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"You know how people are. They only recognize greatness when some authority confirms it."

- Calvin

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil discusses the future of technology by the year 2020. Ray talks about what is currently being developed and the future infusion of technology into biology that society will see. His views of the exponential growth of engineering and evolution are very powerful and clear. Get ready for a wild ride into the 21st century!

I find the strangest things sometimes. Apparently National Geographic did a special a while back on the world's first head transplant. It was performed on a monkey. Doing some research you'll find there have been other such experiments with other animals. Something about this that reminds me of Shakespeare's Hamlet...

Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at Karolinska Institutet, the medical university in Stockholm, Sweden, has found a fascinating way of presenting data. In the following TED video presentation, Hans uses the world's data from 1962 onwards to compare the world's health vs. the world's wealth. Mr Rosling's unique methods of data representation are not only cohesive, but eye-catching as well. Enjoy!

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

- Berthold Auerbach

Politics is the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other.

- Oscar Ameringer

Current electrical power generation plants currently use nuclear energy to create copious amounts of steam that in turn motivate turbines to generate our electricity. Seems kind of ridiculous to use a nuclear reactor to create steam right? Well, thankfully, Liviu Popa-Simil, former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear engineer and founder of private research and development company LAVM and Claudiu Muntele, of Alabama's A&M University, feel that transforming the actual radiation into electricity is a little more practical; not to mention more efficient. Read more from the full article.

"A militant kind of aggressive religiosity, sometimes called "fundamentalism" has grown up in every single one of the major world traditions as a rebellion against this unbalanced world; a rebellion against humiliation... powerlessness. And there's a sense of rage expressed in religious terms. 'Every religion, as i understand them, has a history of intolerance; and every religion has principles for overcoming intolerance.' I want people to hear the compassionate voice of religion, I want to change the conversation and bring compassion to the forefront of people's attention.

... And we need to somehow find a way to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat other nations, other peoples, whomever they may be, as we wish to be treated ourselves. We need a charter for own souls, for our own sake, but also for the sake of our powerlessly divided world; one that has been drawn closer together more than ever before. The world will be invited to make their own contributions, their own comments, tell their own stories about compassion or their lack of it.

... The task of our generation, whether we're a relgious or secular people, is to build a global community where people of all persuasions can live in peace and harmony."

- A brief transcription from The Charter For Compassion's promotional video.

The organization is asking the world to contribute their ideas for the charter and stories of compassion.

When it comes to creative spark and design, few can deny the awesomeness of the "innovation and design" firm Ideo. In the following TED video, the CEO of Ideo, Tim Brown, presents the strong connection of creativity and play; bringing ideas and experiments back from the psychedelic drug induced sixties all the way through present approaches, all of which lean toward breaking the barriers of our conservative adulthood. The 30 circles experiment works quite well when stuck in the muddle of contorted professionalist demeanor.



The video below is a presentation by Zach Kaplan and Keith Schacht, the co-founders of Inventibles. They show off some pretty nifty breakthroughs in science with some clever ideas for application. Worth the 15 minutes.

"It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went."

- Thoreau