I have read the same thing about Greece's Ikaria island centenarians.
As an anecdote my grandfather born in remote mountain village in mainland Greece in the 1900 was actually registered by his father having been born in 1906 as to avoid being drafted as long as possible to fight in the multiple wars fought at the time.
So birth records and certificates from that time are not really trustworthy.
I knew someone who came over with "the boat people" from Vietnam when he was six or seven; but his parents adjusted his birthday so he would start kindergarten instead - and he still didn't know for sure his actual birthday day.
Oce you upload the image, you get immediately suspended with the justification that the post contains personal information. The weird thing is the image contains no text whatsoever, or anything for that matter that could associate the image as a genome.
This is the COVID genome btw.
I think that one sector that has not been given much spotlight is space.
I feel that space will get lots of more startups leveraging LEO in unexpected ways.
The current rate of progress for the different launch systems, bring the cost/kg to orbit further down, as well as further satellite miniaturization/mass production will prove space as a new breeding ground for ideas that we cannot still think about, but I think in a decade from now we will be looking at space as on of the sectors pushing economic growth across the planet.
Funny how this thread surfaced now. I'm in a similar place.
I didn't use to fear flying until I got my first (and only) panic attack (not in a plane).
The trick I used to fight anxiety was walking around and it always worked for calming me down. But guess what, you cannot get for a walk on a plane so I started fear flights for a fear I might get a panic attack.
Long story short after lots of workarounds and googling I found that there's a company called psious[1] (not affiliated with them other than using their product).
You cannot use their system on your own (I asked) you only use it with a psychologist/psychotherapist.
Basically it works by exposing you to a simulated flight through VR and the psychotherapist helps you with tools like diaphragmatic breathing [2] and cognitive behavioral therapy [3] to ease your anxiety levels.
To be 100% open/clear I haven't flown yet since I started the therapy but I can tell my mindset has changed from trying to avoid flights at any cost to having booked flights and waiting (a bit anxiously :) but nowhere near at the paralyzing level) to actually fly.
So the key takeaway for me today compared to 1 year ago, is that Elon has put a lot of thought on how to make this plan economically viable compared to just the vision last year.
Multiple potential streams of revenue:
- Government/intragovernment contracts to cleanup space debris.
- Government/Private satellite launches.
- Earth to earth transportation which Elon announced on Instagram that the cost would be comparable to an economy fare. https://www.instagram.com/p/BZnVfWxgdLe/
It's key, and it's clever design. Basically space shuttle next edition with the booster on the bottom rather than it being strapped to the side of it and where the booster is reusable. It's a two-part vehicle: booster/shuttle.
The original space shuttle had a 40% vehicular failure rate. The SpaceX Shuttle need to have commercial airline rates of failure and reusability. That's a big step up.
You know the way we still have 80 column terminals because punch cards had 80 units?
The decisions SpaceX make now are going to become space-faring standards for decades if not centuries to come.
To frame in a comment we often hear around here: if you don't control your funding, you don't control your destiny.
Building anything for the US government that's big enough and has potential military applications is virtually inviting them (and the large project procurement morass they bring) to become involved.
The Soviet Buran shuttle had the right idea. It didn't have main engines and was launched with the Energia rocket, which could be used independently with other cargo as well. Also, it was capable of fully automated landing, unlike the American Shuttle
From a commercial, ROI standpoint, having %40 of your hardware eventually destroy itself is bad news. Especially since each time your whole enterprise stops for years until you find out what went wrong and fix it.
Nobody is arguing that hardware doesn't eventually fail so I don't know why you mention that.
False. It's not outstandingly good news, not if we want to become multi-planetary in short order. We need to get to better than commercial airliner standards quickly.
I'd be curious how many large diameter applications there are. Physically-contrained uses (mirrors & EM dishes), but do those make up that much of the market? And does it make that much of a difference?
I think this is a nod to ESA who has stated they want to build a base on the moon:
http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Ministerial_Council_2016/Moon_Vi...
Elon's message: "Here's the rocket, it costs this much, go build it".
Basically trying to find more ways to monetize BFR.
Olin alum here (and one of the listed founders). The bigger impact of the small graduating class size in this case, rather than extreme statistical outcomes is powerful network effects.
You're more likely to think something a large percentage of your cohort (and people you closely know personally) goes and does is cool, doable and worthwhile. A chunk of your peers at Olin will go found meaningful companies (startups or "just" businesses) and you will think of taking it up too. I never considered being a founder before going, or even most of my life attending Olin, but it became something I considered very seriously and eventually diving into after graduating, and needless to say best choice of my life.
The other cool thing is even if you don't start your own company, you are part of such a small and tight-knit community with all these founders, and founders-to-be! I have personally worked on projects, lived, or had drinks with all but 3 of the founders mentioned in this article, and I am definitely one of the more introverted people who went there.
If you don't mind, can I ask a question about Olin? It looks like it's full of cool kids that make stuff and go on to make more stuff.
My guess is that they only accept kids with a track record of making stuff, like the kids that are in the robotics club.
I've got a sharp kid who I would like to turn into a maker kid but he's currently not that kid. He's a math guy, wants to try and get a PhD in math. I'd be happier for him if he became a maker of things, that's what I am and it's worked out well for me, both financially and it was satisfying.
So I'm wondering if Olin would take on a kid and try and form them into a maker or is that just asking way too much. His GPA is so so, 3.6 something, his ACT is 32 I think, I know the math part was 34. That was his only try at the ACT, he can do better. He's taking a gap year and working on retaking the ACT, he's shooting for a 34-35 overall.
