Canada: Conservative to a fault

The local paper has a reprinted article from The Economist with the header of Not on our roads:bureaucrats against electric cars and progress.

Bureaucrats against electric cars, and progress

IN THESE times of high petrol prices and worries about climate change, you might think that any country would be proud to enjoy a lead in manufacturing electric cars. Not Canada, it seems. Two Canadian companies, ZENN Motor Company and Dynasty Electric Car, make small electric cars designed for city use; a third, which will use new battery technology developed by Exxon Mobil, plans to launch a model later this year.

But almost all these “low-speed vehicles” (or LSVs) are exported to the United States because Canada refuses to allow their use on public roads. Transport Canada, the regulatory agency, questions their safety. It doubts they would stand up in a collision with a delivery truck or a sport utility vehicle. Officials say they crash-tested one which didn’t fare well, though they refuse to release the data. The agency wants LSVs confined to “controlled areas”, such as university campuses, military bases, parks and Canada’s few gated communities. Its advice has carried weight with the provinces, which make the rules of the road.

It is true that the cars are made from lightweight metals and plastics. But the manufacturers allege political bias: Stephen Harper’s conservative government has much support in oil-rich Alberta. Backed by thousands of would-be buyers, they are campaigning to reverse the agency’s decision. “It’s a ludicrous regulatory situation. All you can point to is oil and the big guys and think there’s a conspiracy somewhere,” says Danny Epp of Dynasty.

Mr Epp reckons that his car should be allowed on urban streets with speed limits of around 50kph (30mph) or less. But Dynasty recently gave up the battle. In March it announced that it is being bought by a Pakistani firm, which will move production to Karachi and export to the United States from there.

ZENN—that stands for zero emission, no noise—promises to fight on. Ian Clifford, its boss, points out that there has not been a single death related to LSVs in the United States, where 44 states allow them and some 45,000 such cars are in use. And gas-guzzlers imperil public safety by polluting the air, he notes. But Mr Clifford is not expecting change soon. He claims that his campaign against Transport Canada has made him enemies. “Two senior, entrenched bureaucrats have told me personally that if it is the last thing they do, they’ll keep LSVs off the road in Canada,” he says.

Alright, I’m not going to blame this one entirely on the government; the bureaucrats in question are not necessarily Conservatives but I will imagine a hefty boot being hurled toward the capital buildings nonetheless.

Unfortunately this just sounds like more of the same from the entrenched auto interests who have to be among the most out of touch industries operating today. Everything about current auto design flies in the face of rising energy prices and just plain common sense.

Owning a car means not only paying higher fuel prices every year especially now that they are beginning to reflect reality but every higher prices for any repairs to these absurdly fragile cars. Every day I seem to pass another traffic slowdown because two people are comparing some small dent because it could very well translate into thousands of dollars. Not long ago our cars were made of much stronger stuff.

In the article above, we have corrupt officials denying the future on the basis of the cars not standing up to being hit by SUVs. I have a Hyundai and I don’t think it would fare much better. But that’s not the point. What I propose instead of making the environment and small car owners carry the cost, place the onus on the big vehicles. Ask them to pay a premium for their increased drag on the environment, increased demands on all resources including roads, and increased potential to do damage. Asking the small cars to step aside is blaming the victim.

Do we not want to encourage small vehicle ownership? It does benefit us all.

Keep the parking stalls small, and the lanes narrow. Make the big guys work for it. From where I sit in my little thing, I see too many who cannot make a proper turn with their outsized cartoons of transport. Open the gates for all alternative modes whether bicycles or segways.

That’s my idea if we still have the metal cars. What we really need are to turn transport into plush. Remove the ego and the hardness, and make everybody drive around in Fisher Price knockoffs….bouncing off each other….nobody gets hurt and aggressive dicks can beat their fists within the confines of bright pink gel bots.

How we count, and how we count, and Simpsons too.

