This will be a very short, but hopefully fascinating, post.
People ask me about some of the more interesting projects I've worked on in the past ten years. Some of them involve clever hacks and some of the more interesting involve position information - feel free to ask for details. I've mentioned some like Air Graffiti and there are several others that I can talk about and some I can't.
What strikes me as interesting is there are types of practical questions that can be answered with brute force and cubic money and, at the same time, have very clever solutions that depend on a wee bit of coupled orthogonal thinking. The later approach often depends on foundational technologies and science in which there are few short cuts, but benefits extend beyond the wildest dreams of the original implementors. Exactly where connecting-the-dots and having a lot of interests and the ability to dance with others who are very different from you come in handy. I should add that it is really important to have a rich problem space and can also help a lot to be resource poor (money and people), but connection rich (several people with very different backgrounds and someone who can tie everything together). Large well-funded projects with massive teams are rarely clever - large organizations that field cleverness tend to use very small working groups.
Rather than my rambling on, take a look at this talk by Googler Michael Jones at the US Naval Institute and see if it doesn't leave you with some interesting questions and ideas - its popcorn time!
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