A selection of stories outlining the stupid ways people made their millions.

Inventions are important. They're the reason life has become so easy for us, and technology so accommodating. The market for inventions is enormous, and hundreds of new ones are patented every day. Since not everyone is a genius, many of them fall into obscurity immediately as inefficient or unimportant ideas. However, sometimes the silly ones we might be quick to dismiss are unexpectedly more profitable than the conventional method of doing whatever it is the newfangled thing does. Here are 15 weird and ridiculous ideas that made people rich.

1. Pet Rock

The Pet Rock is undeniable proof that people will buy just about anything. It's literally a rock with googly eyes glued to it, but the inanimate companion grossed a couple million dollars in 1975. The fad only lasted for that year before dying out, but the Pet Rock carriers, equipped with breathing holes and a straw as if for a real animal, proved irresistible for those wishing to give silly and ironic Christmas gifts.

2. SatLav

Really having to pee can be one of the most uncomfortable feelings ever. You can’t concentrate on anything else, you fidget, you frantically search for the bathroom. But what if you’re out in public and don’t know where to find one? Poppin’ a squat it picking a dark corner isn’t always an option, and many establishments have bathrooms restricted for employee or customer use only. Conveniently, anyone with a cell phone can now find the nearest public restroom just by texting a short number for a small fee.

3. Doggles

Do dogs really need goggles? No. Do they want them? Probably not. Does anyone sell them? Of course -- and they've made more than a million dollars off the idea. Giving dogs goggles is about as useful as giving a goldfish a monocle and cane, but that didn’t stop the company Doggles from doing their very best. At $80 a pair, Doggles is a multi million dollar company.

If you think about it, looking at the photo above (and ignoring the fact that this product shouldn’t exist in the first place), there’s no reason that goggle s for dogs should look the same as those for humans. The bridge of a dog’s nose isn’t directly between his eyes like a human, so this design is a little strange. They pretty much look like Seth Green’s character from Can’t Hardly Wait.

Programming style, a set of rules or guidelines used when writing the source code for a computer program, is important for a programmer, it not only allows the reviewers to know the date and author of the file, but also helps the programmer himself to track the file version and improve work efficiency. Nevertheless, repetitive comments, especially for the header part are boring. Uncomment is even more boring, read Matlab comment stripping for a lazy way for that.


NEWFCN is a good function I always use when creating new files, basically it creates a M-File having the entered filename and a specific structure which helps for creating the main function structure. The actual working MATLAB Version will be also captured. For example, running newfcn('testnewfcn') generates a file named testnewfcn.m at a pre-defined style, the new file looks like

To be honest, I can't call myself a fan of Mathematica, as you can notice by the number of posts under Mathematica category of this blog. No specific or big reasons, but just because my first job required Matlab & C++, my second job required R & S+ & Matlab, my master & PhD universities don't have Mathematica installed, that's it. I personally came across this software a few times either due to the codes I could find on my interested topics having only Mathematica version, or the request by my friends & colleagues for analysis.


That's why I only got to know the existence of Mathematica Home Edition today despite the fact it has been in the market for over one year! What is Mathematica Home Edition? as the webpage shows:

It can be used for:

I came across a toolbox - FinMetrics this morning, it sounds good from the introduction of help document, plus highly relevant to our topic quantitative finance, so I am eager to share it here. However, I am unable to get access to Matlab and check it in detail at the moment, please help me test and leave a comment about your thoughts then.

The stock market is a mess of people one-upping other people constantly. Any chance to get an advantage is seized immediately and one of those opportunities lies in the so called “Flash” Orders. In a brief summary, a flash order is a brief glimpses (no more than milliseconds) of someone else’s exchanges. Of course, only high-speed computers can see these, but once they are seen, they can be used to get a leg up and buy or sell ahead of others.

Some regard this as an unfair advantage as professional traders would gain advance knowledge on trends before individual buyers. Others say that it adds ‘liquidity’ to the stock market. This opinion comes, of course, from the big businesses who are using the flash order service to their advantage to gain a  profit. The problem is in the shifts that this brings about. For example, the big business might buy all of a certain stock, and then sell it for a bit more than they bought it, but a penny less than what the next guy is offering it for. This advantage causes motion in a violent manner in ways that would not be present in normal conditions. While this can for a time be a benefit, it means it can also fall just as quickly.