New word for the day
In the definitive book on innovation (self-claimed), the author fucked it up on page one.
“Alexander Fleming … on a plate streaked with golden staphylococcus he noticed something odd: a fuzzy blue-green mould had drifted in, and around it, the bacteria had dissolved. Fleming soon realised he had created a substance that could kill bacteria without hurting animals.”
Fleming hadn’t created anything. Because of his very sloppy lab practices has had accidentally encountered something interesting.
Fleming didn’t even discover penicillin. Not being a chemist, Fleming didn’t and couldn’t identify the molecule in the mould that was causing all the interesting phenomena. That was other researchers much later on. Fleming didn’t even know, nor could he guess that it was a single molecule in the mould that was doing all the good work.
Fleming’s contribution was to publish an interesting lab fuckup. And there we have to admire him because not many scientists would be stupid enough to do that.
I think we need a new word for innovation that falls between an accidental encounter and a discovery, and is mediated by an inexplicable self-deprecating publication: a sloppism.
Note carefully, it’s not officially related to solipsism, which is the philosophical idea that only your own mind is sure to exist.
But if you squint, at sunset with a brown paper bag over your head, you can see a dotted line between the words.
In solipsism, the mind creates the world. In sloppism, the world creates the result, while the mind is somewhere else.
offshore westerly 