"The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments."  ~Mad Magazine

How do you instantly turn $1,000 into $125,000 and make the world a better place? Easy - make a microloan to an entrepreneur in a developing country. Microloans are small loans made people in developing countries that allow them to start or build local businesses. 

In the U.S., the GDP per capita is $44,000.  In Ecuador, with a GDP per capita of $3,000, your $1,000 could go as far as $15,000 domestically. Looking for more impact? Try Togo. With an average GDP per capita of $350, your $1,000 loaned to a local business would be like getting a $125,000 line of credit. Not bad.

Websites like www.kiva.org provide a simple way to get involved. They partner with local organizations around the world to identify qualified borrowers and handle the transactions. You can choose from a wide range of candidates and businesses and even receive periodic updates on how things are going. After your loan is repaid, you can invest in others or withdraw your initial investment.

Lenders at kiva don’t currently earn interest from their investment, but the possibility of changing someone’s life sure seems as valuable than the few percent a year you could get from a savings account.

"The nice thing about this country is that nobody’s popular except the people who don’t matter. This is very safe. Rock stars are popular, because no rock star has ever lasted for more than a few years. Rock stars are therefore harmless. The wonderful thing about this country is the universal persecution mania. Every group feels that it is being despised and persecuted. Have you ever heard the doctors talk about how nobody appreciates how much they bleed for the good of humanity? Everybody is persecuted. Everybody feels terribly sorry for himself. You sit down with university professors, and it is unbelievable how terrible their lot is. The businessman feels unloved, misunderstood, and neglected. Any have you ever say down with labor leaders?

They are all of them right. It’s all true. This is not a country that has great respect, and this is one of its great safeguards against tyranny. We save our adulation for people who will never become a menace – for baseball players and rock stars and movie idols who are completely innocuous. We have respect for accomplishment, but not status. There is no status in this country. There’s respect for the office of the president, but no respect for the president. And as a consequence, here, everybody feels persecuted and misunderstood, not appreciated, which I think is wonderful."

                                                      - Peter Drucker, in an interview with Tom Richman. Oct 1985, Inc.

Wikipedia tells us that 1985 was also the year Nelson Mandela rejected an offer of freedom from the South African government, Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the USSR, five lionesses at the Singapore Zoo were put on birth control after the lion population increased from 2 to 16, Wrestlemania made its debut in Madison Square Garden, Coca Cola introduced New Coke, a joint American-French expedition locatesd the wreck of the Titanic, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released on US shores, Microsoft Corporation released the first version of Windows, and "We Are the World" was recorded by USA for Africa.

“Back off man, I’m a scientist.”

When a panel at Seoul National University announced today their finding that a professor had faked data showing that it would be relatively easy to clone humans, they merely confirmed what had been suspected by scientists around the world for several weeks. The fact that a story on scientific misconduct would make the front page of cnn.com suggests two things: (i.) it was a slow news day, and (ii.) there’s a rubbernecker’s appeal to the fact that someone got busted for lying.

In some areas of life, efforts to deliberately mislead are tolerated and even praised. After all, who hasn’t told someone “it was nothing,” when in reality “it” took considerable effort. Consider how popular the World Series of Poker would be without the bluffing? Or for the more cynical, imagine life in Washington DC if politicians were held accountable for campaign promises and other pronouncements.

A common theme here is the interplay between ambition and integrity. There are many ways to balance the two… some right and others wrong. As I look at the major turning points in my life – both good and bad, I find that at each intersection stands an individual who had a unique internal standard for how far he (or she) was willing to go to satisfy his (her) ambition.

Those people also happened along during the less meaningful times in life as well. One of my college classes was taught by such a person. An absolutely brilliant chemist, this professor consistently appears on many people’s annual short list for the Nobel prize. At the time though, it didn’t occur to me to wonder how a high-powered faculty member ended up teaching a mid-level class of two hundred undergraduates. I was too busy complaining with my classmates about how boring the lectures were. About a month into the class, he got word of our discontent. In a surprise move, he secretly videotaped one of his lectures and watched it over the weekend.

The following Monday lecture started with a stink… literally. Rather than launch into his usual monologue, he began with a discussion of the smells of organic chemistry. He then confessed to us that over the weekend, he had fallen asleep watching himself lecture! The demo was his first in a series of efforts to make the class more interesting. To this day, I still find it amazing that such an accomplished individual would take the time to cater to unappreciative students.

Maybe we should clone the guy.

Some theories on babies

1. Young babies age as fast as dogs.

The first three months, Ellie had a 3 hour sleep-wake-eat-poop-play cycle. That means that for each adult day, Ellie experienced 8 baby days. This is a little faster than the 7:1 ratio that dogs apparently experience… True fact: she seemed to have a new trick for us every few days.

Ellen Ray-Hwa Ku  (b. 08.03.2005)

7 lb, 3 oz. 16 inches