How body movements can help arithmetic

Even for a simple counting task, pointing at the things we count makes it easier. But once again the question arises: how is it that simply pointing at things helps us count?

When viewers weren’t allowed to point, they nearly always nodded as they counted. What’s more, non-pointers who nodded were significantly more accurate than non-nodders. It’s beginning to look like the body movements themselves are somehow assisting in the counting process.

Could it be that the physical movement works like an abacus, actually totting up or simply that the extra movement provide a deeper processing. Other research has found that the more modalities involved in memorizing the more successful it might be.

What Makes the Average German Tick?

To keep its reputation alive as an “idea factory,” four years ago the agency came up with the concept of creating the Müllers’ living room. Using mountains of statistical data, survey results, opinion polls, sales figures, together with home interviews with 20 real families, they built the average German living room, complete with the most popular German wallpaper, indoor plants and knickknacks on the sideboard. Jung von Matt’s creative and strategic teams now use the space for meetings. It gives them the sense that they are talking shop in the middle of the average German life, while gazing at the walls of the average German living room.

Anyone entering the room has the eerie sense that its occupants have left it only moments earlier, perhaps to make a sandwich in the kitchen or walk down to the basement to put the laundry in the dryer. But there is no kitchen or basement.

The room is updated periodically to conform to the latest trends and news headlines. Trainees at Jung von Matt double as “living room attendants.” Their job includes making sure that the TV program guide is always opened to the correct page, the plants are kept watered and the books on the shelves are current. “Moppel-Ich,” a bestselling diet book, was added in recent years (for Sabine Müller), along with the latest installments of the Harry Potter series, a book on the pleasures of quitting smoking, a smattering of popular self-help books and the latest bestsellers, next to a travel guide for the Mediterranean tourist haven of Mallorca — a little light reading for husband Thomas.

Average Germans Thomas and Sabine like to paint their walls yellow and decorate them with pictures of family and animals. A small collection of stuffed animals lined up on the back of the sofa provides the necessary dose of coziness.

Knowing all of these intimate details is as important to advertising agencies as it is to the companies that are their clients — because the average German rules the country’s economy, determining what is purchased and what is produced. Political parties are also keenly interested in finding out what Thomas and Sabine Müller are thinking and what they want out of life. Politicians want to be there for the Müllers, or at least create the impression that they identify with the typical German voter. Everything about their politics is geared toward the average voter at the political center, even though the center is gradually shrinking. And anyone in the media who fails to take note of what the average German likes to listen to, read and watch is doomed to fail.

Now, for me, this would make an interesting reality show where what you would be watching is a constantly updated statistical average. It would let you see where and how far you deviate from the norm and for those who care, it would be a way of making sure they stay on track. The downside is that if it became popular it might actually accentuate the means and further homogenize the population.

The house pictured above is the Simpsons house if it were real (an unfortunate average if it is). Here are a few more from there - from Geekologie

Revenge, violence, fear and risk

From the New Yorker

Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.

See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.

I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.

Food crisis

From the NYT

- Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger:

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

and

The Poor Eat Mud

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

At Der Spiegel

- The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis, we have another part of the story.

Commodity speculation spread long ago from standard products like oil and gold to anything edible and available for trade on the Chicago Futures Exchange. These days there are futures contracts for everything from wheat to oranges to pork bellies. The futures market is a traditional tool for farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time. In a futures contract, quantities, prices and delivery dates are fixed, sometimes even before crops have been planted. Futures contracts allow farmers and grain wholesalers a measure of protection against adverse weather conditions and excessive price fluctuations. They can also help a farmer plan how much to plant for a given year.

The Chicago Board of Trade is the nerve center for global futures contracts.
But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.

Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.

Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.

“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”

He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”

Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.

Capitalism is literally consuming itself.

Electronic nomads

The Economist has a special report out on nomadism, that is the current move towards virtual interaction and liberating oneself from being specifically located. Its a report that is full of interesting observations and ideas, and though what I’ve pulled out below might seem about threats to society, the report as a whole is rather evenhanded (as The Economist is to a fault) and makes sure to state that all technologies during their ingestion periods are regarded with suspicion.

