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
Yuri Gagarin! First human to journey beyond our cradle and into space! His Vostok spacecraft orbited Earth on April 12, 1961, a half-century ago. Epic! He is one of the Russian giants of spaceflight, rocketry, and cosmonautics in a pantheon including Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Sergei Korolev, Valentina Tereshkova, and Nikolai Kardashev. 
"It's a restrictive, terrible symbol... I can't condemn the veil enough. But banning it, in my view, is not the answer. I think the best thing to do is to have [...] a debate about the substance. What does the veil stand for?"
Thanks to Stanford Professor Chuck Eesley for spotting this WSJournal piece by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame on How to Get a Real Education: Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business... "...why do we make B students sit through [genius brainy] classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes -- a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship? [...] By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training."Read the rest, especially his top tips!
"The M/V Lone, owned by shipping company S.A.L. of Germany, together with sister ship Svenja, is the most powerful Heavy Lift Ship in the world. It has two cranes with a joint hoisting capacity of 2,000 tons. The 162-meter long Lone is also DP equipped for offshore work. The video shows above shows the Lone’s first job, transporting six 630 ton pipes from the RHB Terminal in the Rotterdam to Korea."
Greg Miller writes in Science Now about how Formerly Blind Children Shed Light on a Centuries-Old Puzzle... "In 1688, an Irish polymath named William Molyneux wrote the English philosopher John Locke a letter in which he posed a vexing question: Could a blind person, upon suddenly gaining the ability to see, recognize an object by sight that he'd previously known by feel? The answer has potentially important implications for philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Now, researchers working with a medical charity that provides surgery to restore vision in blind children say they've found the answer to Molyneux's question. It's "no" but with a twist."MIT colleague Professor Pawan Sinha and his Project Prakash colleagues report their results online in Nature Neuroscience in The newly sighted fail to match seen with felt...
"We addressed [Molyneux's question] by working with treatable, congenitally blind individuals. We tested their ability to visually match an object to a haptically sensed sample after sight restoration. We found a lack of immediate transfer, but such cross-modal mappings developed rapidly."
"...tells the story of Sofia, whose Columbian father brought her to the Netherlands when she was two years old. Sofia has lived in the Netherlands for almost 20 years now. Her first language is Dutch, and she was educated in Dutch public schools. Yet, as an illegal immigrant, she cannot work, or go to university, or pay taxes, or get health insurance, or buy a house. She also cannot apply for a residence permit or citizenship; she is stuck, through no fault of her own."Completely ridiculous rules imposed by what -- as evidenced by its inhumane actions -- is an illegitimate state. We need to rapidly move into a post-nationalist, pro-people future where accidents of birth are not held against us and fundamental human rights of movement, commerce, residency, identity, and more are upheld.
"...a bus shaped like a race car. Its top speed is 250 kph, to be reached in custom bus lanes. Its aerodynamic shape not only allows it to go fast, but apparently also makes it energy efficient. It can carry up to 23 passengers."
Ginormous!
Looking forward to viewing the whole of The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System... "Finland’s education system has consistently ranked among the best in the world for more than a decade. The puzzle is, why Finland? Documentary filmmaker, Bob Compton, along with Harvard researcher, Dr. Tony Wagner, decided to find out"
Millions of taxpayers continue to receive precious little value for money from the incompetent and inefficient bloatocracy that rules US. Despite hundreds of billions of US$ "defense" and "intelligence" spending per year -- for decades on end -- we still had the absolutely inexcusable 9/11. Most recently, the organs of "state" and "diplomacy" completely missed yet another wave of authentic democracy movements -- this time in the MENA region of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, etc -- and continue to prop up messianic and/or religious-irrational and/or discriminatory and/or familial-kleptocratic and/or dictatorial-authoritarian or abusive-murderous or otherwise totally unsavory and illegitimate regimes worldwide. Homeland Insecurity is mostly visible as farcical airport "security theatre" which unconstitutionally searches and harasses millions of US innocents while invigorating and bemusing evildoers everywhere. The Patent Office can't even process our essential inventions in a timely fashion despite charging more than it costs to do so. Social Insecurity is a multi-trillion US$ colossal nightmare of a Ponzi scheme which makes Bernie Maddoff look like a merely bumbling Robin Hood. Endless activities which should be privatized to independent for-profits -- e.g. SBA loans, home ownership loans, etc -- or spunoff to independent non-profit civic trusts -- e.g. the Smithsonian, National Parks, etc -- are threatened to be held-up -- yet again -- as Republicrats and Demoblicans in DC flail about compromising on a budget. So perhaps -- even probably -- it's actually a very good thing to have, as CNN puts it -- Government shutdown: White House details consequences. At least some taxpayer moneys won't go unnecessarily up in smoke in the interlude from this idiocy.
"Bikes Belong in the USA recently visited the Netherlands on a study trip and produced this film as well as an article entitled A Week of Biking Joyously."
