Brian L. Hill

Museum Mishap sounds like the name of a hipster/indie-rock band combining a MIDI Accordian, a keytar and some claves…

The cable holding a model of Foucault’s Pendulum snapped last month at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, sending the 60-pound ball crashing to the ground. It was permanently dented in the fall.

Léon Foucault’s 1851 experiment remains a mesmerizing evidence that the Earth does, in fact, rotate. Scientists were aware of this, but the fact that the pendulum swings through 180 degrees over the course of a day provides tangible proof that we are on a planet spinning in space.

The Umberto Eco novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, made the mid-19th-century physics demonstration famous. The novel even opens at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. The pendulum played a key role in the high-literary conspiracy involving the Knights Templar at the heart of the novel.

Via Geoff Brumfiel at Nature News

Photo: Graham Chandler/Flickr

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Although I’m not sure how advantageous a roof deck meeting area will be in Chicago during the winter months, I still love this example of an innovative working environment. This sort of flexibility and creativity goes a long way to improve morale but may not be immediately quantifiable.

Chicago lawyer Michael Childress conducted four meetings Wednesday on the rooftop deck of his law firm’s new offices.

The outdoor deck on the 13th floor at 500 N. Dearborn Street also serves as a lunch spot for employees of Childress, Duffy, Goldblatt Ltd.

“We had a happy hour up here kind of spontaneously,” Childress said, adding that a Friday night movie event on the deck is planned.

During the coming months, a “tagging” event is expected. Teams of employees will be set loose with spray paint cans to cover sections of the deck in whatever designs they want to create, Childress said.

The firm, which concentrates its practice on representing policyholders in insurance disputes, moved to the new location in early April. After working with a broker, the firm relocated from an office building about a block west from 515 N. State, where employees could see the roof deck from the 22d floor, Childress said.

“We looked at [the] building that had a roof deck,” partner Joel N. Goldblatt said. “That caught on and resonated.”

The move allowed for a more open layout in which partners share offices, while associates and staffers work side-by-side rather than in cubicles.

Found this via @builders_pal… This is such a great idea!

IDSA

LiftPod

Gold Award
Category: Commercial & Industrial
Design: Geoff Campbell and Jason Watson of JLG Industries (Australia); Hugh Stark, Frank Fornasari, Sandy McNeil, Mark Armstrong, and Oliver Kratzer

The LiftPod is a personal, portable aerial work platform designed as an alternative to ladders. Powered by any standard 18-volt cordless drill or an optional power pack, the LiftPod gives users a 360-degree range of motion at a working height of up to 14 feet. It can be assembled by one person in less than 30 seconds, and because of its light weight, it can be moved around a job site by a single person.

This is an excellent post from Building Industry Relationships that highlights another aspect of presenting value when courting clients. For service industries, value is the main offering that successful companies provide. Often the term is used in reference to perceived value, or “the relationship between the consumer’s perceived benefits in relation to the perceived costs of receiving these benefits.” In this case, Karen Davis discusses the more conventional meaning of value – saving money.

At a time when people are pinching pennies, let them know how you your services can save them money in the long run. Their time is money. Their research effort is money. Their mistakes – money. Show your prospect the financial benefit of choosing you.

- The financial benefit of choosing you over your competition, whether you’re in a job interview or trying to sign a contract.

- The financial benefit spending a little more time in the pre-design phase before moving on to construction documents.

- The financial benefit of moving forward with the project today rather than waiting a few months.

- The financial benefit ordering the finish material now, not two weeks before it’s scheduled for installation.

Clients like to hear how you can save them money. Showing and telling them how hiring you can give them a higher return on their investment could seal the deal.

Wow. I wonder if there will ever be an iDefibrillator app…

Brace yourselves for another Apple patent. It’s a weird and wacky one. It’s about using a “seamless” biometric heart rate monitor to identify iPhone users. Seriously. Your boom-tiddy-boom could unlock your iPhony-phone.

Apple’s patent couldn’t be simpler: Part of the metal shell of an iPhone (can you say iPhone 2010, anyone?) is replaced by electronic sensors that detect the pulse of the user’s heart as it reaches the hand holding the phone. Peculiarities in each user’s heart patterns at the cardiac level, transmitted through their blood vessel network, result in a signature that the iPhone can then detect and use to identify particular persons. Thus logging in to your iPhone could become as easy as just picking the damn thing up and waiting a second or two (typically about the same time it would take to press unlock and tap in a PIN number, anyway).

This should be a lot of fun – ain’t nothin’ like some zydeco and crawdads…

Pinch those tails, suck those heads and dance, dance, dance! At the ninth annual Gator By The Bay Festival (May 7-9) the Louisiana bayou comes to Spanish Landing Park in San Diego, bringing along 8000 pounds of crawfish (that’s where the tail pinching and head sucking comes in) and some of the hottest Cajun, zydeco, and blues music around.

Dance fever at Gator By The Bay.

^{Courtesy photo}

The festival is expected to draw more than 10,000 attendees, enjoying 70 performances on six stages, dance lessons, cooking demos, kid- and family-friendly activities, a plethora of food options including those succulent crawfish (a.k.a. mudbugs)and lots of dancing.

For those unacquainted with the genre, Cajun music stems from the traditions of the descendants of French Acadians (Cajuns), who settled southwest Louisiana in the mid-1700s. Zydeco, the wilder, looser sister to Cajun music, cranks it up a notch with more funk in the beat and more swivel in the dancers’ hips, taking the lively airs and soulful waltzes of the French-speaking Cajuns, and infusing them with African, Caribbean and even Native American influences.

It’s a rollicking, up-tempo, heavily syncopated sound, and both Cajun and zydeco music are literally made for dancing, for celebrating life, and having more fun than you ever thought you had energy for.

