Maybe I haven’t been home to Minnesota in a while, but I was rather surprised to read the Minneapolis/St. Paul has been ranked by Forbes magazine as the 2nd “Drunkest City” in the USA. (Milwaukee beating it out for first place.)
Seriously? I would have thought a city like New York, with all-night clubs and public transportation would have taken it from a Midwest city. Then again, there’s not much else to do on a string of cold, winter nights!
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting blog on wealthy people, and there’s an interesting post yesterday about “Where will all the mansions go?”
I’ve thought about this a bit because it’s something you see here in the UK all the time. Amazing houses were built by ridiculously rich people over the past several hundreds of years. They used to be virtual cities in and of themselves, because of the servants required. (Have you seen Gosford Park
It’s fascinating to me that wealth lasts so few generations, largely because the work ethic of a generation isn’t passed down or is just lost over the course of a couple of generations.
At the same time, I have a friend who does wealth management for these kinds of families. One of his clients made their money over a thousand years ago, and has kept it in the family. Amazing! The discipline to do this is incredible, and relies on only one child ever getting the inheritance. (The rest get a pittance.) Then for that one child not to spoil it over 30 generations is again amazing.
Makes me remember that the best thing you can do for your family is to raise your children with a healthy perspective on life, family, work and money.
From John Maeda…
While on vacation I found a book in the house I was renting with a little note enscribed in the margin:
When you’re green you grow.
When you’re ripe you rot.Finding this quote was quite heartening as it validated my own philosophy of life. When I know something well, I stop doing it in search of something that I don’t know at all. My teachers always recommended that I just do one single thing well and be really really good at it. I now know I did not choose that route for a simple reason — to be green forever. But Kermit the frog was right: “It really isn’t easy to be green.”
This video is exactly what commenting on most blogs is like.
In honor of that, comments on this post are closed. 
So I’ve been a big fan of SpaceX for a while, and even considered trying to get a job there at one point. I’m on their mailing list, and they just released a huge project update with lots of fantastic photos.
Check out the SpaceX Updates page for more details.
But get a load of the new rocket they’re building:
It is important to appreciate that the Falcon 9 is a *big* vehicle. To give you a sense of scale, it stands about 18 stories (54 meters) tall on the launch pad and has a cargo area in the nose that is 17 feet in diameter and 50 feet long – big enough to carry a bus to orbit. Falcon 9 has a maximum thrust of just over one million pounds, which is four times the maximum thrust of a Boeing 747. The Falcon 9 Heavy, which I expect will fly about two years after the standard Falcon 9, will have over three million pounds of thrust, which is almost halfway to a Saturn V.
Wow!
Another great quote I saw today on Twitter:
I wonder how different the world might look if the default ‘new meeting’ time in calendar programs were 10 minutes instead of 1 hour.
How true is that?
I think I first saw this on Tom Peter’s Blog.
Hall of Fame basketball player Larry Bird was once asked what he wanted his epitaph to be; surprisingly, he said that he wanted to have played as hard at practices where not a soul was in attendance as in Game 7 of a World Championship series. Nice.
That’s something I occasionally need to remind myself on weekend outings.
I wanted to make this video the first real post to my blog. It’s Sir Ken Robinson, a British creativity guru, talking at the TED conference in 2006.
Watch it, download it here, and tell other people about it. It’s fascinating and inspirational.
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