As Bill Gates keeps telling us, the World is actually getting better. Overall. 🙂
6.7 million fewer kids under the age of five are dying each year compared to 1990.
Click through to read the long article by Charles Kenney in The Atlantic.
I’ll need these soon. Christmas 2016, perhaps. 🙂
(via Mashable – 26 incredible innovations that improved the world in 2015)
“The Roads Must Roll” is a 1940 science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein. In the late 1960s, it was awarded a retrospective Nebula Award …
The story is set in the near future, when “roadtowns” (wide rapidly moving passenger platforms similar to moving sidewalks, but reaching speeds of 100 mph) have replaced highways and railways as the dominant transportation method in the United States. …
Heinlein’s vision might just be starting to come true.
A Futuristic Proposal to Turn the World’s Oldest Subway System Into a Giant Moving Walkway
Economist – Doctors should be allowed to help the suffering and terminally ill to die when they choose
The argument is over the right to die with a doctor’s help at the time and in the manner of your own choosing. As yet only a handful of European countries, Colombia and five American states allow some form of doctor-assisted dying. But draft bills, ballot initiatives and court cases are progressing in 20 more states and several other countries (see article).
In Canada the Supreme Court recently struck down a ban on helping patients to die; its ruling will take effect next year. In the coming months bills will go before parliaments in Britain and Germany. …
I’d like that right. Voluntary euthanasia is working well everywhere it’s been tried.
With typical lack of research I caught the last ferry from Nanaimo to Tsawwassen. You could ASSume the British Columbia government would require public transport to meet every ferry.
You’d assume wrong. 😦 Public transport meets every ferry except the last one of the day. People get stranded every night.
I found this out by asking the ferry purser. A regular truck driver happened to be standing there at the time. He immediately offered me a ride from the ferry terminal to the Vancouver Sky Train. 🙂
Note to self: pay it forward.
It was after 1am when I got to the elevated platform. With 4 minutes to spare I jumped on the last train. 🙂
A couple hours sleep in the airport. Then the easy check-in to the first flight of the day at 6am.
Arriving Denver I had one errand. To send a piece of snail mail. The only post office in that airport was closed for lunch. But a lady waiting in line kindly gave me an American stamp. 🙂
Pay it forward.
Betsy had recommended a new inexpensive bus service out of Denver into the Rocky mountains. The driver sized me up and said: “I believe you might be a Senior”.
I got the discounted old-timer’s fare on the 4th day of the service. 🙂
Pay it forward.
… it is 100 times stronger than steel, yet it can stretch by as much as a quarter of its length. Graphene is the thinnest solid ever known, indeed the thinnest possible: it is a sheet of linked carbon atoms just one atom thick. It is a great conductor of electricity and nearly transparent to visible light, but is impermeable to gases and liquids. It has so many surprising properties that it has been dubbed a “wonder material” and has earned its discoverers a Nobel prize. …
I love the site. Use it every day.
FINALLY got around to making a donation.
No, it wasn’t one of Jimmy’s personal appeals. 🙂
You can donate here.
The Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system put forward by entrepreneur Elon Musk incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion that is driven by a combination of linear induction motors and air compressors.
The conceptual route runs from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area, paralleling the Interstate 5 corridor for most of its length, with an expected journey time of 35 minutes, meaning that passengers would traverse the 354-mile (570 km) route at an average speed of around 598 mph (962 km/h), with a top speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h). …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The first crowdsourced 7 km long track will be built in 2016 in Quay Valley (California), a town that calls itself the “100% solar powered, self-sustaining residential model town for the 21st century“. Around 200 people (from scientists to students) are working on this project right now in exchange for equity in the transportation company that will eventually emerge. …
Rick McCharles 