from A to B, that would be a mess. So the idea that you can just leap through to some new place. And I use it as note taking. I don't use it for drafts for writing stuff. But I'll sort of stop there.

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