From the Economist.com: Special report on Nomadism: Family Ties

But such communications go far beyond the merely utilitarian. Manuel Castells, the sociologist at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that mobile technology affects children the most. On one hand, adolescents today become socially autonomous earlier than their parents did, “building their own communities from the bottom up” through constant text-messaging and photo-sharing among their clique, even if this circumvents the wishes of their parents. On the other hand, they also have their parents on speed-dial, and are only one button away from help if they get into trouble. Mr Castells calls this a “safe autonomy pattern”.

This has some sociologists concerned. James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobile phone a new sort of umbilical cord between children and their parents and wonders whether this might in some cases “retard maturation”. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist at MIT, says that wireless gadgets are, ironically, a “tethering technology” and create new dependencies that delay the important “Huck Finn moment” in young lives when adolescents first realise that they are alone on the urban equivalent of the Mississippi. Getting drunk and lost after a party is different when one push of a button summons the parental chauffeur. In 2005 a psychology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont found that undergraduates were communicating with their parents, on average, more than ten times a week.

The potential problem with connected presence is that it usually excludes other people who may be physically present. In situations that might once have been an opportunity to talk to a stranger—waiting for a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say—people now fill the time with a few messages to parents, lovers or friends. This strengthens the strong ties, but weakens, or even cuts, the weak ties in society. In some cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to “bounded solidarity”, when cliques become so turned in on themselves that they all but stop interacting with the wider society around them.

The weak ties referred to came to prominence a few years ago when a study found that wellbeing was somewhat dependent on weak ties, that is, ties with acquaintances, those friendly daily presences such as the person you get coffee from, people with whom you interact on a superficial but warm level. It was felt that these could be as or even more important than the strong ties in life.

I think I agree that this erosion is a bad one. When you move somewhere the first thing you do is build up these weak ties. They are relatively easy and they form the basis for stronger ties. They are usually calm and without the potential stress of familial relationships and may in fact be an oasis from those, a way of having company without really having it.

But all in all, the danger is simply that groups cohere weakly and spontaneously wherever people gather. And it is through these chance encounters and unusual formations that one learns empathy. Many contemporary forces fragment the social order, both isolating and strengthening the class experience to the detriment of communitarian action.

Probably the single most common etiquette conflict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it, when mediated communication interrupts co-present communication, as when two or more people are sitting at a table in conversation or negotiation and one of them gets, and answers, a call. The other co-present people must now keep themselves busy while seeming nonchalant. What is more, they must pretend not to be eavesdropping even though they are only a few feet away from the mediated conversation, ideally by assuming a pose of concentration on some other object, such as their fingernails or their own phone. As soon as the intervening call ends, everybody must try to re-enter the co-present context as gracefully as possible.

We’ve all had this experience. Not long ago I was in an airport awaiting a flight and listening without wanting to, to a man discussing his father’s hospital stay over the phone to someone. I’m sure that even though he had made all the rather intimate details public, he would have felt insulted and intruded upon, had I given an opinion to his discourse.

I have three thoughts about this. The first is I wonder if this is paralleled in any way by earlier days where servants were expected “not to hear” their betters. And second, I feel insulted by this, because it implies that I am not there. Third, I’ve found that when people keep their mouths shut or say little they seem more intelligent, and very few cell phone conversations I have overheard have changed the truth of that statement. In most cases, someone who I thought was a reasonable human being showed themselves to be overly pompous (these are the ones who need to let the public know that they are busy and important people) or consumed by the need to yack if there was ever more than a minute or two to wait.