Thanks for any insight and congrats on going to that college, it looks sweet!
Unrelated, but as someone who has experienced much distress over what my parents would be 'happy for me to be' I find that language super creepy. DEFINITELY not trying to attack you or even suggest that what I am about to say is the case for you, just saying I hear that language and go straight to the image of someone projecting their own desires onto someone else possibly to their detriment.
Yeah, you are right. I certainly wasn't trying to be creepy and you can rest easy that I haven't pushed my kids like I was pushed (in fact the kid in question regrets that I didn't push him).
I just am dismayed that my kids don't build stuff. Building stuff has brought me so much pleasure and satisfaction. I want that for them, for their happiness, not mine. I'll be gone one day and I want them to be good whatever they do.
Olin alum here - in my graduating class (2013), a majority seemed to have experience "making things" when we entered Olin but there was also a large contingent that was super passionate about and actively pursuing non-engineering activities. I think the admissions teams looks more for passion/hustle/doers than "makers".
Absolutely apply. We have a bunch of people that don't really care about physical stuff at all, and would rather just think about the problems.
That said, the classes aren't going to all be about math and only math, a lot of classes have physical projects. But the projects are tightly integrated with theory. I learned multivariable calculus by modeling a boat with some curves, and then building the boat out of foam to see if the calculated angle at which it tips was the same as reality.
If you kid can get excited about project-based learning, Olin is an awesome option.
I'd be happy to talk to you more if you have more questions.
The simple answer is: your kid should definitely apply.
1) To be completely honest I can't speak to the current admission climate and criteria, I enrolled in 2007 with the 5th class. Things have likely changed a lot (they do when the institute is that young and application and admission demographics change rapidly at this age).
2) Myself, I grew up in a quiet conservative Middle Eastern city (first international cohort rep!), never "made" things that I could put on a resume, and mostly just had solid grades in math/sci/compsci. I had solid SAT scores, never took the ACT, and my GPA was hard to translate (I didn't attend an AP/IB curriculum) for direct comparisons. The admissions team emphasizes that individual scores are of low relevance, as are aggregate GPAs -- Olin is primarily looking for kids who show a passion and/or aptitude in STEM/entrepreneurship which can't always be represented by scores. This is why the final stage of the admission process is a weekend-long in-person interview+team builds+campus tours where they (and you) try to evaluate whether you will survive/flourish/despise Olin's pedagogical practices, and this is ultimately the deciding factor. Parents are welcome.
3) As Olin grows older, the graduating classes have polarized more and more into founders, and pure scientists. My class ('11) had ~35% join PhD programs in everything from solar power to cancer biology, over half with prestigious grants such as NSF. And more people are becoming not only founders, but embarking on various philanthropic and/or entrepreneurial journeys, from SV startups to building solar cookers in West Africa. This is a shift away from joining Google/Microsoft/Facebook/IBM/etc, which clumped was previously the largest cohort of a graduating class (and has shrunk to ~20% now).
The hypothesis is that both these people are actually the same -- they absorb skills, look at the world, try to reason from first principles and their recently gained knowledge whether something could/should exist and improve human lives, and then just goes and does it. Pure academics is the long-term pursuit of human improvement, contributing to the greater corpus of human awareness, and entrepreneurship/makerhood is the near-term, fast-moving version. They are just essentially the same mindset applied on different timeframes.
My point is that I think you shouldn't worry about which of these perspectives he pursues at this point -- if he's the kind of kid who'll like it at Olin (he may not), the path he'll eventually take will be influenced by where he feels he can contribute the most effectively. Olin will give him some exposure to more people on the maker-side of that spectrum.
My question when I first saw this was where do you get such jet engines? They look small enough to be from any kind of plane/UAV, but also quite large for any small model aircraft.
I wonder how easy it is to get one, do you by any chance need any sort of special license to operate them?
It's worth noting that these jet engines are actually just car/truck turbo chargers that were repurposed and placed in a relatively simple combustion sleeve. You can actually build your own fairly easily with little more than a trip to the junk yard.
Look for model jet engines they get to be surprisingly big. I haven't looked them up in a number of years but I wanted to build a jet powered bike in a previous life and if I remember right the only thing stopping me was price. Also runtime sucked for them all.
I love these things. I love enabling gadgets that enable hobbyists and garage entrepreneurs to do crazy things like this that would normally require a military program to fund.
"So what facts am I missing? What makes it even remotely okay that Musk and Facebook are promising the public telepathy within a few short years?"
The author probably didn't read Tim Urban's WBW article[1]. Elon Musk never claimed that we were going to have telepathy n a few short years but rather that he was hoping that he would have some sort of BCI that would also be used by people who don't have some sort of disability.
"I think we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities."
"And Mark Zuckerberg gave a timeline of about 25 years.
Mark Zuckerberg said: “I would be pretty disappointed if in 25 years we hadn’t made some progress towards thinking things to computers.”"
So I think the whole article has a clickbait-y theme, I would expect something more objective from the MIT Technology Review.
Finally as the author said Musk has indeed missed the deadlines on his achievements, but nonetheless also he manages to go through with his plans, both with SpaceX and with Tesla.
So even though I don't expect the neural lace in "a few short years" I think it will come eventually.
As an anecdote my grandfather born in remote mountain village in mainland Greece in the 1900 was actually registered by his father having been born in 1906 as to avoid being drafted as long as possible to fight in the multiple wars fought at the time. So birth records and certificates from that time are not really trustworthy.