Close your mind to nonsense, however, and live in fear of the edge of
the world.
Charlatans and hoaxsters are parasites, but it seems that without the
foolhardy and errant thought mutations that luckily appear in those
select
few "eccentric" types, we'd be even more mired in the status quo.
OK, so I took Bob's statement out of context....just seemed like the
thing
to do.
Actually, I thought it might function as a useful segue into a
discussion on
the role of "wacky" ideas in the development of human consciousness.
The Big Bang, black holes, modern art, evolution, neural networks,
internal combustion engines, sexual and racial equality, human
flight......I
know all of these projects had/have their share of detractors calling
each one crazy. I'm also fairly certain that each one of these ideas
had other miserable failures that contributed to them.
I'm certainly not giving an altruistic viewpoint of giving equal merit
to all
ideas, but I guess I'm sort of asking the open ended question of where
we would be without some of the crazy seeds planted in our fertile
minds.
Rambling on a bit....
eEc