From the Economist.com: Special report on Nomadism: Homo mobilis

This criticism dovetails strikingly with what other sociologists and psychologists are observing in the interpersonal behaviour of some nomads. Older people use their mobile phones to “micro-co-ordinate” with partners during the day in order to run their errands more efficiently and perhaps to spend more time together as a result. But many younger people, who have never known paper diaries or an unconnected world, micro-co-ordinate in order to avoid committing themselves to any fixed meeting time, location or person at all. After all, a better opportunity might yet present itself.

My brother told me that when he was in South Korea (well known for cell phone mania) he drove his colleagues insane by not having a cell phone. He said it annoyed them because then they could not call him at the last minute to manipulate the agreed upon meeting time. Having a cell phone meant never having to be on time, or never to show up for certain.

Three course post: Gordon Ramsay, vegetarians and solid cocktails

Too Much Heat in the TV Kitchen

“You read Rolling Stone and you don’t see rock stars curse like this,” said the chef ,Tom Colicchio, the lead judge of “Top Chef.” “And it’s recent, too. It’s something you’ve seen just in the past year.”

Worth reading, all about keeping the bleeper busy for the ratings to stay high. Ramsay is so known for his tirades that it was news a while back that he could calmly show you how to stove top a steak without losing it. He passed for normal, and that was news.

Some Vegetarian Statistics

Being vegetarian-inclined is like a sorority pledge claiming that they still believe in their virginity and sobriety even after having a drunken tryst with Todd, the Sigma Kappa who got them into the mixer at no charge. It’s a nice thought that may let folks sleep easier at night. But let’s be clear - there’s already a word for someone who is ‘vegetarian-inclined’. It’s called an “omnivore” and it represents 96.8% of the rest of the country.

This one is fun because it led to quite the little comment flurry rightly castigating the writer for not acknowledging that there was a world of difference between someone who ate meat once a month and someone who ate it a few times a day.

a very interesting meal with lovely photos

These are solid cocktails; other unusual creations manifest themselves in this adventure from the Wandering Eater.

The Onion, plastic surgery, the law and seeking abortion

Every couple of weeks or so, the Onion strikes gold:

Oprah Launches Own Reality

(CHICAGO)—Calling it the next logical step in her celebrated career, and a groundbreaking achievement in applied quantum field theory, media giant Oprah Winfrey unveiled her latest project Monday: a completely separate realm of existence, known as OpraH, which she will control on the subatomic level.

“Now, Oprah’s always on!” Winfrey said through an interspatial image of herself broadcast between her world and ours. “I’ve created a place where anyone can come to share and laugh and feel totally free from the conventional laws of the physical universe.”

“I invite you all to be guests in my new reality,” she added.

This latest addition to Winfrey’s empire—which already includes her flagship talk show, a reality TV program, an influential book club, O magazine, the thoughts and emotions of millions of viewers, and two television networks—is Oprah’s first foray into large-scale nucleosynthesis. Developed over the past three years by the theoretical physics wing of her company, Harpo Productions, >OpraH was reportedly created by tearing a small hole in the fabric of known reality. The talk-show host then went about restructuring an infinite number of never-before-seen particles to produce a separate dimension, which is currently oscillating around Chicago.

According to her aides, Winfrey was personally involved in the most minute details of planning, from the type of coffee served in the green room of her new studio facility to the genetic makeup of every organism she deemed worthy of receiving life.

Plastic surgery book

Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a renowned plastic surgeon, wrote My Beautiful Mommy to help patients explain their transformation to their children. The story guides children through Mommy’s surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way.

This has been news here and there in the blogosphere: yes, I suppose why not have a book explaining what could be a confusing time but its been pointed out that there is no questioning of the procedure itself. Nothing wrong with a nip and tuck for mommy but there just might be cause for concern if its passed off as either necessary or as anything but cosmetic. “And now you have even a better mommy” sort of talk.

Oregon: our laws are copyrighted and you can’t publish them

This is rather insane. As I understand it, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Kind of get you coming and going then. You’d think if you want people to abide by laws which supposedly are devised to make society run more smoothly and equitably that you would let people know what those laws actually are.

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.”

