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Poetry: Catching Life by the Throat
I remember reading Rumi and thinking how very much akin it was to white water rafting. Great poetry is like that, leaving you breathless. There are astonishments, surprises that transform to deeply...
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Remembering Deming
December 20th will be the death anniversary of William Edwards Deming, a giant of the business world by any standard. Deming died in 1993, respected in his native America but totally revered in Japan,...
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Play, learn and feed the world
FreeRice is a unique site engaging people of all ages to do good. Select a subject to play: English Vocabulary, Math, Chemistry, French, etc., and you are asked questions. You can select a suitable...
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Cool cups for tea
The 'cool' is literal. These are double-walled glass cups, with a vacuum seal -- nice to your hands while your tea remains piping hot. Made by teasetc. and sold in twos.I just got them from Amazon...
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"Hire managers of one"
We use their product Basecamp for managing our projects and think it's pretty good. But equally impressive to me is the thinking that is 37signals, the mother ship. The company is whimsically named...
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The computational effort behind Avatar
Two hundred and thirty million dollars later, James Cameron wants us to see Avatar and we shall surely oblige. The movie is being hailed as a game-changer in 3-D animation. You may wonder at the raw...
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Product placement (by the trash!)
Blu Dot, a Minneapolis furniture maker, decided on their first anniversary to do an experiment. They make the "Real Good" chair, a sleek metal affair. Helped by Mono, a marketing agency, they asked,...
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Which has more caffeine, tea or coffee? The final answer...
As a convert from umpteen cups of coffee to umpteen cups of tea, I am often asked if that doesn't mean (surprise!) more caffeine? I have been taken aback by this and thought I would research this...
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A decade of too many choices?
I am all for product choices, as long as they are real and relevant, presented sensibly. But then there are companies that think that permutational excess qualifies as “shelf space” and that a hundred...
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2010: women exceed 50% of the American workforce
I must admit that I was taken by surprise. The usual conversations about women in the American workforce have to do with the injustice of unequal pay at all levels, the low representation in leadership...
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The Photographer
Afghanistan is the wound that never heals. A reminder of the past comes in the form of a riveting book, “The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders”. This is the story of...
View ArticleProgress, not praise, is the real motivator
The Harvard Business Review just came out with "The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2010". The one that caught my eye was the first item, "What Really Motivates Workers", by Teresa Amabile and Steven...
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Pencil art as you have never seen it
I am wary about craft masquerading as art, but Jennifer Maestre's work is quite impressive. Inspired by sea urchins, this pencil sculpture has an unexpected spiky charm. It's a feel somehow different...
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Brilliant advertising
I first came across the name of this German advertising company in the "The 9th Annual Year in Ideas" issue of The New York Times Magazine. In "The Advertisement That Watches You", the article...
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Paper as art
Peter Callesen is a Danish artist who is a master of paper. His work, dazzling in its meticulous execution, and often fantastical in its themes, is something to behold. A4 paper, white, cut and glued...
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Simplifiers and Complexifiers
You know these people: add one to a team and the work at hand becomes easier. These are the Simplifiers. They create order from chaos. Conversely, add a Complexifier and the work takes on byzantine...
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A Google tool you didn't know about
Well - at least I didn't know about it. It's Google's free Sketchup software for 3D modeling. There is a Pro version for $495 that we can leave to the pros.Network World did a nice slideshow of 10...
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Cool drop caps
ool drop caps, like the "C" that leads this paragraph, are available from Daily Drop Cap. This is a project by typographer Jessica Hische where she creates a hand-crafted initial letter each day. It's...
View ArticleIslands of irrationality
I first heard the phrase from Professor Anwar Syed who used to teach Political Science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The concept is simple. Everyone has a set of beliefs that are...
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Piet Hein's Grooks
ARS BREVIS: There is/one art,/no more,/no less:/to do/all things/with art-/lessnessPiet Hein died in 1996 at the ripe age of 91. A Danish scientist and mathematician who "played mental ping-pong with...
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How to make perfect subcontinental green tea
January was National Hot Tea Month in the US. Having missed all the parades :) I thought at minimum I would enhance my tea knowledge. What better place to visit than Top Green Teas? A nice enough...
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Action Philosophers!
If you like your philosophers in small wacky chunks look no further than Action Philosophers! This is the newly published compilation of the award winning comic book series by the same name. Fred Van...
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Games for change
What a great concept! These are on-line games for children from ages 3 to 18 and over, "that engage contemporary social issues in meaningful ways to foster a more just, equitable and/or tolerant...
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Salman Khan teaches the world
Here is one person making a difference. I learned of Salman Khan's work when someone forwarded me a link to an audio interview of him by John Udell on IT Conversations, YouTube Teaching as Guerrilla...
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Top 10 Super Bowl Ads
You have choices. There are the 10 funniest ads. The classics here include Macdonald's showdown between Larry Bird and Michael Jordan as well as three Budweiser favorites: rock, paper, scissors, the...
