Interesting post. It seems the guy was inspired by the breakup with his girlfriend into putting the hours in. I would argue that initiative is as important as effort - no one wants the world to fall down around them in order to force them into action.
Good article with quite a list of 'free things'. Surprised it missed putting Skype on your mobile (cell phone) - especially useful for international collaborations.
if you did that, obese kids would be the norm, school (if kids went at all) would end up teaching the finer points of getting to the next level of supermario. Kids need guidance, but also a forum for innovation.
i think you missed the subtlety of travisjeffery's post. the montessori method of teaching is all about "Let your kids do what they want to do.". most young children have a natural "i'm full" signal that prevents obesity (any parent knows this). most kids are naturally curious. many of our greatest historical thinkers did not attend school and had lots of "do what you want" time. the "let kids do what they want" works surprisingly well when they have opportunities to explore and good role models.
my only other addition to the travisjefferies post is "and allow children to fail". too often we don't allow children to learn from their failures. this is part of being a "self starter". you don't fear failure because it has happened so many times though personal experimentation that you have an intrinsic understanding that "it's no big deal, i'll eventually figure it out".
Creating amino acids isn't really has difficult as it was thought to be back in the 50's. Amino acids that aren't known on Earth have been found in various meteorites and the like. Although they can be considered bio-markers, they aren't very good ones.
A friend of mine once argued that alcohol boosted brain performance; it went something like this. Alcohol kills brain cells. Darwin's theory implies that the weakest and slowest to adapt will be the first to die out. Thus: Drinking alcohol kills weaker brain cells and boosts brain performance.
Does that mean that women are smarter than men because more of their braincells get killed (or shrunk) according to this research?
Not sure that works. Remember, a neuron is a relatively simple mechanism. It is just that a bunch of them together make one "smart" or whatever. So alcohol's wanton destruction of neurons is only destructive I would think, because there are not "stronger" vs. "weaker" neurons. They are all pretty much the same, simple mechanisms. The more the better, and so killing some of them off just can't be good, I don't think. I am not a doctor but I do know neurons are fairly simple. They fire if a "threshold" of electric potential is exceeded, else they don't. They are simple, stupid, binary mechanisms. But put lots of them together and you eventually get Einstein. So killing neurons can only be bad I think.
Surely taking the best of a lot ideas and putting them into one browser is a good thing. That's how processes become streamlined and businesses flourish.
