Top 10 Things That Have Recently Blown My Mind

1. Two weeks ago a video of an inventor asking the internet to suggest names for "the greatest toy in the universe" went viral. The inventor's name is Jaimie Mantzel, and he is one of the most endearingly eccentric people I've ever encountered. He lives completely off the grid on twenty acres in the Vermont woods, in a house he built himself out of boards he cut from logs using a home-built sawmill. One level of his home has a trampoline for a floor. His most (perhaps only) successful creation is a one-foot tall six-legged spider-like robot, which he recently sold to a British toy manufacturer. For the last five years he has been working on a twelve-foot tall version which will carry a human operator; he calls it the Giant Robot Project.

2. The cadavers used in the popular Bodies exhibit were procured from the Chinese police. It is possible they are the bodies of prisoners who were tortured and executed by the Chinese government. The company who owns, operates, and profits from the exhibit has admitted it cannot verify where the bodies came from.

3. In response to a Newsweek article that claimed they live in a "dying city," five thousand people in Grand Rapids, Michigan took part in the largest (and in my opinion, most heartwarming) music video ever created. It's a slice of pure Americana.

4. Segregation continues to die. All-white neighborhoods are now effectively extinct.

5. After trying for seventeen years, the New York department of education has finally won a ruling enabling them to evict congregations that meet in public schools on weekends, citing the separation of church and state. Erin put it best: people have truly begun to take "shall make no law" to a ridiculous level.

6. An incredible letter from a former slave to his old master.

7. For the past three years, Russian director/megalomaniac Ilya Khrzhanovsky has been filming a biography of physicist Lev Landau. To do this, he has created a full-scale replica of a small city from the 1950s USSR, in which thousands of actors live, in character, 24/7, and over which he rules as their Stalin stand-in.

8. A judge in Britain has ruled that the similarity between two separate photographs of double-decker buses in the same location is enough to warrant copyright infringement.

9. Last year a study found that for 8th graders in the United States, homework in science, English, and history had little or no impact on students' test scores.

10. Nevada has become the first state to make self-driving cars street legal. The car of the future is here.

Bonus thing: How close we are to having invisibility cloaks.