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Exponential Innovations Everywhere
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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
"It is a matter of principle that women are free and equal'. This means zero tolerance of cultural practices such as honour violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM). In her talk, Hirsi Ali challenges the audience with questions such as whether multiculturalism is indifference disguised as tolerance, and what do Western feminists have to offer to the life and death problems of women from the developing world?"
"Why are the Jews, a relatively small population, specialized in the most skilled and economically profitable occupations? [...] The literacy of the Jewish people, coupled with a set of contract-enforcement institutions developed during the five centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, gave the Jews a comparative advantage in occupations such as crafts, trade, and moneylending -- occupationsthat benefited from literacy, contract-enforcement mechanisms, and networking and provided high earnings. [...] Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily entered and later specialized in moneylending and banking because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets [...] An apparently odd choice of religious norm -- the enforcement of literacy in a mostly illiterate, agrarian world, potentially risky in that the process of conversions could make Judaism too costly and thus disappear -- turned out to be the lever of the Jewish economic success and intellectual prominence in the subsequent centuries up to today."
"The bombs at the Boston Marathon were designed to maim and kill, and they did. Three people died within the first moments of the blast. More than a hundred and seventy people were injured. [...] Yet it now appears that every one of the wounded alive when rescuers reached them will survive. [...] The explosions took place at 2:50 P.M., twelve seconds apart. Medical personnel manning the runners’ first-aid tent swiftly converted it into a mass-casualty triage unit. Emergency medical teams mobilized en masse from around the city, resuscitated the injured, and somehow dispersed them to eight different hospitals in minutes, despite chaos and snarled traffic. [Indeed,] everything happened too fast for any ritualized plan to accommodate. [Nevertheless] nurses, doctors, X-ray staff, transport staff, you name it showed up as soon as they heard the news. They wanted to help, and they knew how. As one colleague put it, they did on a large scale what they knew how to do on a small scale. [...] Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety."Read the whole piece for rich details about resiliency, preparedness, and grim efficiency of Boston's hospitals & people.
"Dutch junctions are very straight forward. All the routes for the different types of traffic are clearly connected and separated from other flows of traffic. There is no turning in strange and unexpected places, no waiting on a coloured square with other traffic passing on all sides. [But the UK's made yet another flawed plan] announcement. This time about a junction in Southampton, which is announced as a Dutch style junction. A picture was included and I was totally surprised. What is depicted there bears no resemblance to a Dutch junction at all!"Mark's clear video (and blog post) illustrates...
"LabCentral supports creation of innovative startup biotechnology companies by providing a world-class environment for entrepreneurs, and a fully functional life sciences laboratory within the Kendall Square innovation hub."
"[MakeyMakey which] seems like a toy, and educators have used it to play games or teach kids about basic electrical circuitry. But Silver believes that his kit can also help engineers test concepts and prototypes more cheaply. "Some people are just totally goofing around (with the kits). Some people are making devices so that their son with cerebral palsy can access browsing the Web," he said. "I don't know which of those two things actually are more important. They're both, to me, really valuable." "The reason I'm making this kit is that I'm totally stoked about what I can do with it and what other people can do with it," he said. "I hope that other people use it in a way that makes them feel alive. And if they are, it doesn't matter to me if what they're doing can be called useful or not." Silver talks wistfully about a utopian future where everyone creates their own unique space instead of settling for cookie-cutter homes or furnishings or decorations."
"Obsidian was once one of humankind's most sought-after materials, the "rich man's flint" of the stone-age world. This black volcanic glass fragments into lethally sharp, tough blades that, even after the invention of bronze, made it literally a cutting-edge technology. Because sources of obsidian are few and far between, obsidian artifacts are considered some of the earliest evidence of commerce: Long-distance movement of obsidian, even hundreds of thousands of years ago, suggests the early stirring of true trade. Differences in the trace elements in each volcanic source let archeologists trace the origin of individual obsidian artifacts and reconstruct trade routes. A new study [Environment and collapse: Eastern Anatolian obsidians at Urkesh (Tell Mozan, Syria) and the third-millennium Mesopotamian urban crisis] by Ellery Frahm of the University of Sheffield and Joshua Feinberg of the University of Minnesota, has used such obsidian tracing to shed light on how trade collapsed in the Akkadian empire of the early Bronze Age around 4,200 years ago in what is now northern Syria."Fascinating! Here's just few of the study maps & data...