Definition of Exponential growth:

An example of linear growth would be if I gave you a dollar every day for thirty days, at the end of the month you would have collected 30 dollars from me.   But with exponential growth, if I would give you one dollar on the first day, the next day it would double and I would give you two, on the next day, four, the next day, eight, and so on.  At the end of the month you would collect over one billion dollars.  Technological advances are growing so fast, they have nearly reached this point of doubling every year.

 The

Exponential 

                     T i m e s

NEWS of our rapid global transformation and the inspired innovators who are helping to solve seemingly unsolvable challenges.   

In these times of exponential change in our global society, it is important that we keep aware of the great good that is occurring all around us… of the inspired people who are rising up with genius solutions to our massive challenges.  It is also wise to keep informed about key issues that threaten our environmental health, our bodily health, and the health of our human soul.  I will be offering these news postings, both the challenges, and potential solutions, in this spirit. ~ Max Strom

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9 April 2012 

This is the World We Live in Now

By Max Strom

"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."  These are the immortal words of Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ as she realized she had arrived in an entirely new and astonishing realty.  But unlike Dorothy, most of us haven’t yet noticed that we live in an extremely different world than we did 20 years ago.  It resembles the old world, but that is partly because some of the new world is intentionally veiled to resemble the old world.  Like with dairy advertisements which depict cows grazing happily on 1940’s styles farms, rather than the massive dust fields and corn-fed lots where they actually exist.  But the other cause of our inability to see the new world is that we ourselves are so accustomed to what used to be, that our minds cannot see what is in front of us.  Like the Aztecs who couldn’t recognize or comprehend what the European ships carrying the conquistadors actually were, we do not perceive how our own world has changed.  After all, food stills come from the market, electricity from the socket, and gasoline from the pump. 

But allow me to pose a question;

What if a device appeared on the market tomorrow that gave you access to virtually all human knowledge?  And what if this device would cost less than $350?

Sounds unbelievable doesn’t it?  Like a science fiction story.  What would you do with it?  Would you get together with your friends and discuss how best to use this device to help better your life and even better the world?  What extraordinary things could you accomplish with that kind of knowledge?  Well, here’s the most incredible part of the story- you probably own one of these devices now.  It’s called a PDA (Personal digital assistant).  That’s right, as futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil has repeatedly pointed out, your iPhone, Blackberry, or laptop has access to virtually all human knowledge.  Search engines such as Google provide you access to encyclopedias, libraries, scientific, government, and philosophical texts from the beginning of the written word up to an hour ago.  So, if you own one of these devices, the question I ask you is - what have you been doing with it?  

Things have changed so fast that we haven’t caught up yet.  And they are changing faster.  So most of us barely put our PDA to use beyond text messages, emails and entertainment.  It is being so underutilized that it’s like we’re using our PDA’s to break open walnuts.  It could work more or less as a hammer; but it has obviously vastly more potential.  Picture one in the hands of Jefferson or Ben Franklin.  They would have believed that they had been given the greatest scientific achievement imaginable.  My point is, since you and I now have access to all knowledge – perhaps we should broaden our view, raise our aim and consider that we now have the capacity to reform, upgrade, and generally improve every aspect of human life.  Many solutions to life’s problems don’t need to be invented; they have already been invented and are in use in other countries.   We don’t have to invent a better train for example, the Germans already have, it’s called the Maglev. The Netherlanders have the most developed bicycle culture in the world, resulting in an exemplary healthy society.  Several countries, like Taiwan have extraordinary health care systems at half the cost of our own in America.  If America would only model these inventions and systems rather then wait to reinvent them we could begin to rapidly improve our society.  And in our spiritual life, we no longer have to travel across the globe to learn about various religious or philosophical teachings.  Fro example, we don’t need to fly to Asia and then hire Sherpas to lead us on foot up to a Tibetan Holy City to study the great teachings of Buddhism.  We can just go to a website as nearly any spiritual or philosophical text ever written can be found now online. We can even watch the Dali Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh on YouTube. 

So the tools we have always wished for are in our hands.  This is the world we live in now, and if knowledge is power, how powerful might we become?  I believe that with this knowledge we can educate and transform ourselves and become a much wiser people.  I believe we can even make a better nation, and world.  Are you ready?

25 March 2012 

For veterans suffering from PTSD, yoga and meditation bring peace of mind

By AUDRA D.S. BURCH
McClatchy Newspapers
Published: Sunday, Mar. 25, 2012 - 1:00 am

from: The Sacramento Bee

MIAMI -- One week into his second tour of duty, U.S. Marines Sgt. Hugo Patrocinio was wounded by a suicide bomber who drove a dump truck stocked with 1,000 pounds of explosives into a house in Anbar, on the outskirts of Fallujah. He had been attacked before, hurt before, but this time Patrocinio was just 20 feet from the explosion.

