Just started watching The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi thanks to a recommendation from Hui. This anime is having the same effect on me as FireFly. It's making me feel really really happy watching it. Such an odd thing.

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There are TV shows that put normal people in extraordinary situations, where the viewer relates to the protagonist by thinking "Yeah I may feel and appear mediocre, but I'll bet I could kick ass if the time came."

The special thing about Haruhi is that she is an extraordinary person in a normal setting. She truly believes she is extraordinary, and wears it on her sleeve from day one, never condescending to any standard of normality. I find that inspiring.

Of course, Haruhi is aided by the fact that her extraordinarity just happens to be the truth. There are no if's and but's to her position in the center of her world. The story isn't meta-religious dogma requiring the protagonist to go through various trials and tribulations to earn some overvalued prize. Her greatest/only enemy is boredom plain and simple, and since the only enemy of an anime series is also boredom, this is a perfect alignment.

1. photon
2. exciton
   
3. polarons
   
4. ...
   
5. profit!

To me there is one important difference between powerful ideas and ideas that are merely correct. Powerful ideas are transferrable. Powerful ideas are usually also correct to a certain degree, but the mindless pursuit of pedantic correctness can often be counterproductive.

Great ideas are great because of their influence on other ideas, and as such are necessarily powerful. In fact, I believe that many great ideas do not even have correct first incarnations. The fact that they are powerful allows the thinker to patch up superficial inconsistencies or realize that another important problem had in fact been solved. I believe great novelty and robustness often exists outside of details.

It is good to have a nose for powerful ideas. I have seen plenty of the opposite: correct solutions that require so much tedious, error-prone, slow, detailed work that they do not empower the reader at all. Worse still, there are those who are oblivious to this kind of failure, and who continue to pour effort into repetitive drudgerous tasks. These tasks are done only once, but are classified as repetitive in my mind because in doing them one does not learn how to do them any faster.

Of course, in completing the same task two people could learn really different lessons, what's repetitive to one may not be repetitive to another.