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The 6 ways in which people learn new technology
ow do people embrace and start using new technologies? The Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario has published research that suggests that the learners fall into six...
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5 must-see videos about architects
I have always been fascinated by architecture. At its best, this is art with high stakes and mathematical boundary conditions, a true creative optimization that can leave you breathless with...
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Bert Simons' paper sculpture
I haven't seen anything quite like Bert Simon's paper sculpture. It is at once fragile, light, engaging -- startling in it's delicate realism. The one on the right is "Rozemarijn Lucassen".The process...
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The phenomenon of xkcd
Three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, at midnight Eastern Time, the world is treated to a fresh batch of stick-figure comics from the genius mind of Randall Monroe. This is "xkcd",...
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Campbell's soup neuromarketing
Not since the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland sang, “Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in a hot tureen!” has the marketing of soup interested me as much as the story about Campbell’s recent...
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In praise of Trader Joe's Pomegranate White Tea
I am not sure if it really qualifies as tea. The subtlety of the white tea leaves asymptotically approaches the imaginary -- but the high notes of the pomegranate are unmistakable and joyous. Tea or...
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Why Toyota and not Toyoda?
By now we are all aware that Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder, is the head and chief apologizer (and apologist) for the car company Toyota. But why Toyota and not Toyoda? BBC news has dug into...
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Microsoft's Songsmith for the singer in you
Something cool from... Microsoft? Yes, while we have all been busy praising Apple and Google for innovation, here comes a creative new tool from Microsoft. "Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to...
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Twitter Wit
If "brevity is the soul of wit", as Shakespeare said, then Twitter with its 140 character limit is a perfect vehicle for it. I am sure, though, that Nick Douglas had quite a few haystacks to comb...
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Cisco's CRS-3 'foundation' for tomorrow's internet
Cisco's new CRS-3 is being called a game changer -- at least by Cisco. This Carrier Routing System, a 'core router', can pump data at three times the capacity of its predecessor, and 12 times what the...
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Ray Jones: mastery in wood
I first saw this Ray Jones box and was reminded of the gull-wing doors of the DeLorean. There is the same elegant defiance of gravity, the clean lines that surprise when first you see them. Exploring...
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What are memes?
he Oxford English Dictionary succumbed in 2003 to officially including “meme” (rhyming with “dream”) as a word. The definition is, “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by...
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Lala -- the next big thing in music? [Update: Poof! It's gone!]
[Update: If you visit Lala now, you are greeted with the message, "Lala is shutting down. The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010". What happened? There are two speculations: 1) Apple...
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Garfield minus Garfield
Subtract Garfield the cat from Garfield the comic strip and what do you get? An insightful look into the not-so-happening life of Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's young "owner". This is the brilliant mirror...
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Steep.it to time your steeping time
Confused by the title or confused by how long to steep your tea? Visit Steep.it for the answer. Hailing itself as "the simplest internet tea timer EVER" the site lets you enter in the time you want to...
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Is the iPad the first non-personal computer?
onsider the following scenario at home. An iPad on the table in the den where you watch TV, another in the kitchen. American Idol is not really moving, so you pick up the iPad and take a look at the...
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Using shame for social change
hat shame is a powerful force for creating good behavior is known to every parent. All those "I am sorry"s accompanying returning the other kid's toys or not pulling the cat's tail come from a genuine...
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Tony Hoagland -- a poet for the times
few days ago at the library I picked up the unusually named, "Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty". A great discovery! Turned out to be Tony Hoagland's fourth full-length poetry collection...
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The iPad as a new way for children to learn?
First, I want you to see a YouTube video about a 2.5 year old's first encounter with an iPad. Is there any doubt that this device is meant for the newest generation?A colleague introduced me to Dr....
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What are MEMS?
MicroElectroMechanicalSystems [quite different from memes which we covered earlier]. MEMS rhymes with “hems” if you are into sewing or “Dems” if you are into abbreviated US politics. They are the new...
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How to flip a mattress
Finally, a new use for mathematics in the bedroom! (Modesty forbids talking of the older uses :)). Steven Strogratz in Group Think in the on-line Opinionator for the New York Times explains how Group...
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One man's tê is another man's cha
How different are the names for tea around the world? Not very, I was surprised to find. It turns out that just two Chinese pronunciations form the roots from which almost all the world has learned to...
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Three cool apps for the iPhone and iPad (free!)
...And the winners are: Pocket Pond, Soundrop and Use Your Handwriting. All are available free from iTunes. I have picked them more for their design brilliance than their usefulness. I should add that...
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Music of the planets
I like SolarBeat by WhiteVinylDesign -- a virtual music box of the planets. Each time an orbit is completed, a note is struck. The planets, of course, do not have circular orbits -- but it is in...
View ArticleSteve Jobs: How to live before you die
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) has been an outstanding source of thought-provoking talks. This non-profit's "Ideas Worth Spreading" conference was the original source. Now, it has evolved to...
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