He would eventually recover from the wounds - the shrapnel in his foot and leg, the severe concussion - but the psychological injuries lingered. His nights were soon crowded with re-runs of the bombing that injured 10 other platoon members. Often, he didn't sleep at all, tormented by searing memories of friends killed in the war. He was angry, prone to headaches and mood swings, one of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the masked casualties of war.

In the 18 months of Patrocinio's spiral, he eventually turned to yoga after learning about it during group therapy as a way to quiet the inner noise. He found the discipline, the poses, the breathing - and especially, the stillness - worked to restore what had been taken that July in 2006.

"I didn't understand yoga but I knew it was helping somehow. I was in a horrible place, a fog," says Patrocinio, 29, who was awarded a Purple Heart for his military service. "There is no magic pill that can erase your past or what you have seen but the practice helps me to cope. Now I am not afraid to go to sleep."

Patrocinio is part of a wave of returning veterans - with thousands more expected as the United States continues its military pullouts from two decade-long wars - who are embracing yoga as a calming therapy. For many, it is a companion medical treatment, to ease the symptoms of post-traumatic stress on the mind and body. For others, it is simply a way to relieve the stress of reintegrating. Some are turning to the poses and deep breathing of yoga. Others to the quiet of meditation.

"Through yoga or tai chi or some other discipline, the vet can create a space of calm. And that is a place that the brain can return to when faced with a trigger," said David Frankel, executive director of Connected Warriors, a nonprofit offering free weekly yoga sessions to veterans and their families in South Florida. "More than anything, the vet returning from a trauma needs a sense of peace."

Faced with a growing national health crisis, military officials and the medical community are exploring other methods to help treat psychologically wounded soldiers. Between 11 and 20 percent of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have PTSD, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense conducted a narrow feasibility study at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center on the effectiveness of Yoga Nidra, an ancient meditative practice, on soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD symptoms. After eight weeks, all the participants' symptoms were reduced. Buoyed by the results, research was expanded to several VA hospitals and centers, including the Miami VA where a study of meditation was conducted on veterans. The local study has been completed but not yet published. The program used in the study, eventually renamed Integrative Restoration or iRest, was added to the weekly treatment for soldiers at dozens of centers across the nation.

"The program provides them body relaxation and breathing exercises that are tools for managing the emotions, the memories, the cognitive thoughts that come with war," said Richard Miller, a clinical psychologist who served as a consultant and advisor to the DOD study. "It helps to build a deep inner resource that they can call back on for stability."

At the Red Pearl Yoga studio in Fort Lauderdale, veterans - including Patrocinio - who served in wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan spend an hour on Thursdays lying on green yoga mats staring towards the ceiling. The walls are deep red, and the air is warm and still, the afternoon sun shielded by bamboo blinds.

Frankel, a Broward County prosecutor for 22 years before becoming a yoga instructor, leads the Hatha yoga class. He has practiced yoga two decades as a way to balance his professional life, a discipline he learned as a child from his grandmother. For the veterans' class, he makes sure that the warriors don't face walls because they might feel closed in, which can be a stress trigger. When he adjusts their positions, he approaches from the front to keep from startling them. And the final posture of the class - full relaxation often called the corpse pose - goes under its more formal name, Savasana.

He encourages these veterans to surrender to the quiet, so the body relaxes, the senses soften and the mind eventually settles. For returning soldiers, whether diagnosed with PTSD or not, one of the great challenges is to slow a mind racing with troubling and obsessive thoughts and to disconnect from the whirlwind of combat. Frankel has them breathe and exhale deeply as they move through a series of poses: downward-facing dog, standing forward bend, full forward bend. During each pose and stretch, they are told to concentrate on their cores. Later in the session, Frankel plays soft music, the lyrics of one song promising, "no one will lose their soul."  It is all meant to help the vets reconcile war experiences with civilian life. It is another path to healing.

For Beau MacVane, an Army Ranger from Boca Raton who served five tours in the Iraq and Afghanistan, yoga helped enhance the quality of his final months. He died in 2009 of Lou Gehrig's disease at 33, but his legacy lives on in the work of Judy Weaver, a yoga instructor in Boca Raton and co-founder of Connected Warriors who taught him the breathing and meditative techniques that helped even as he neared death.

