Are Ideas in the Air?

     Have you heard the expression "It's in the air." regarding inventions? It seems like ideas for new inventions occur to people at about the same time. The ideas are different, of course, but the invention finally is perfected by someone and we have some new phenomena like, say, automobiles, or airplanes.

     This happens for all sorts of things. A few years back, my son had an idea for a CD that would hold a huge amount more data than the ones we have now, and what do you know, recently I read someone come up with a way to do that. In fact, if I remember the article correctly, there were at least two different ways to get terabytes worth of information on a disc--layers of information. See, my son was able to pick up on the idea, but he didn't have the knowledge or the expertise to make that disc.

     Now, I had an idea this morning about futuristic kitchen cabinets or even pantry doors. You know those doors in the spy movies that you can open with a fingerprint scan or a hand-print? I was thinking it would be really cool, that instead of having cabinet fronts and doors on pantries, we could have invisible shields that would be unshielded with the touch of your finger print (for a cabinet) or hand print (for a pantry). When you got the food or dishes or whatever you needed out of the shelves, you could touch your finger or hand to the sensor again and the shield would go in place again. Why, you might ask would I want a shield on my cabinets. Well, for several reasons. I could keep my cats out of the pantry. Some people might want to keep their little children out of their cabinets. If the shields were tight enough, maybe they could even keep out insects? I'm no scientist so I don't know.

     There, I've thrown the idea out into the air. The concept is probable way too expensive, but it's a cool idea to me. I just wanted to share the thought.