Picasso was a wise, wise man.

Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

My dad once sat my brother and I down and said, "Boys, you want to know the secret to being successful in life? Win if you can; lose if you must; but no matter what happens, always cheat."

Pablo Picasso once said, "Bad artists copy, great artists steal."

Now before you all go crazy, let me explain what my dad meant. (If you want to question Picasso's quote, you can take it up with him someday) Dad was not talking about dishonest cheating. He simply meant to do what it takes, and don't be afraid to use "unorthodox" methods, and I think that unbenknownst to him, my dad really hit on the secret mentioned by Newton and Picasso.

Let me elaborate. Who, in the entire history of the world, has created something useful without some idea that there was something useful to be created? Newton's work in physics and math was the result of a lifetime of studying Pythagorus, Archimedes, and hosts of others who had gone before him. Picasso undoubtedly had his fair share of favorite pieces of others before him. Tolkien and Lewis had centuries of myths, legends and old wives tales that they had studied and read. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the good folks at AT&T had previous operating systems before them when they wrote Unix. Even "the Steves" (Jobs and Wozniak) had predecessors when the Apple and Apple II were born.


So where is the line between the good artist and the bad one? What is the difference between copying and stealing? I think that line is drawn by our own individual effort. Recently I posted about some idiot in Argentina who copied my friend's blog. There was no effort involved there, a few wget commands, some bad English-to-Spanish translation, and poof!! "check out my cool website everybody". I'll use Nicole as an opposite example. Nicole loves art. And photography. A lot. Nicole is an excellent photographer. She didn't become so by following some pro around and pointing her camera at the same things he did. She became an excellent photographer by, "learning how things will look as a picture, before I take the picture."

I'm currently taking a network programming class. Many of the concepts are pretty much foreign to me, and I've been spending _a lot_ of time on Wikipedia, Google, and in various reference documentation websites. I've "borrowed" lots of code snippets from various locations. I've long since learned the difference between copying and stealing when it comes to code. If you copy code and your program ever breaks, it will be in one of two places: on the border between your code and the code you copied, or in the code you copied. Both of these bugs result in copying code that you don't understand into your program. So I spend lots of time tinkering, modifying the code that I'm "stealing" in various ways to find out how it works, why it does what it does under certain conditions, and therefore figuring out how it _should_ be used in _my_ code rather than dropping it in as-is and praying that it will work.

So, in response to a recent blog entry by Nicole, what is inspiration? A lot of effort involved in turning someone else's previous work into your own original work. The magnitude of originality may in some cases be limited by scope: there's only so many ways in one programming language to implement the ages old, "Hello, World!" program.

So, if I follow Nicole around a little while we're up the canyon taking pictures, she'd notice that instead of taking just one picture of what I think she's taking, I was taking 10 or 15 with various shutter-speeds (I'm keeping things to one variable right now) to see what happened. When Newton figured out the notion that the slope of a curve at a given point is the derivative, he was using his own knowledge of previous mathematicians and physicists. Because everything, in its own little way, is art.