Walking Through Walls, and the NASA Brand

“Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.” — Benjamin Franklin

How to Walk Through Walls: The Hacker Mindset: In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one... Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked: “How much did it cost [to make] again?”... “$7,000.”... “Really? That’s pretty good, most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.”...“No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”

The Future of Fertility: After a few days of development, companies like Herasight will test which ones have the highest genetic quality (many times, quality genetic factors go together), and for the remaining embryos, parents will be able to calculate the tradeoffs: Would I rather 4 more IQ points, or a 70% lower probability of cardiovascular diseases? Parents will thus be able to generate as many high-quality embryos as they want.Another thing that might be compelling about this is that it makes it much easier to be a single parent, as it’s trivial to get, say, skin cells from a consenting person. If a mother (or father) wants to bring up children alone, with friends, or with extended family, they can have children who have different sets of parents.

NASA is the Most Underrated Brand: The NASA website gets more site visits than The Economist, twice as many as SpaceX, and almost as many as Tesla. Of all traffic, less than half is from the U.S... The NASA logo is so broadly admired that it has become a status symbol. Coach, Balenciaga, Kith, Estée Lauder, Nike, Adidas, and Vans have all collaborated with NASA or used its iconic red branding... NASA may look inefficient compared with SpaceX, but be clear: Its second-order effects on innovation and America’s reputation make it one of the most valuable U.S. assets. President George H.W. Bush reportedly called the Apollo program “the best return on investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought himself a sketchpad.”