e-voke : 2006

Anousheh Ansari recently went to the Space Station… she was the first female/iranian space tourist. She was also the first person to blog from space...here are some interesting bits from her her blog entry Thank God for Velcro

Here are some excerpts..

When you open a bag of soft food like yogurt or soup, if you are not really really careful, small yogurt bubbles or soup bubbles start floating around and then you can catch them with your spoon. But if you try to catch them too fast, one bubble hits your spoon and becomes 10 smaller bubbles and now you have to catch ten of them!
I guess the closest thing to moving in weightlessness is floating in water. But there is a major difference. In water when you move your arms and legs, you move… in here you can move your arms and legs all you want, but you are not going anywhere.
So God invented Velcro for this very purpose… to keep things in place in weightlessness. Everything here has Velcro attached to it…even your pants have Velcro strips. I thought things could be secured if I put them in my pockets and closed the zipper. Well they are secured until you open the zipper and take one out… here comes the other small items flying out..

http://spaceblog.xprize.org/
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/our-call-from-space.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMghHs-DwvM

Here is a very interesting article on The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters by Malcolm Gladwell which I think gives great insight into how to raise kids..

Some of the interesting tit-bits..

A study of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just 34 percent had been considered in any way precocious as children
What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.
A study comparing French-speaking Swiss children, who are taught to read early, with German-speaking Swiss children, who are taught to read later but show far fewer learning problems than their French-speaking counterparts.
The young Mozart’s prowess can be chalked up to practice, practice, practice. Compelled to practice three hours a day from age three on, by age six the young Wolfgang had logged an astonishing 3,500 hours — “three times more than anybody else in his peer group. No wonder they thought he was a genius.” So Mozart’s famous precociousness as a musician was not innate musical ability but rather his ability to work hard, and circumstances (i.e., his father) that pushed him to do so.