Today¹ I learned that my name gives not one but two awesome anagrams:

Bad Hero, and
Do Rehab.

Seriously. Who can complain about that?

1. How did I never know this before now? [↩]

One of the misconceptions I had buried in the back of my head, before I started my current dayjob, was that inventions were all, by necessity, clever.

This turns out to be not the case.¹ See, in assessing whether something is an invention, there are two main hurdles:² it must be novel, and it must also be inventive.

Novelty's easy, and fairly self-explanatory. There are some technicalities in terms of what constitutes usable proof, and timing considerations as to who had the idea first etc, but basically it's either been done before, or it's new. Easy.

Inventiveness isn't any more complicated, per se, although it is more subjective. The test for inventiveness is simply: is it obvious?

Pay careful note to that. Something that's unguessably clever is not obvious, yes — but equally, so is something downright stupid.

office consensus is not inventive in light of a porcupine

Actually, I don't know that I'd argue the shark protector suit there is stupid, as such. Let's just say I'm dubious as to whether it's really a better solution than, say, a cage. Which will protect you. The suit itself, so far as I can see, will simply give the shark some nasty scratches while it's giving you some nasty scratches. But maybe that depends on the size of the shark.³

1. If you want to talk about inventions that see commercial success, that's a whole different conversation. [↩]
2. There are other hurdles, quite a few of them, but they're less to do with whether it's an invention and more to do with whether the invention is allowable, legally. So for the sake of simplicity… [↩]
3. That's the other thing with inventions. There's always, always a smaller niche. [↩]

Before I moved to Melbourne, I'd never lived without at least one family pet. My knowledge of the various critters starts with two Siamese cats — Bubbles and Cuddles — who, if they weren't in the house when I was born, were acquired not too long after. My mother tells stories of one of them (I forget which one) having a worrying love of pouncing on my baby brother's bald head.¹

Over the years following there have been cats², dogs, canaries, budgerigars, fish, a horse, rabbits (both normal and pygmy), and even a tortoise at one point. Although we found the latter laboriously crossing the road in front of the house one day, put him in the backyard, and lost him under the back fence one day — so I'm not sure we can claim ever owning him so much as we fed him while he (very, very slowly) passed through.

Down this way, a variety of circumstances have meant no pets.

Or at least, that's what I thought. As it turns out, care of that most hypnotic of time-sinks otherwise known as TV, I've recently discovered that in fact I have a multitude of pets.

They're popularly called water bears or moss piglets (which is not one but two awesome names), their scientific name means "slow walker" (which makes me think of something out of Star Wars), and they can survive the vacuum of space.

That, my friends, is one heck of a combination of cute and hardcore, right there.

and look! are they not fatly adorable?

Of course, since they're so teensy, I don't actually know how many of them I have in my sink. But that doesn't matter. I'm going to call them all Chewbacca.

1. He turned out just fine. In fact, he all but speaks cat. [↩]
2. I think the maximum at any one point was 7: 2 purchased, 1 who followed my younger brother home (when he bought fish and chips) and the 4 mini-cats she soon thereafter surprised us with [↩]