Uniqueness of an Idea

Daniela posted an interesting piece here of what she overheard - "my idea may be interesting, but not unique. I have not had a single unique thought in my life. Interesting, maybe. But not unique..."

Is it right to dis the guy who said it ? (I dont know him or anything about him)
Or was the statement he made a profound enlightened thought or a statement he made offhand which happened to be pretty profound ? Come to think about it, is it profound ?
Got me thinking ... more like ruminating.

I believe in what he said to a large extent.

-- Unscientific rambling ON --
All our thoughts usually tend to be incremental changes - ofcourse at the end of a thought chain , the final idea might be quiet radical: but do we ever have a radical idea by itself ?
This line of thought will bring us to a net of interconnected subjects in AI , but we will keep that aside for the time being and try to think about the fundamental way in which human's think and progress.

"If I have seen further than you, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Issac Newton.

Cant we not infer a lot from this ?
I believe that there are no radical ideas - even the most revolutionary idea would be something simple like using something that works in a particular context in an entirely different context.
All great ideas must be a consistent incremental development of thoughts and ideas in the right direction.Ofcourse you need to keep the discipline in following the direction and not wander.

That being said , I dont believe this to be the case always ... some ideas just come to you out of the blue. For me , it is usually just after I fall asleep. The only prerequist for these seem to be a singleminded focus on the problem ... I dont really know from where these ideas pop up from ...
Is it random synapses firing in a lucky sequence which resulted in the spark ?
Or just random associations of thoughts and ideas which result in it ??
Not sure , but they do happen ... and I would rather write them off as due to one of the above than as some act of GOD/supernatural/psyche/etc.
The spark by itself would not be enough - you need more incremental thoughts to make it into a workable idea ... more like the irritant that results in the pearl , but without the irritant no pearl for you !
So the question would be , was this irritant a result of your focus ? or something else ??
I seem to be going into a circular dependency loop here inside my head on this :)

-- Unscientific rambling OFF --

Will chill for a while and maybe read something else.
Daniela gets two percent pay reduction for torturing poor innocent souls who happen to visit her blog with thoughts like this :)

Friend of mine has finally put up his product site online ... expect it to hit the stores sometime later this year. http://www.diep3d.com