"For most players in Europe, the idea of winning the Stanley Cup is only a distant idea.
Two scientists who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday helped lay the foundation for regenerative medicine, the hotly pursued though still distant idea of rebuilding the body with tissues generated from its own cells.
Will Kemp took the poetry prize with Driving to Work at 5am Listening to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, while Michael Allen won the essay prize with an examination of the ways Keats treats beauty, A Distant Idea of Proximity.
But for some of New York's younger residents, those 18 to 24, who were born long after the city's first gay pride parade in 1970, and for whom marriage is a distant idea, does the legalization of same-sex marriage matter?
It was in the late 1990s when nobody was thinking about cloud computing and the notion of software on the internet was a distant idea.
The distant idea that in a few years we may be able to kill teleconferencing as we know it and look someone in the eyes as we chat has been replaced by the idea of us being able to do (and create) almost anything together in a purely digital space.
"The beauty of family," he wrote, was "once a distant idea".
The defendant, however, replied that he had "not the most distant idea of selling his wife, who was, poor creature, at home with her hungry children, while he was endeavouring to earn a bit of bread for them by the strength of his lungs".
But no matter what Medium blog posts tell you how crucial it is to understand the problem before coding its solution, this is, at best, an annoying part of an average developer's job, and, more likely, a distant idea that is happily ignored.
But at the moment, a resurrection of Congressional Democrats seems distant, the idea of recapturing the House in two years is a long shot, and the party is bracing for serious electoral trouble in the 2012 Senate races.