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

Won’t let you know the laws, and won’t give you information; only in China you say?

Mostly the New York Times

Good weekend reading over at the NYT

1. A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream

This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center. They spent five years studying noise levels across the city and concluded in a report issued this year that the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away, said Mustafa el Sayyid, an engineer who helped carry out the study.

But that 85 decibels, while “clearly unacceptable,” is only the average across the day and across the city. At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.

I was thinking of one brother who spent a very strange year in Egypt and then another who reported back from his trip in South Asia that a typical Thai restaurant had to have a full volume blaring televlsion set that no one paid any attention to. This was particularly galling to him in that, though he shares my distaste for urban noise and especially horrid music in commercial or public areas, he is so indisposed by this that he finds he can only feel calm living in the mountains. And that is where he has been for years, apart from the near annual trip over the ocean to somewhere.

2. Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

About a Nokia user-anthropologist who travels the world looking for innovative design solutions based on how people actually do things, and see how they use products in unintended ways (naturally focussing on cellphones). Like this but took exception to the statement, which might be true, but kind of sad, that “in an increasingly transient world the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.” This too reminded me of my first mentioned brother’s reports from Egypt, and later Korea, about the cellphone madness in other lands where people obsessed about which model they had, and the topic of conversation was usually the phone itself. Come to think of it, we’re kind of going that way.

In this respect I remain actively Luddite and only when I am dead, or cells actually do become cheaper in which case it will stay in my house almost always, will they pry the landline from me. I have railed before and will again about the tyranny of technology. How it drops ever more filters between us and the life around us, how it fools us into thinking we are more important than the world, that we are the center because we can carry everything with us. I try to limit my labour saving devices, and my access to certain things so that I do go without sometimes, just so that something unexpected might happen. I don’t like a scheduled life and the cell phone is a step in that direction.

Starting a new blog

Hey folks, for those of you who care, and few though you may be, I thought it worth a notice. I have decided to launch a new blog, one about the structures in my “fair” city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I am still crafting my monumental introductory post but the essence is this: all cities are composed of good and bad buildings and not too much is said about these things that we must pass by every day. My city is more bad than good, and the certainty of that comes from travel, from seeing alternative and much more interesting and pleasing solutions to that basic need of putting a roof over your head. But though I live in dross for the most part, I will try to laud as much as brickbat; I will do my best to praise what I can. And partly because I would like to see more of it.

Though much of it will be based on my pedestrian photographs of local sites, I will go afield as well partly so I can compare, and just to keep the blog a little varied. I will be asking for people to send in photos of buildings they love or hate, and I hope we get some provocative discussion going..after all we have to live with this stuff, might as well think about it too. And if someone sends me an image of a cool or not so cool building in Kuala Lumpor or Portland or Naiorobi, we’ll play with that.

Anyway, once its on its way, I will let you know, and though I will try to do a daily or bi-daily post, I do work full time so its not a promise, and I have to keep this one (and a couple of others) going as well.

To meat again

This might be an actual cultural turning point. April 9-11 of 2008 is the date of the First In Vitro Meat Consortium Symposium. Yes, folks, meat in a vat. Of course, there will be millions of dollars spent on how to come up with much more palatable descriptions. Rather than stick with the idea of just replacing our traditional meats with mock or faux versions, some have suggested we should forge ahead and just create new foods which happen to be meatlike.

In fact, as reported, its not that hard to make minced or mashed like meats but things like steaks are difficult since they haven’t yet figured out how to grow blood veins amongst other things, just one of the components of what makes a steak. So far its just the disky sorts of things above. But just wait.

The potential is beyond imagining. A new food source which would be much kinder to the environment, which would not necessitate slaughterhouses, which would be free of the impurities that all natural foods come with, and new tastes. One of the questions too is whether vegans and vegetarians would come into the new pretend meat palace.

For the time being though, at the conference, they still had to send out for vittles.

Now, we await the dreamers, those who will take this knowledge and create great things.