Juggling Dynamite

Over the years, I have heard some say that if people don’t know what they want to do as a career they should not waste time studying. I have always thought this was incredibly short-sighted. The brain is like a muscle: the more we feed it, the more we train it, the more we grow it, the more we can become. Diverse experience is a form of cross-training the brain. The more diverse the experience and study, the more robust and imaginative the thinking can be.

Here is a direct video link.

I interviewed Maya on her work in January see: Teenage scientist, inventor and entrepreneur Maya Burhanpurkar.

Once we stop looking to banksters to solve the problems (they helped create) we can focus on what true life-improving innovations look like. Yes we can.

A soccer ball that generates electricity to help light African homes won recognition in the sixth annual Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards.

The ball, developed by Jessica Lin, Jessica O. Matthews, Julia Silverman, and Hemali Thakkar, when they were still undergraduates at Harvard University can generate enough energy during 15 minutes of play to provide three hours of LED light, which could come in handy in sub-Saharan Africa, where less than 25 percent of the population has reliable electricity. Here is a direct video link.

Flaherty has been typical of global financial policy makers over the past 8 years: add debt and stir, then exit back to the private sector to sell your insider knowledge.

I will always remember Mr. Flaherty for his cheerful announcement in 2006 that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Company under his watch would be underwriting zero-down, 40 year amortization mortgages even while the US housing market was already in the early stages of imploding from similar government-backed policies.  Already high, Canadian realty prices soared into the stratosphere since 2006, even as Flaherty repeatedly backtracked and introduced a series of slow moving measures to tighten the mortgage market.  To little avail:  in 2014 Canada holds the distinction of having the most over-valuated housing market in the world.   Like former BOC head Mark Carney, Flaherty is wise to go before the bubble bursts I suppose…See:  10 charts that sum up the Flaherty years