Re: Eliot Spitzer, antismoking leader, self-destructs

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:03:07 -0500, Judson McClendon wrote:

> Recent Eastern cultures have not been conducive to innovation and
> invention. Even as intelligent and industrious as the Japanese are,
> they produce relatively few innovative inventions. Most of their
> creative talent goes into refining inventions made elsewhere. As you
> yourself pointed out, ancient cultures in Persia and China were well
> ahead of anything in the west. It's clearly not genetic, but cultural.

Have you never used a transistor radio, or a Sony Walkman?

The total quality movement, while it used ideas from Edwards Deming, was
really a Japanese thing. This has been one of the most im****tant
innovations of the past few decades.

There is a western preoccupation with "who invented it". It is
usually more im****tant, and more difficult, to take an idea and turn it
into something useful. The first programmable elctronic computer was built
by a German, and the British were ahead of the US in early computer
technology.

This was not what created the computer revolution though. Americans turned
these ideas into usable products.

Having said all that, the whole Con****ian ethic, with its excessive
reverence for age and authority, and the centralisation of power and money
in traditional Chinese society produced a terrible stagnation that lasted
for many hundreds of years. In the west, the renaissance and the
industrial revolution swept similar tendencies away.

Tim