Daniel Lubetzky

If you feel the need to refer to mobile phones, computer games, or digital cameras, you’re probably a ‘digital immigrant.’ To the natives [including most of those born in the 90s], these are simply phones, games and cameras.

- Julian Baggini, paraphrasing Mark Prensky’s concept of ‘Digital
Natives’, in a Financial Times review of Susan Greenfield’s article
Id: The quest for identity in the 21st Century, about the
commodification of human identity or ‘Nobodies’ who are hypnotized by a steady stream of stimulating but undemanding electronic noises and images.

Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos

Today we received some samples of interesting products from Turkey: fruits stuffed with nuts.  I thought they were great possible additions to our healthy snacks family – minimally processed, all natural, flavorful, just sun dried.  But it was funny (and sad) that in informal focus groups, most consumers were turned off by the look of the dried figs and encrusted walnuts.  Ok, dried figs and walnuts may well look like coarse mummy brains as some of my team members were saying.

  But it seems like some people are getting too used to over-processed artificially created surfaces that are smooth, brightly bleached and homogenous.  It is interesting that, while there is a huge backlash against these overly-processed products, some consumers have almost gotten hypnotized into expecting factory-bland looks, without recognizing the health implications.  It is almost as if we are being conditioned to expect the factory look, rather than the natural.

The line may be blurry on this one.

Japan, Seeking Trim Waists, Measures Millions - an effort to prevent diabetes and obesity from the Japanese government by strictly imposing waistline limits on the population, with penalties for corporations and local governments that do not meet guideposts…

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So I guess the Zaidmans are not the only ones running their van on vegetable oil.   Greg Melville reports in the New York Times – Greased Lightning – about how he powers his station wagon with left-over waste oil from french fries.  He makes the point – if $1,000 can help him refurbish his engine this way, shouldn’t the big car companies be able to get it together once and for all?

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About two and a half years ago I was approached by Zvi Schreiber with a dream he had: to build a hi-tech joint venture between Israelis and Palestinians.  I had started joint ventures in the food industry between Palestinians and Israelis and we had a mutual friend, Alvaro Aguirre, who had encouraged Zvi (who was a very successful internet entrepreneur) to exchange notes.  I believe we spoke briefly and I tried to share a couple thoughts, but in the back of my mind I frankly was worried about his project and a bit skeptical whether he’d succeed, given all the obvious challenges during the political and economic environment, but also the prospect of cooperation in the tech space given the overall disparities between Israelis and Palestinians in high-tech skills.  After all, economics of peacemaking that PeaceWorks bases itself on require complementary comparative advantages.

Well, Zvi more than did it.  G.ho.st is a hot start-up with a hot product and great potential.  The New York Times just wrote about it.  And in Ramallah, G.ho.st is the pride of the town.  It is also winning rave reviews from Wall Street to Sillicon Valley.  And it is at the forefront of efforts where Israelis and Palestinians are cooperating on a daily basis to build a business platform and in the process build understanding.

What most excites me about this is that my pessimism was proven wrong.  So many times people have ideas and are discouraged from pursuing them.  Yes, it is healthy to have someone to question all your assumptions and to ask the tough questions.  But it is also important for people to JUST DO IT some times.  And Zvi is doing it!  Read the NYT article…

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Robert Lee Hotz reports in the Wall Street Journal about how our brains are transformed by the alphabets and languages we learn. Those who learn English and those who learn Chinese use different areas of their brains – confirmed by alternate patterns of energy use and brain structure.   Hotz explains this could also be behind ‘cultural differences in memory, attention, and visual perception.’

Now add evolving changes in learning behavior with the advent of SMS, internet, cell phones, and all instant-input technologies.  Our brains are getting completely re-wired, and we don’t know what the implications of all that will be.

Here is an article that gives you hope that a lot of our interconnected environmental, climate-change, waste disposal, energy and resource scarcity, pollution and geo-political threats can be tackled through technology before our world implodes:

Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn launched E-Fuel Corporation.  Their product allows you to create ethanol in your backyard.

The holy grail will be reached when someone comes up with equipment that takes bio-trash and turns it into clean energy.  There you have the cleanest solution to so many problems.

It is not impossible – the core technology actually already exists. My crazy fellow Mexican Jewish friends Zeev and Zak Zaidman run a health foods company called Kopali that goes from place to place on a bus fueled with trash. 

The film-maker Jehane Noujaim dreamt a day when people across the world would see the same films, images and messages on the same day, at the

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Perri Klass wrote a very interesting article on the interplay between modern medicine’s use of anesthesia and its interplay with the far less scientific and more mysterious concepts of consciousness and self.  Anesthesia, as he writes,  encompasses "the allure and the terror of leaving yourself behind."

Ovation Cable TV had a special today on Chuck Close, an American artist/painter whose work is extraordinary.  Take a look on google images and in this website.  No less extraordinary is his background and the challenges he overcame along his life, never letting setbacks keep him down, always surmounting tragedies to come out stronger.  This article does a good job describing his life. He is not just an artist on canvas, but a man who exemplifies the triumphs of the human spirit. His work reflects his efforts to push himself to discover new techniques that keep pushing the envelope. 

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