Weaver decided to launch a campaign to teach service members, veterans and their families the benefits of yoga through free classes. It was the beginning of Connected Warriors, now offered in 17 studios and VA hospitals and centers including the Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay and the U.S. Southern Command in Doral.

The number of veterans in Connected Warriors, which started in 2010, has grown steadily - the group serves about 220 people per month - and is likely to increase as more troops come home. The U.S. announced last year that all troops would be were out of Iraq in December and plans call for combat forces to return from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Three months after Army Capt. Jonathan Freeman returned from Kabul, his third tour, he began yoga at Red Pearl. He had learned Transcendental Meditation from his father as a child and practiced it occasionally while deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. But by the time he returned in November after the intensity of combat environment - Freeman and his unit were among the first soldiers on the clean-up scene after an Iraqi family of 14 was killed in 2005 - he needed something more to help with the transition back. So he started running and in February, he added yoga as part of the Connected Warriors program.

"The yoga is really beneficial on the bad days when I am having negative thought after negative thought, and can't get outside my head," said Freeman, 36, who lives in Fort Lauderdale and is part of the Virginia National Guard. "The breathing helps me center myself and settle down."

For Patrocinio, the path to healing through yoga started with a headache.

When he first got back home, he experienced anxiety, depression and relentless flashbacks but kept it all a secret. He had joined Marines just out of Miami Central High School and planned on a military career as an infantryman. He is proud of his service and received 11 awards.

He had deployed to Iraq in 2003, returning to the war-torn country three years later and was wounded that summer. When it was time for a third deployment, he worked hard to ready his unit. "I kept thinking everything would go away and telling myself that everything was OK. But the reality was I was in a really bad place," said Patrocinio, now a student at Nova Southeastern University studying psychology.

He finally turned to his battalion medical officer and asked for help.

"At the time, my main purpose was to get some medication that could even me out so that I could finish my mission. I needed to finish training my Marines. We were supposed to leave around Christmas of 2007," said Patrocinio, who also serves as a trainer for ArtsReach Foundation, which uses creative expression to help those who have experienced traumas. "I was honest in the assessment and they came back and said I was not going anywhere, that I had PTSD. For me, that diagnosis meant career suicide. One minute I was a sergeant, the next minute a patient."

Patrocinio was transferred to a medical platoon at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina in late 2007, where he was finally placed on a regimen that included nine pills a day to deal with his emotional trauma. While there, an instructor who taught yoga on the base attended group therapy and suggested they consider yoga as a way to relieve the stress. He hesitated.

"I was thinking I was this tough guy so I didn't embrace the idea," he said.

Eventually, he decided he had nothing to lose and attended a class. He didn't attempt a single pose that day, concentrating on learning "to breathe again."

"I was lying on a mat and trying to push my thoughts away. Suddenly, I fell asleep. I couldn't even remember the last time I was able to fall asleep without medication," said Patrocinio, who now hopes to become a yoga instructor working with veterans. "That was when I knew yoga could help me get better."

11 March 2012 

Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future 

"A must see." ~ Max Strom

In this inspired talk, entrepreneur Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism -- that we are inventing, innovating and creating ways to solve the challenges that loom over us.

17 February 2012

What would happen if we could generate power from our windowpanes? 

In this moving talk, entrepreneur Justin Hall-Tipping shows the materials that could make that possible, and how questioning our notion of 'normal' can lead to extraordinary breakthroughs.

27 December 2011

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal 

"This is one of the most well written articles which incapsulates and explains this hypothesis held by many of the top futurists in the world.  Highly recommended for becoming up-to-date on the extreme-impact trends which will affect us all." ~ Max

read

27 December 2011

Apple plots smartphones powered by hydrogen

The Telegraph 

Apple is working on laptops and smartphones powered by hydrogen fuel cells that would last for weeks without needing to be refueled, patent filings have revealed.  read

23 December 2011

IBM.com

The Next 5 in 5 - Innovations that will change our lives in the next five years

Science fiction becomes reality. The future is now...or within five years, at least.

read

29 November 2011

yahoonews  

For those of you who are not up to date on robotics, this video will be an eye opener as too just how advanced "helper robots" have come.  Robots are the next coming wave of workers - for better and/or worse.  The good news is that robots will be an advantageous recourse for handing toxic chemicals in factories for example, but the negative consequences could include being used instead of humans to 'manage the needs of the elderly,' when our elders already suffer from extreme loneliness.  The other consequence is that they will be filling jobs formerly held by humans and will highly impact the labor force within 5 years.   Something not even being discussed in the national economic arena, and obviously should be.  It will change the fabric and even the definition of what we now simply call “jobs.” The robot in this video is made by Honda.  ~ Max

