At risk of some reputational damage, I confess that one of my favorite comic scenes has \u201cDumb\u201d\u2014the Jeff Daniels character in the sequel Dumb and Dumber To\u2014stumbling onto the stage of a TED Talk- like conference where he is taken for a world-renowned scientist slated to comment on the presentations. <\/p>\n
On stage, a young genius describes how he has invented an injectable nanobot that seeks out and destroys cancer cells. The audience, revved up for revelation, gasps in astonishment and admiration. <\/p>\n
\u201cInteresting\u2026\u201d says Daniels\u2019 goofy character. \u201cBut. Does it sing?\u201d The question baffles the inventor. And the impostor explains that now \u201cthey\u2019ve got a largemouth bass that you hang on the wall, and it sings \u201cTake Me to the River.\u201d \u201cWhat I\u2019m saying is,\u201d he continues, sagely, \u201cis that you\u2019re this close, and there\u2019s a drawing board that you should be getting back to. Next!\u201d Mystified, the budding scientist says, \u201cBut it cures cancer\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
FIFA Refs and the Mistaken Identity Law<\/p>\n
Mistaken identity<\/a> takes hold of more memorable comic films, making life twisty and dangerous for main characters. Hitchcock\u2019s North by Northwest is one good example; The Big Lebowski is another. But I couldn\u2019t imagine that mistaken identity could have anything to do with World Cup soccer until the United States team faced off against Uruguay in the opening round. <\/p>\n This recent instance is mistaken identity of a peculiar kind. In that match, the FIFA referee cited the American captain for a tripping foul and levied a free kick. (A free kick results in a goal three times out of four, and so could well have decided the game.) But a video review rescinded the penalty, a first instance of a new technology applied to enforcing a newly promulgated rule. <\/p>\n The updated official \u201claws\u201d of soccer (f\u00fatbol) had provided for a reversal in the case that the referee had \u201cclearly penalised the wrong player of either team for the offence in question.\u201d The rulebook noted: \u201cThe offence itself cannot be reviewed except in the context of mistaken identity.\u201d <\/p>\n Some Rules Are Hard to Follow<\/p>\n If the context of \u201cmistaken identity\u201d itself seems unnecessarily inside and technical here (misleading, too, because nobody on the pitch was taken for somebody else), know that the obscurity is not an exception. <\/p>\n I once asked other parents of soccer daughters, our Buffalo Rockets, for help in explaining the off-side rule. That group included three lawyers, an administrative judge, and a dentist. They delivered five different impressions. <\/p>\n Looking for clarity and simplicity, I found instead that the text for Law 11, including commentary and exceptions to the off-side rule, ran to three full, single-spaced pages. <\/p>\n From Boundlessness to Consolidation<\/p>\n We don\u2019t need to strain to find instances where informal games, those that kids first played and negotiated spontaneously on the lawn or in the street, became increasingly organized by and for adults, and sometimes rapidly. While it took centuries for golf to settle on its governance, and decades for American football to evolve into its modern form, other sports went from casual to codified in record time. Think of two: frisbee and pickleball. <\/p>\n Frisbee, with its origins in the counterculture\u2014a favorite on college quadrangles in the 1970s and an improvised pick-up game if there’s ever been one\u2014has now garnered notice from the International Olympic Committee. \u201cUltimate Frisbee\u201d even boasts rival governing committees. The rulebook for one of these specifies the size of the field, the equipment allowed, and the rhythm of the game. It features seven appendices.<\/p>\n Or more recently, consider pickleball. Once played in backyards with repurposed tennis racquets, pickleball has its own new gear and is reputed to be the fastest-growing sport worldwide. True to form, pickleball play has been codified. Operating within artificial restraints and restrictions has unearthed more bones of contention. These needed to be diagnosed and mended. The 2026 USA Official Pickleball Rulebook runs to 96 pages. Rules are rules.<\/p>\n This tendency toward systematizing also creates more occasion for infraction. Rulemaking, let it be said, also invites rule-breaking, as subversion and mischief reliably become part of the experience and parcel of the fun. <\/p>\n Playful Repurposing<\/p>\n Some innovations have been accidental. Two famous examples show how original purposes inadvertently diverged into classic toys. Silly Putty resulted from a failed attempt to create artificial rubber during World War II when Japanese conquest cut off supplies of natural rubber. (A clever marketer later saw in the substance the potential for a gooey plaything.) And Play-Doh, another perennial favorite, began as a tool to scrub soot from wallpaper. Players will now roll up a brilliant pink hot dog or a yellow dachshund long after coal ceased to heat houses.<\/p>\n Divergent Thinking and Innovation<\/p>\n So, when thinking diverges from the worn path, interesting things can happen\u2014sometimes, for the better. Purposeful, play-inspired methods now consciously deploy divergent thinking to encourage innovation and invention that management<\/a> theorists term \u201cdelight-driven.\u201d <\/p>\n One of these approaches that means to encourage teams toward creative, original solutions goes by the acronym SCAMPER\u2014Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Redirect (or Reverse). Why not mash up a music player that can store songs with a portable phone enabled to hook up to the internet? Hmmmm. Why not?<\/p>\n The most successful and innovative organizations leave themselves open to pursuing innovation by generating a generous store of ideas. Some pay off. For the lucky team or individual mind, divergence converges on workable, original solutions.<\/p>\n Divergence vs. Disruption<\/p>\n Of course, sometimes divergence disrupts. Consider the heap of products that invention left behind. The phonograph. Stick shifts. Film cameras. The atlas. Car keys. And who knows what next? Landlines? Internal combustion engines? Currency? Scalpels? <\/p>\n Or consider the wreckage of once serviceable but dead-end rational beliefs\u2014astrology, heliocentrism, the geology of Noah\u2019s Flood, phrenology, homeopathy, \u201cscientific\u201d racism<\/a>, cold fusion, and so on. <\/p>\n But back to Dumb and Dumber and disruption. Rather than intellectually challenged, the disorderly duo are instead wildly mistaken, comically misinformed, tacky beyond salvation, and especially, badly behaved. There is, alas, a lot of that going around.<\/p>\n Mistaken for eminent scientists at a key TED-like presentation, of course they revert. Their catcalls, however infantile, compel a celebrated scientist to reconsider his conclusion. He admits, tearfully, that his cosmos-shaking claims about dark matter were data-thin and speculation-heavy. He needs to go back to the drawing board. Soaring paradigms fall when wobbly foundations erode. <\/p>\n Play and other creative endeavors will lurch between regulation and abandon, order and disorder, and conformity<\/a> and creativity<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At risk of some reputational damage, I confess that one of my favorite comic scenes has \u201cDumb\u201d\u2014the Jeff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-652510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}