The Humble Libertarian original

We're going to get there . You're living in the future now.

Scientists have come up with a way to make whole brains transparent, so they can be labelled with molecular markers and imaged using a light microscope. The technique, called CLARITY, enabled its creators to produce the detailed 3D visualisations you see in this video. It works in mouse brains and human brains; here the team use it to look into the brain of a 7-year-old boy who had autism. This is just-- so cool.

Barry Randall writes : 'But getting consumers to buy millions of these devices isn’t about the price of the box. It’s about the time and effort necessary to make anything useful. As for effort, consider that industrial design is done by professionals with years of education and practical experience. Capable designers make high five-figure salaries. Because of the high labor expense of industrial design, there has already been sufficient motivation to create easy-to-use CAD-CAM software. And yet none exists. Catia, AutoCAD, Creo and other CAD programs are powerful, but as yet they have not become easy to use, even for professionals. So the idea that the existence of cheap 3D printing will somehow beget easy-to-use design software is delusional. Some have compared the arrival of cheap 3D printers with that of cheap word-processing software and ink-jet printers 30 years ago. But that was different, because typing was a skill already possessed by the majority of e...

These are exciting times to be alive for sure! Today, humanity has reached an unprecedented milestone at the later stage of a steeply upward-sloping population curve, the birth of the world's seven billionth baby (hat tip: memeorandum ) , or to be more precise, the first baby to put the total human population at seven billion. The Daily Caller reports : 'The United Nations estimates that the 7 billionth baby in the world will be born on Monday. The international agency has chosen Manila-born Danica May Camacho as the symbolic milestone baby, as first reported by the UK Guardian. National Geographic will devote a year long series to mark the occasion, complete with questions like “Are there too many people on the planet?” and “Can we feed seven billion of us?” Amid panic-laced prompts, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has called the milestone a victory for mankind, as people are living longer and children are surviving childhood — with the caveat being that the world nee...

In the opinion pages of the New York Times, David Brooks writes : "The prognosis for the next few years is bad with a chance of worse. And the economic conditions are not even the scary part. The scary part is the political class’s inability to think about the economy in a realistic way." Yup. Hat tip: Memeorandum . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

It is an uncommonly known fact that Eric Blair, better known by the pen name of George Orwell, was a socialist. This is seems astonishing in light of his extensive literature that seems to tear apart the myth of the socialist paradise. But you see that is precisely the point- he was a socialist, but Orwell never hesitated to burn bridges if he thought that his movement was going astray. His most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984 are his refutations of what he called the "stupid cult of Russia" and totalitarian socialism. Orwell was a democratic-socialist and so he detested the Marxist Bolsheviks. And the rest of the "cult of Russia" and the larger part of the left during his time detested him. History has shown Orwell to be quite correct, and his opponents "led into the Marsh" most ironically by Lenin himself. So what is the point? What bearing does this have for the modern Liberty movement? Orwell teaches us an important lesson about individualism and m...

I recently viewed Tron Legacy and was enamored with the message of freedom, individualism and anti-statism. We can see this clearly through character analysis. C.L.U.: the Statist and molder of systems and individuals FLYNN SR.: the libertarian individualist (and Taoist) !::POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT::! (though I am covering the basic plot, heads up all the same) Let's expound on this. When Kevin Flynn created C.L.U., they both wanted to create the perfect system and vowed to do so together. However, when the ISOs came this all changed. The ISOs were spontaneously and inexplicably generated digital individuals . They are not programs like the other people in the movie. Quorra and Zuse are both ISOs. Kevin Flynn realized that he could not create perfection around these dynamic individuals that needed to grow and make their own decisions. C.L.U. on the otherhand saw their individuality as a imperfection in the system he was molding. So he staged a coup, and systematical...

Video: This is possibly the future of the Internet and computing- they will become so integrated into the physical world around us so as to disappear into ubiquity. An excellent example of innovation, entrepreneurship, and free markets in action. Good for you, Pranav Mistry! Hat tip to THL forum user, Prismatic Sphere for suggesting this on the THL message forum .