21 November 2011

Kurzweil.net  

 read

26 October 2011

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement

TED.com

An extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.  watch:

The Wheel Reinvented – The Q Drum Is An Easy Way To Transport Water In Developing Countries

by Peter Murray  The Singularity Hub

For people in developing countries, getting clean water to cook with, clean with, and drink, can be a difficult and dangerous task. We’re all familiar with the images of women in developing countries carrying large vessels on their head, which can lead to neck and spinal injuries. Piet Hendrikse wanted to find another way.  read more

11 October 2011

Solar Is Walgreens’ Prescription For Power
by Lauren Craig  Earth Techling

Walgreens, the nation’s largest drugstore chain, has installed its 100th rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) system, on a retail store in Mason, Ohio.  read

4 October 2011

Words from the Wise: Solar Energy

renewableenergyworld.com

Our sun provides 10,000 times more energy than the world needs.  This is an excellent and succinct artcle which explains why solar energy is the energy opportunity of our time.  I highly recommend you look at. ~ Max   article

27 September 2011

How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty? By learning from nature.

Ted.com

21 September 2011

Sonia Arrison Brings Longevity To the Masses With Her Book 100+

The Wall Street Journal

What would you do with another 75 years on this Earth? Not as a pain wracked wizened elder in a nursing home, but as a vibrant super-centenarian with the energy of a 30 year old? Sonia Arrison is here to tell you it’s not only possible, it’s coming soon.  Scientists are on the brink of radically expanding the span of a healthy life. Author Sonia Arrison on the latest advances—and what they mean for human existence. article

 14 September 2011

Invention has the power to help world's poorest areas
The Scottsman
GROUNDBREAKING solar power technology that can be fitted on to clothing and small objects or even "printed" on to buildings is being developed by a Scottish scientist.

It is hoped it could be used to bring cheap electricity to poverty-hit areas of the Third World, potentially benefiting more than a billion people. more

Sept. 15, 2011

Volkswagen's amazing 300mpg-plus Car

the telegraph UK

Sept. 9, 2011

Minority rules: scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas
kurzweil.net

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. more

September 6th 2011

Self-directed microspider could repair blood vessels
from newscientist.com   by Ferris Jabr
A new spider-like micromachine could swim through a person's blood vessels, healing damaged areas and delivering drugs as it goes.
Ayusman Sen of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues have created the self-propelling microspiders using spheres less than a micrometre wide. Each sphere is made up of two halves – one hemisphere is gold, the other silica – and looks like a gold-and-silver Christmas bauble. read more

Sept. 4th 2011
Ancient Moves for Orthopedic Problems
New York Times
With the costs of medical care spiraling out of control and an ever-growing shortage of doctors to treat an aging population, it pays to know about methods of prevention and treatment for orthopedic problems that are low-cost and rely almost entirely on self-care. As certain methods of alternative medicine are shown to have real value, some mainstream doctors who “think outside the box” have begun to incorporate them into their practices. read article 

Sept. 2nd 2011

Medicine's future? There is an app for that

An ironic title, but a most amazing look into the near future of medicine. Some of the plus benefits of technology. ~ Max 

Sept. 2nd 2011

Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars

Forget about the hybrid auto -- Shai Agassi says it's electric cars or bust if we want to impact emissions. His company, Better Place, has a radical plan to take entire countries oil-free by 2020.

August 30, 2011 

Transforming Shipping Containers Into Local Farms – PodPonics Brings Produce to the City

CNN News

Urban agriculture has a new hope, and its name is PodPonics. Based in Atlanta, the startup is pursuing a new kind of recycling: transform old shipping containers into miniature hydroponic farms that can be used to grow food anywhere.

see video here

 August 23, 2011 

X PRIZE: working to solve the unsolvable
CBS News
Headed by Ray Kurzweil and Diamandis, the challenge for the prize is to build a product or company that can positively effect a billion people lives within a decade.  read article

Yoga Reduces Cytokine Levels Known to Promote Inflammation, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2010)

— Regularly practicing yoga exercises may lower a number of compounds in the blood and reduce the level of inflammation that normally rises because of both normal aging and stress, a new study has shown.  read more

 important news - challenge

Mass extinction threat "significant" in oceans

(CBS News)
The threats of over-fishing and to the world's fragile coral reefs have long been well documented, but now a panel of scientists say the threats to marine life are far worse than previously imagined.

The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) convened a self-described "first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind" recently, and they have released a report claiming "multiple ocean stresses threaten globally significant marine extinction."

read article

important news - potential solutions to challenge

Sylvia Earle: How to protect the oceans