How its Made - Fountain Pens

CHANGE THE WORLD. DROP OUT OF SCHOOL

Follow @thnk_org
PEOPLE | When you’re super smart and want to learn – or simply don’t fit the mold – what other choice do you have? Some of the world’s greatest creative leaders didn’t have the patience to earn their degree. They dropped out, found a way to create the type of education they needed. And changed our world.

School’s not for everyone. All that linear thinking and standardized examination. Looking at the article “8 famous Harvard drop outs not named Gates or Zuckerberg”, you see an impressive list of people who just didn’t fit in, and yet made it somehow. On their own, or with some help.

Edwin Land, co-founder of Polaroid, dropped out to focus on research. In his lifetime he had registered than 500 patents and introduced the world to instant photography. Then there’s Buckminster Fuller, certainly one of the geniuses of the 20th century. He dropped out, went back, got bored and dropped out again. And went on to invent the geodesic dome.

Interestingly enough, once they’d proven themselves to the world, many of these dropouts later received honorary degrees. Not to bash Harvard, but it’s as if they wanted to claim credit retroactively for creating these innovative souls.

It’s tempting to think of what Bucky and Bill and Edwin would have been able to achieve had their education better suited their needs. Perhaps a single institution wasn’t enough – or maybe the concept “institution” is all wrong, and these famous dropouts had to drop out in order to find the various bits and pieces of education and inspiration and experimentation they needed to achieve that gut feeling we call “vision”.

Dropping out is nothing new. In fact, it seems like a good old tradition in some worlds. Back in 1962, TIME magazine’s list of famous dropouts included astronauts Scott Carpenter and John Glenn, President John F Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Frost, Nobel Prize in Literature winner, William Faulkner…

If that’s the company dropouts are keeping, count me in!

“College psychiatrists by no means disapprove of all dropouts,” the 1962 Time article says. “If dropouts lack ‘motivation,’ it may be a healthy reaction against too many rules and goals that—for them—are momentarily false.” And perhaps dropping out actually provided the motivation needed to look elsewhere for a satisfactory learning experience, and the chance to create something no one every imagined possible.

Image: Buckminster Fuller stamp issued by the US Post Office

Author: Claire Taylor
Date: September 16th, 2011

Read the article and find interesting links here.

In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

Business Day In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column By STEVE LOHR Published: September 10, 2011 Using more than a decade of research, a start-up company is taking computer-generated news articles to a more sophisticated level. Read the full article here.

In Celebration of the 45th anniversary of Star Trek

Which was yesterday, the 8th of September!

From Scroll to Screen

BOOKS
From Scroll to Screen
By LEV GROSSMAN
Published: September 2, 2011
Centuries before e-books changed the way people read, the codex replaced the scroll.

Click the title to read the article

This guy is a riot. I read about his slingshot channel in this month's issue of 'Wired'. Here's one to get you started:



I remember my father making me a 'machine gun' slingshot when I was a boy. It only fired one rubberband at a time, but it looked like a machine gun, including a removable 'clip'. :-) I wish I'd kept it!

Snail Mail My Email

This project only runs until August 15th.

BBC News - Japan tsunami battered ice shelf in Antarctic

BBC News - Japan tsunami battered ice shelf in Antarctic

Fountain of imagination and joy in the hand - Opinion - Editorial - General - The Canberra Times

File photo: Getty

"It's true that fountain pens are anachronistic: relics of an age before television and radio, let alone internet and mobile phones. Moreover, they have acquired a certain status. For my parents' generation, they evoke ink-spills, exercise books and schoolroom whippings. Nowadays, they are a mark of wealth or style, particularly if they are topped by Mont Blanc's white snowflake. But my pen is not primarily a status symbol. It is a simple, useful tool..."

Click the title to read the rest of the editorial

When Data Disappears

When Data Disappears
By KARI KRAUS
Published: August 6, 2011
To avoid a “digital dark age,” we have to rethink preservation.

LAST spring, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the papers of Bruce Sterling, a renowned science fiction writer and futurist. But not a single floppy disk or CD-ROM was included among his notes and manuscripts. When pressed to explain why, the prophet of high-tech said digital preservation was doomed to fail. “There are forms of media which are just inherently unstable,” he said, “and the attempt to stabilize them is like the attempt to go out and stabilize the corkboard at the laundromat.”

Click title to read full article