This has got to be one of the coolest inventions I’ve seen in a while. A personal VTOL craft that runs on lightweight electric motors. It looks like a Puffin when it lands! Said to be super quiet, this NASA carbon fiber design weighs in, with batteries, at just over 300 pounds. Top speed 480 kph with a 300km range on a single charge (est 2017). And since it’s not an air breathing machine, it has effectively unlimited ceiling (with internal oxygen for pilot). This aircraft can lift a person with just 60 engine horsepower. Wow. And electric motors are between 10X and 20X more reliable than internal combustion engines.

Renny Gleeson shares,

…[those who] survive and prosper recognize that rejecting the technosphere or attempting to dam it will simply reroute its flow to more viable channels – and their only chance to lead is having those channels pumping through their doors. Innovation and capital will go where opportunity exists.

I was at the Seattle “Museum of Flight”, and a particular plaque caught my attention in the ’space’ display wing. In the ‘history of rocketry’ section, a note mentioned that two thirds of Nazi Germany’s physicists and half its physical chemists fled the Nazi’s ethnic and political policies – fueling Western leaps that resulted in the Atom bomb and (eventually, once the Peenemunde scientists were added to the mix) space travel. They played to a legacy, and sacrificed their future.

Government restriction will drive innovation – at home, to circumvent such restriction, and abroad through migration of human capital and resources. Survival is based on the answer to a simple question: do you drive innovation, or do you drive it away?

Today’s report from Port au Prince. Heartbreaking. Please give generously to a relief effort.

…

> This is a direct report from Dr. Abel
> Vallejos and Enrique Montenegro working on the ground in Port au Prince,
> Haiti.

> We’re almost incommunicado. The team is good.
> We have 7 doctors working and 8 paramedics. We are taking more than 200
> injured per day.
> Most amputees because of the time has come unattended, and gangrene
> which has been formed. All hospitals are a mess. There are corpses in the
> streets, people walking around
> and even patients in the asphalt.
> We are located opposite the palace of government: it is the epicenter of
> ground zero. From here we see, as
> 80% of the buildings are lying, while others are about to fall.
>
> The earthquake today (Wednesday) brought new people injured and hospitals
> muertos.La
> are on the ground, and that some fell on him the medical equipment, or even
> the weight of the tents where they are served. Is total chaos! We need
> doctors, nurses, medicines …
> Please: Do not stop praying and giving.
>
> People sleep on the asphalt on the streets. There are hundreds of thousands
> of people dumped in open fields. Although they are dead in the rubble and
> the streets, the smell is nauseating.
> We also slept in the field under a tree. It’s sad … injured children, with
> amputacones,
> bodies strewn, infected! It really is worse than living in the Tsunami!!
>
> Our only daily food consists of water and 3 granola bars.
> Even the most experienced physicians like Dr. Abel Vallejos, break and cry
> for the pain that is here. It’s so scary chaos and the situation, there are
> no words.
>
> The nurse Ramon Bravo, is doing an outstanding job as the only paramedic
> team that makes surgery.
>
> This is unbelievable. The emergency will last for 2 months yet, as they are
> millions of people who are
> in the streets. The city has 3 thousand people, there are already more than
> 250,000 dead and 150,000 missing. Everyone is wandering from one place to
> another, international help arrives … but not enough!
>
> “Dr. Abel Vallejos tells us that all the sick, children, toddlers,
> women, men and elders who serve, have trauma to the body by the
> pieces of masonry fell on them. The injuries are huge and have not been
> treated in time. The catastrophe is the ever-increasing poverty in the
> country.
> We attend the same cases that we saw in Indonesia, a difference that is
> greater misery
> around us and thus the greater the catastrophe. Flies abound and lay their
> eggs in
> wounds. This causes not being cleaned in time become worms, which
> we work even more difficult. Today we had to pull worms from their eyes even
> some children, apart from between the legs, arms or any injury to afford ”
>
> Of the 200,000 injured by the earthquake, tens of thousands will die of
> infections not treated in time.
> It is tragic Tragic ….. …. tragic!
>
> Please: keep praying, offerings, and for medical equipment that can come to
> support.
> From, Enrique Montenegro

from New Scientist

A tactic familiar from insect behaviour seems to give viruses the edge in the eternal battle between them and their host – and the remarkable proof can be seen in a video.

The video catches viruses only a few hundred nanometres in size in the act of hopping over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold.

This finding is “pretty cool”, says Erik Barton, a virologist at Purdue University, Indiana. “What I find most fascinating is that it suggests that viruses can function with a sort of primitive ‘hive mentality’ to ensure efficient use of host cell resources, akin to the way worker bees tell others where to locate the best food sources.”

Good to see Compathos getting some attention. The P2P Foundation recently highlighted a great set of social media predictions from Marcia Stepanek, noting that “low-cost social media will be used ever-more widely and creatively by social enterprises and advocacy groups to aggregate new levels of clout, funding, innovation and community support.” Stepanek’s predictions have been picked up by a number of bloggers. She says,

One site to keep watching in 2010 is…the Compathos Foundation, which connects volunteers and financial resources with nonprofits through digital storytelling.

Last night, we screened a pre-edit of a new documentary film from the Compathos Foundation which highlights the plight of hundreds (maybe thousands) of tribal children who are ritually killed each year via a little-known superstition. Compathos is a leading voice raising awareness to rescue these children from certain death by supporting efforts to convince tribal leaders to allow the children to be placed in orphanages.

Post updated 18 Jan

Camille Puglia writing in Salon

… I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on—lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went “Psycho” weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock)—as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need—which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.