Month: November 2018

College of Extraordinary Experiences

COEE is at minimum 3 things: a College, an Extraordinary Experience, and a Community. First, it’s a full-fledged College: a place for higher education and intellectual discourse, offering hands-on, real-world crash courses on Experience Design. Following 3 guiding principles — Rapid Prototyping, Co-Creation, and Flexible Focus — this intense 5-day event has the flavor of an “unconference.” There are a few loosely structured activities, as the core of the program is a co-created and co-designed immersive learning space. Information, ideas and practices flow among participants through facilitated group discussions, thought-provoking workshops (where PowerPoint presentations are adamantly banned), and impromptu conversations. One wishes all learning was as enjoyable, and all enjoyment as profound. Second, like a nested Russian matryoshka doll, COEE is itself an Extraordinay Experience, self-reflectively focusing on Extraordinary Experiences. It’s like Hogwarts meets Disneyland, thoroughly spiced with Burning Man ethos and costuming. For 5 intense days and nights, you live in a real medieval castle, nestled in gorgeous natural surroundings of breathtaking beauty. Spectacular things happen in this unusual, immersive environment, stimulated by a parade of colorful and wild activities, and playful mind-bending events. You are quickly advised to come to terms with the FOMO syndrome: there is so much going on, you can’t get to, or even see, all of it. You’ll never know when and where the next thing will happen. Whatever is in store for you, however, will certainly deserve the term “extraordinary.”

Boring Prospects

Boring Company has started work on an 29km tunnel in Chicago from downtown to the airport. Successfully completing the airport tunnel will make the tunneling company worth as much as $16B. This valuation will be before any full speed hyperloop implementation. If Boring Company succeeds in lowering the cost of tunneling by 10-100x then they will enable high-speed transportation to be used inside and between cities. This would not only mean capturing most of the existing tunnel and infrastructure projects but increasing the tunneling projects by 100x.

2021-12-17: New tunneling methods are being tried. They’re currently about as fast as Prufrock, the Boring machine (which does 10 m / hour)

Petra, a 3-year-old startup is developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. A mix of gas and heat above 1000 degrees Celsius breaks rock into small pieces. Sensors attached to small rods touch the rock, but the excavation is carried out by the heat and gas. Petra is testing its tunnel-drilling method in a Minnesota quarry on Sioux Quartzite, 8x tougher than most forms of concrete. In the test, Petra says its method is moving through rock at 12 m / hour. Once the rock is broken into tiny pieces, a vacuum is used to suck rock fragments out of the hole.

Mandatory dating class

South Korean universities have courses that make it mandatory for students to date their classmates. Students have to date each other in 3 randomly assigned pairings. Courses on dating, sex, love and relationships are trying to increase coupling and eventually birth rate. Most young korean woman and men don’t want to have kids. They reason it would be too difficult to balance family with work pressures. They would consider trying to have children “if the economic conditions were right.”