Stephen Darlington and the Choristers talk about the demands of a choir boy’s life.

The highlight of 2011 for me was being part of the US and Canadian Christ Church Cathedral Choir tour last spring.

Here is their Gandalf - Dr Stephen Darlington - talking about the chorister's life - the boys add their 5 cents too.

As you listen to them and hear their story, you may wish that your son had been one - or that he could be.

I was one aged 8 -13. I still look back and wonder at how much I learned and recall the joy. Why I now work so hard to make this more possible for others.

If this video peaks your interest - wonder around the site and see and hear more. Next year our plan is to try a small test of whether we can reach out online and help other choirs and choristers hone their skills - watch this space!

No comment needed from me

How hard is it for corporations to understand that when they do something that is overwhelmingly evil corporation-y, the public will inevitably hate them for it? Case in point: Chick-fil-A, the fast food company, decided to take serious legal action against, wait for it ... a guy in Vermont who handscreens t-shirts and sells them around town.

Yes, the now-infamous legal action is targets a folk artist named Bo Muller-Moore, who has printed t-shirts displaying the slogan "Eat More Kale" since 2000. Chick-fil-A claims that said slogan is too similar to their "Eat Mor Chikin" slogan, and therefore Muller-Moore must cease and desist. Instead of complying, Muller-Moore has decided to fight the mammoth fast food corporation. And, as Alex detailed in his post on the story, the move has swiftly snowballed into one of those corporate David vs Goliath battles where everyone is cheering for David--and hates Goliath.

Muller-Moore has been flooded with support. The local food movement, which is highlighting his story to convey the importance of local produce and the power wielded by industrial food, has rallied to his side. Local business groups and politicians in Vermont are working pro bono to help him ward off the legal attack. Consumers are voicing their support with dollars, buying the shirts in record numbers. Hell, even the state's governor just issued some strong words defending 'Eat More Kale', and issued a warning to the fast food giant.

Muller-Moore also enjoys the support of everyone who hates it when corporations do stupid, asshole-ish things. This brazen example of overreach is exactly the kind of thing that inspires backlash against corporate greed--and in a cultural moment marked by elevated awareness about such malfeasance, it's good to see local food, politicians, and ordinary people standing up against it. I have a feeling we'll be seeing more of this: as the influence of Occupy Wall Street-style dissent reverberates through mainstream culture, there will be more resistance against blatant acts of corporate misconduct.

This is just good politics and good sense. The new food system is emerging here on PEI too. The large conventional farms cannot be passed on - even if the families want this - for the numbers cannot work.

In the place of a few large farms with millions of dollars of capital tied up in infrastructure and few employees, a new farmer is here.

They tend to be young. They want very small parcels of land. One of the best I know has 1 acre! They sell high quality food direct to the consumer or to chefs.

As the world population grows and so the demand for food, a small place like PEI CANNOT be a commodity producer. But we can be a quality producer.

In this context, we could have back 15,000 farms on PEI with all the employment that that involves.

Time to acknowledge that SMALL is the key to Quality and that lots of Small Aggregated into a large network is the new BIG.

"When a tool breaks, at the very worst the space-station crew calls Houston and says, 'Send us a CAD (computer-aided design) file of that tool,' and they'll be able to 3D-print it," said Jason Dunn, chief technology officer and cofounder of Made in Space, Inc. "Ideally, one day they'll be able to design it themselves."

Made in Space working in Houston, TX at NASA Johnson Space Center for microgravity testing. Made in Space members in the photo include Jason Dunn, Brinson White, Mike Snyder, Alison Lewis, Adam Ellsworth, and Aaron Kemmer. Credit: Made in Space, Inc.

Made in Space came out of Singularity University — a school for startups aimed at solving the world's biggest problems. It chose to locate itself at the NASA Ames Research Park in Moffett Field, Calif., near Silicon Valley.

The founders estimate that printing parts in space could reduce the structural mass of objects by at least 30 percent, because the objects would not need to survive Earth's gravity or the extreme G-forces of launching into orbit aboard a rocket.

"Our long-term goal for 3D printing is to actually build functioning spacecraft," Dunn told InnovationNewsDaily. "A Cubesat (miniature satellite) could be built with the machine we are designing for the space station in the next several years."

First, the company must create a 3D printer that works well in the seemingly weightless conditions of space. It used past NASA funding to test a prototype and several commercial 3D printers during two hours worth of stomach-churning aircraft dives meant to simulate microgravity. Such printing runs led to the world's first tool — a small wrench — ever printed in partial gravity.

Made in Space team members Adam Ellsworth, Brinson White and Jason Dunn wave to the camera while testing multiple 3D printers in zero-gravity. Credit: Made in Space, Inc.

The tests eventually convinced Dunn and his team to go with their own custom printer design. They plan to focus on an extrusion printer capable of building objects out of plastic polymers, but say that the printer could still make a huge number of the space station's $1-billion-worth of spare parts.

"We think that one-third of those parts could be built using the machine we're building right now," Dunn explained. "We're starting with polymers because they're extrusion-based, and in some cases we're starting to produce our own space-qualified polymers."

The company's Small Business Innovative Research proposal — submitted with Arkyd Astronautics, Inc. and NanoRacks, LLC — makes the project eligible to receive up to $125,000 in NASA funding sometime next year. If all goes well with upcoming parabolic and suborbital flight tests, Made in Space could see its first 3D printer reach the space station by 2014.

It's coming!

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

I spent a terrible 3 days with a cousin. Her mother was dying but she was so scared to lose her mum that she insisted that the full on rescue attempt be made. So her mums' last 3 days were spent on a ventilator with staff doing all sorts of things to her. We sat stunned and unable to communicate with her as we were pushed away by the "care".

Her mother died "alone" untouched by a living hand. No loving words. Only mechanical intervention.

Beyond what this means for the dying and their families, there is the cost. 25- 50% of the total LIFETIME cost of healthcare is spent in these futile interventions. If we wish to cut back on health care spending - THIS is where we have to start.

Buy Local, Bye-Bye Walmart

When the residents of Saranac Lake, NY were faced with having a Super Wal-Mart put in, some 600 residents came together to open their own department store, selling shares in the new venture for $100 and raising $600,000. CBS News business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis reports.

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