WPenner's Blog

Energy in space is more crucial than on earth. On earth, our atmosphere circulates the energy from solar radiation, for example, and heats extensive areas to liveable (or mostly liveable) temperatures. Outside of the atmosphere, there is only the vacuum of space, which technically doesn't have a tem...

In 1805, Playfair ¹ attempted to understand the mechanism whereby Netherlands sustained wealth for generation after generation and England seemed on the brink of losing theirs. His conclusion was that the shortest line to wealth was from necessity, which, sparking industriousness, created wealth.

The Space Collective is an idea I've been thinking about for a while and plan to write about more. I imagine it as a welcome place where people who are interested in space, but may not want to make a career out of it by becoming an engineer, scientist, or astronaut. A space place for the rest of us....

If you’ve been following my Twitter account you’ve noticed a strong pivot towards space in the last few weeks. I’ll write about what I’ve discovered in the next while, but today, I take a detour into civil organization.

I have recently pondered a strange idea: the largest Canadian cities should...

Today's post is unusual.
It developed out of several recent conversations about centralization and misuses of power.
Following the Feynman technique, this aims to be simple enough for a child to understand without talking down.

It starts, as many glorious adventures, with a family on safari.

T...

As I launch my micro media business, I am awash in the confusion of a million voices and opinions about what to do and how to do it. What I want is clarity. Clarity is important to me because it leads to leadership.

My working definition of a leader is the person who sees the furthest and communic...

I recently read an interesting series of articles by Hal Rondo¹ dealing with the emergence of consciousness from a Jungian psychology perspective. What caught my attention was how closely Hal’s description mirrored a customer experience failure that I endured. In fact, Hal’s model of the emergence...

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance. — Samuel Johnson

I recently discovered, much to my shock, that most people believe that perseverance is the #1 source of life success. I don't believe in stick-to-it-iveness as some magical thing that transforms all bad to good, al...

Free will, a human's ability to freely decide with real consequences, is commonly held to be a real thing, even though philosophers debate it. Weirdly, our current relationship with technology is making an old prediction about the demise of free will, detailed in the Talmud, come true. More about th...

Photo Credit¹

Reading Al Simon² this week, he talked about the difference between "magic" and "magick" where magick (with a K) is a set of techniques for sending intentions into the world and receiving feedback using symbolic actions as a signal to the subconscious brain. Magick, in this sense,...