Back in the 1980s Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” Industry Tap writes, “Until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. . . . But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months.” And that rate will increase exponentially. IBM theorizes it could someday become every 12 hours. Makes me tired just thinking about it. The Renaissance genius Sir Francis Bacon was thought to be the last person who…
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Pollsters for the annual Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index interviewed 176,000 people in every state of America. They wanted to find which state had the happiest people. Best results ever. They asked questions related to five areas: 1) purpose and sense of happiness in what you do, 2) healthy, supportive social networks, 3) financial security and freedom from stress, 4) community safety and liking where you live, 5) having health and energy. If we think the way the media and advertisers would have us think, the top states would be places like Hawaii and California, or maybe Florida. No way. If…
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A major leap in computer technology may be on the horizon, or not. Time Magazine says, “It promises to solves some of humanity’s most complex problems” and that “it operates at 459° below zero. And nobody knows how it actually works.” Welcome to the world of quantum computing. Wired.com writes: “Quantum computers harness the weird quirks of the subatomic world to run algorithms at extremely quick speeds and solve problems that stymie our current electronic devices. That’s because classical computers rely on transistors that hold memory in the form of zeros and ones. A quantum computer, by contrast, uses subatomic…
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Everybody has to start somewhere. Behold, the first Porsche. In 1898 Ferdinand Porsche fastened a three-horsepower electric motor to the rear axel of a wagon and a steering wheel to the front wheels. He built four of them. This first one was stored in a barn in 1902 and sat untouched until recently. It had two bench seats that apparently disappeared. Porsche went on to build tanks for the Nazis and the original Volkswagen Beetle. After World War II, he started building sports cars. And now the name is synonymous with them. Have you started something that seemed (or was)…
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Humanity is taking another step toward being like God. Japanese researcher Haruko Obokata and her team have discovered a way to create personalized stem cells that do not involve human embryos or manipulating DNA. So ethical issues are minimized or erased. Obokata’s idea was so crazy, that no one really thought it would work. But it did. She immerses the tissue cells of newborn mice in mild acid, which causes a near-fatal shock, which makes the cells “pluripotent”–capable of growing into any type of body cell. She, and others, theorize that the procedure could very likely work with humans….
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