Elly Beinhorn, The Most Famous Aviatrix You Never Heard Of

Mention Elly Beinhorn to somebody today and he or she will look at you blankly.
Not so, in the era between World Wars One and Two. During the twenties and thirties, hers was a household name on many continents. She was an aviatrix, a daring young woman in the mold of Amelia Earhart. Like other such women of her time, her goals were not properly feminine. Yet as she became famous, people said her flying skills were exceeded only by her femininity. That was it, a most unwomanly thing. She wanted to fly an aeroplane around the world. Alone. Her mother wept and her father threatened to send her to a psychiatrist, but an aunt had died and left Elly a little money.

William James Sidis: The Smartest Person Ever?

The following essay is about William James Sidis, whom Robert Persig (Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) discusses in his novel, Lila. Sidis's one great passion in life was collecting street car transfers.

The account comes from a web page I saved to my hard drive. Before uploading it, I checked it and found it dead, but still want to give credit, so here is the obsolete URL--http://members.aol.com/popvoid/TOC.html. Jim Morton, the essayist, uses Peridromophilia as a term for Sidis's love of street car transfers.

Peridromophilia Unbound:William James Sidis
By Jim Morton

The great geniuses of mankind are often said to be "born ahead of their time." William James Sidis, on the other hand, seems to have been born out of his time completely; on the wrong world, in the wrong dimension. Perhaps someday the world will understand "Willie" Sidis's strange genius, but that day is far off indeed.

Notes from "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from The Biology of Consciousness," by Alva Noë

Are you your brain, or something else?


In this book Alva Noë presents his well-informed view of modern thinking and research on consciousness and the brain. He does not subscribe to the mainstream consensus.

Albert Einstein on Free Will and Ramana Maharshi on Freedom and Destiny

"If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will." Albert Einstein

Scientists in general accept that the universe is a closed system, deterministic and explainable by physical processes involving cause and effect. Yet we all experience the feeling that we can choose between option A and option B.

A Gloomy Prospect: Poverty, IQ, & Emergent Systems

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion. Democritus, 470 BC-380 BC*. Modern particle physics has broken things down even further and at CERN in Switzerland the Higgs Bosun ("God Particle") at the Large Hadron Collider is believed to have been found.

Down-to-the-nitty-gritty just doesn't work in some cases. It's called reductionism, and in its place we have a relatively recent concept of emergent systems.

Born With Half A Brain, She Has Compensated

"Michelle Mack has turned medical thinking upside down.

Born with only half a brain, Mack can speak normally, graduated from high school and has an uncanny knack for dates. . . .

G.K. Chesterton's Christianity & The Nightmare of The Modern World

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) stood 6 feet 4 inches and weighed 290 pounds. During WWI he was asked by a lady why he was in London and not at the front fighting the Hun, to which he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am." Chesterton once told vegetarian George Bernard Shaw, "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England." Shaw shot back, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it".

Confirmed?: Legends of Humans and Near-Humans Walking The Earth

The Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children. Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats." Legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries.

The Martian Inside Your Head

Years ago Reader's Digest published a series of hugely successful articles by J.D. Ratcliff, all beginning with "I am Joe's ____." Fill in the blank: heart, brain, pancreas, etc. The articles explained complicated body organs in simple terms for lay readers. The one on the heart began, "I’m certainly no beauty. I weigh 12 ounces, am red-brown in color, and have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of —well, let’s call him Joe. Joe is 45, ruggedly good-looking, has a pretty wife, three children and an excellent job. Joe has made it."

The Apollo of Gaza

You are a fisherman, name of Jouda Ghurab, on the Gaza Strip and earn give or take seven dollars a day selling what you catch with a net. In August 2013 you dive into the waters off the strip, looking for sardines, squid, and bream, when you see something. What you see will turn out to have great international implications and will involve Hamas, charged by Israel as a terrorist group.