Month: November 2014

Cooking Alinea

Allen Hemberger cooked his way through one of the most complex cookbooks out there, the Alinea cookbook. Aside from the chefs who work in the kitchen there, Hemberger’s probably the only person to have made every single recipe. These recipes aren’t easy

Amazing Randi

For almost 60 years, he has been offering up a cash reward to anyone who could demonstrate scientific evidence of paranormal activity, and no one had ever received a single penny. But he hates to see them lose. “They’re always rationalizing. There are always reasons prevailing why they can’t do it. They call it the resilience of the duped. It’s with intense regret that you watch them go down the tubes.”

Wealth and Happiness

In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. “All needed 2-3x more than they had to feel happier”. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. “While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness, spending it on others increases happiness.”

Dementia Village

Today, the isolated village of Hogewey lies on the outskirts of Amsterdam in the small town of Wheesp. Hogewey is a cutting-edge elderly-care facility where residents are given the chance to live seemingly normal lives. With only 152 inhabitants, it’s run like a more benevolent version of The Truman Show, if The Truman Show were about dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Like most small villages, it has its own town square, theater, garden, and post office. Unlike typical villages, however, this one has cameras monitoring residents every hour of every day, caretakers posing in street clothes, and only 1 door in and out of town, all part of a security system designed to keep the community safe. Friends and family are encouraged to visit. Some come every day. Residents at Hogewey require fewer medications, eat better, live longer, and appear more joyful than those in standard elderly-care facilities.

Bioeconomy Capital

I am pleased to announce the launch of Bioeconomy Capital. Our investments so far are:

Riffyn, which is building software that provides experimental process design and analytics software to improve reproducibility and tech transfer in life science and materials R&D;
Synthace, which is increasing the reliability, quality, and scale of biological science;
RoosterBio, which is is creating exponential advances in stem cell manufacturing to provide raw materials for cell-based therapies, biofabrication, and cellular ink for 3D BioPrinting.

Lantern

Anonymous portable library that constantly receives free data from space

Lantern continuously receives radio waves broadcast by Outernet from space. Lantern turns the signal into digital files, like webpages, news articles, ebooks, videos, and music. Lantern can receive and store any type of digital file on its internal drive. To view the content stored in Lantern, turn on the Wifi hotspot and connect to Lantern with any Wifi enabled device. All you need is a browser.

Creating healthy cravings

a new form of gentrification! just kidding, this could be awesome if it works. color me skeptical though, it looks more like a design school “concept” than a real thing.

A start-up will contribute an interesting answer to the million-dollar food-policy question: If healthy food was as easy as junk food, would we eat more of it? The salads are made from high-end ingredients like blueberries, kale, fennel, and pineapple. Each one comes out in a plastic mason jar, its elements all glistening in neat layers, the way fossils might look if the Earth had been created by meticulous vegans. They cost $1. The salad machine goal is to offer workers a fast, healthy lunch option in areas where there’s a dearth of restaurants. Instead of popping into McDonalds out of desperation, they can simply grab salads from their buildings’ lobbies and eat them back at their desks.