There are many who will argue that it’s impossible to listen to the highly infectious music and not want to dance for joy, and if you don’t know how, don’t worry—there’s a full schedule of dance instruction, from zydeco to West Coast swing to Zumba®, throughout the festival.

This is an excellent list of marketing techniques that every firm should be implementing.

• Start a blog (but make sure your are committed to regular, weekly posts. Get other lawyers in the firm or practice group to agree to contribute on a schedule);
• Make sure marketing and business goals are aligned (too often they are not in sync and send a confused message to the outside world);
• Find out what is written online about you and your firm by monitoring your reputation online (one way to do that is set up Google Alerts on yourself and firm’s name);
• Ask “why this is important” before issuing press releases (and make sure that “newsy” items are just that. If no one outside the firm would really care, it ain’t news); and
• Don’t forget the importance of face-to-face meetings (this should really be listed No. 1. IMHO it is much more valuable than the previous nine.)

I agree with Jessica that “[M]ost of these tips cost next to nothing.” So, in these trying economic times, there isn’t a good reason for not doing them because of budget concerns.

This is one of those Seinfeld moments… I used to be on the road an awful lot commuting to various jobs, and would see these cars with memorial stickers on them a couple times each week, if not daily. I’ve always wondered what sort of sociological and psychological factors might be at play.

Southern Californians have always had deep relationships with their vehicles. The four-wheeled contraptions aren’t just a way to get from Point A to Point B. For many, the car is a toy, sanctuary or way to announce to the world that “this is who we are.”

So perhaps it’s not strange that sedans, SUVs and pickups also have become forums for displaying sadness, for showing familial bonds, for paying tribute to the departed.

“To the extent that cars are a central part of our life, it makes sense,” said Nicholas Christenfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego. “Cars are now just mobile living rooms, family rooms, kitchens … and the symbols of mourning that one might have confined to one’s house can now be displayed on one’s car.”

Owners of sign and automotive custom shops in San Diego County said the sale of personalized memorial decals has become a steady part of their business.

The Museum of Arts and Design in New York presents an exhibit entitled, “Dead or Alive”:

He kills the cockroaches with a spray, pops them into a jar, takes them back to his studio in Florida, and then puts their parts to work in his art. He glues their legs together into long, lacy cylinders that look like giant larval casings. He arranges their wings into medically precise images of a human skull, foot bones and hand bones, all scaled to his own head and appendages.

Mr. Peña likes the medium of cockroach aesthetically, the way he can use the different tones in the wings as his palette to convey light and shadow. He likes it metaphorically, how we are disgusted by something with which we have so much in common — the same taste in foods, the same easy adaptability to every possible niche. “Cockroaches are a witness to our daily lives,” Mr. Peña said. He also likes his medium pragmatically. “It’s a material that I can easily find,” he said, “and it’s cheaper than buying paint.”

Mr. Peña is among the growing ranks of artists who have gone natural, who are scavenging the world’s vivarium and rummaging through the life sciences in search of materials, ideas, cosmic verities, tragicomic homilies, personal agency, a personal agent, a way to stand out in the crowd.

Pat Metheny is a great guitarist, although stylistically he sometimes gets mired too much in that adult contemporary/smooth jazz ilk for my taste. I heard about the Orchestrion Project about a year ago and was very excited to see this:

Youth Radio’s Charlie Foster says, “I saw an amazing concert Saturday night in Berkeley, where Pat Metheny jammed out with an orchestra of robots – playing pianos, vibraphones, a bass, a weird bouncing guitar machine and every kind of percussion instrument – all controlled by his guitar through solenoid triggers. It was insane steampunk and beautiful jazz.”

CSS is a language that is used to provide styling to webpages. It is quite useful in that it separates the presentation or display of content from the content itself. Beyond that description it would be difficult for me to succinctly describe how CSS works. I got into learning about CSS after being exposed to the work of Eric Meyers. Eric was pushing the boundaries of CSS more than a decade ago by creating some very beautiful and intriguing designs all through HTML/XHTML and CSS. But what Mr. DeSandro has done is beyond comprehension – he has created a typeface using CSS. Practical? No. Amazing? Yes. This is like a Rube Goldberg approach to web design.

Curtis is the name I’ve given for a family of geometric sans-serif fonts currently in development. Other incarnations exist as Fontstructions: Curtis Heavy and Curtis Pixel 14. This version takes form in CSS. All shapes are rendered by the browser, using a combination of background color, border width, border radius, and a heavily reliance on absolute/relative positioning….

The Curtis CSS font wasn’t conceived of any practical application. I was more interested in seeing if it could be pulled off, and if so, what the final result would look like. This typeface was used in the article, Why Art?. Remarkably, Wagner Paula was able to build upon the framework I started in his Liveposter.

Many people lament about how unproductive the traditional “business meeting” is. One or more participants feel the need to assert their opinion at great length, or simply regurgitate the same information multiple times. Most of us sit passively through these time-wasting meetings because … well … I don’t know! But now you can have the facts on your side when you want to remind people that any particular meeting is wasting time. Just Bring TIM, the “Time is Money” meeting cost calculator and clock!

Simply saunter (or swagger, if you prefer) into your next business meeting with TIM in your hand. Plop TIM down on the table, and press the plus or minus button to set the average hourly rate of all of the meeting’s attendees. Press the other plus or minus buttons to set the number of people attending the meeting. As soon as the meeting is called to order, press the big button on TIM’s side. Then sit back and watch the dollars tick past! TIM will automatically calculate how much money has been spent in terms of salary dollars for every minute the meeting lasts. Meetings can be paused — say for a potty break — by pressing the big button again. When the meeting resumes, press the big button and the clock picks up where it left off.

No Comment…