The Human Mind: It's so funny to think of putting a hole in a shell to form a necklace or some decoration in terms of a "first", but really it's no less earth-shaking than the first step on the moon. To get to the moon, we first had to put our handprints on cave walls to tell a story about the moon god and its powers over us.

I was watching a bit of a show on PBS about Victorian England and the changes the Queen had to oversee in her country, including the change from agrarian peasants to urban cogs in the industrial wheel. While we Americans tend to credit Henry Ford with creating the assembly line, it was of course done earlier, and in England (perhaps earlier still elsewhere, but I can only watch so many shows - you don't expect me to pick up a book do you?). Anyway, I'm continually amazed by the first person who determined that it might be a better idea to have 100 people repeatedly build something, each doing one select part, than have that same 100 people each build a whole commodity.

Many of these "first-steppers" were visionaries without even realizing it - they just acted on an idea, and didn't worry about the odd looks and laughs of derision that came from the Establishment. This is why, when you examine history in a macro scale, societies that promote free-thinkers have always lept ahead of their more restrictive neighbors. And while countries like the U.S.S.R. and even North Korea have produced geniuses of art, science and industry, those individuals are the exception to the rule. But Oliver Stone still thinks Castro is a great guy, you know, because, well, they have very nice beaches in Cuba, I hear.