Recently in The Dreaded Misc. Category

I'm totally enjoying the blog Tales from Redesignland. He has an adorable little comic that he does that wouldn't be half as funny if it wasn't so true.

I'm tempted to decorate the halls of AP with his motivational posters like this one.

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same." — Suw Charman-Anderson

I signed up and pledged to blog about a woman in technology. Turns out 1832 other people have also signed up. I wanted to blog about Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau, a Danish physicist who works in the field of quantum physics.

I worked with Lene Hau when I was a librarian at the Rowland Institute for Science in Boston, around 1997-2000. Lene ran the group working on atom cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation. While I and her team were working there, they slowed the speed of light! I remember walking into the Institute one morning, and the team had put up a spoof of those Volkswagen Beetle ads that said "0 to 60? Yes.", but with numbers for the speed of light: "300,000 km/sec to 17 m/sec? Yes!" Eventually they were able to stop it.

Lene now works at Harvard University. She has published numerous scientific articles and papers, and was honored with Harvard University's prestigious Ledlie Prize in September 2008. She was Elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on January 16, 2008.

In 2002, John Preskill wrote a poem about her, called Lene Hau.

I admire Lene for her amazing achievements. Physics is a branch of science that is still dominated by men. Lene is incredibility smart and talented. She has risen to the top of her field. I'm proud that I was able to work with her for the little bit that I did.

You can learn more about her on her lab's page at Harvard and on her wikipedia page.

Fast Company has an awesome article today on the women who are making Web 2.0 go. It's so wonderful to see these amazingly talented and inspiring women called out. And that fact that I know a bunch of them makes it that much more special.

Way to go Leah Culver of Pownce; Rashmi Sinha of Slideshare; Dina Kaplin of blip.tv; Marissa Mayer of Google; Cyan Banister of Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page of BlogHer; Caterina Fake of Flickr; Gina Bianchini of Ning; Kaliya Hamlin of OpenID; Mena Trott of Six Apart; and Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post. You are all an inspiration!

I'm moving all of my blog feeds over to Feedburner so I can track the stats more effectively. If you are reading this site via RSS, it would be most awesome if you could update the link to [ http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChiaraFoxcomnowWithMoreFox ].

Thanks!

Signed,
The Management

The people in this country never cease to amaze me. The BBC had a story this morning about a car dealer in Missouri that is running a special promotion. Buy a vehicle and get a gun!

The owner is quoted by the BBC as saying "We're just damn glad to live in a free country where you can have a gun if you want to. [I recommend the Kel-Tec .380 pistol, which is] "a nice little handgun that fits in your pocket."

Every time I start waxing nostalgic for days gone by, and thinking that it would have been better if I had lived in an earlier time, I need to remember this:

I was just fast-forwarding to through the Today Show episode I recorded today, looking for the interview with Dooce. I was watching the show go by (god I love Tivo) and I realized that it has been *years* since I've watched the Today Show.

I used to watch the Today Show all the time, when I first moved out on my own. I think it's because it is what my mother always used to watch in the mornings when I was growing up. And on some level, being a responsible adult meant watching grown-up shows like the Today Show.

Ha!

All I could think about as I watched the show go by was all the consumerism and the plastic people, and how shows like that are the epitome of what I hate about popular culture. I thank my lucky stars for NPR and the intarwebs so I can get my news another way.

Heather did a great job though. I'm so glad she is getting the recognition she deserves for all her hard work.

--- Originally posted on the Adaptive Path Blog ---

Dolores Blog showed thousands of colors to people and asked them to name the colors they saw. They then plotted those names on a color Wheel, printed in the color. They have a blog post describing the project. The resulting image is beautiful. They then added a filter so you can search for different color names and see where it is on the wheel. It's based on a study to test the universality of language.

When I first saw this, I thought it looked like a type of tag cloud. I like how their filter let's you expand and contract the colors that appear on the wheel. It certainly helps to illustrate how ambiguous language is. I love that there are at least four different colors all called "chocolate."

It also started me thinking about what other types of visualizations could be done. There are certainly lots of things that could be done intersecting it with other data, depending upon what you are interested in. Being able to see the color names along with if the namer was colorblind, their gender, native language and other demographic data would be interesting. I found myself wanting to click on a color name to get more information like how many times that name was used for this color.

What ideas for visualizations do you have?

We are always coming up with new names for things. It's what we do at Adaptive Path. You get smart, geeky, creative people together and wordplay is bound to happen.

A couple years ago now, Dan started advocating for "topless" meetings. All too often our meetings were blogged down by folks staring at a screen and typing instead of participating in the conversations around them. Todd took up the call in a blog post against crackberries last November that caused some stir.

Well, it seems that other folks have really started to take notice. Yesterday, the LA Times published a front page story about topless meetings. Next thing we knew, film crews from ABC, CBS, and NBC were in the office. They interviewed Dan and shot some background images of the office.

The footage aired last night and is already up on the web:

On ABC nightly news. You can see me turn around in the background of one shot.

On the local CBS news.  I'm in a lot of shots of this one.

On the local NBC station. I'm just out of frame on this one, but you get to see a lot of good shots of the office and my coworkers.

Anyone who knows me knows that I struggle with the whole work-life-balance thing. I throw myself into projects, running at full speed until I collapse in a heap and then get up and do it all over again. The whole not sleeping thing just compounds that all. Even with hobbies, I go weeks with no crafting and then spend a whole weekend knitting everything in sight. (It's not mania per se, it's just a pattern of manic-like behavior I learned at a young age.)

In any case, I am always looking at ways to be more in balance. The past three weeks of downtime I've had between projects has been wonderful. I feel more centered than I have in a long time. Of course, better is not the same as good.

My dear friend Janice recently sent around a link to a post about just this thing. It's from the blog Feld Thoughts.

In the post Janice sent around, he talks about 5 types of vacation:

1. Spend Time Away
2. Go Dark Weekend
3. Excursion
4. Downshift
5. Visit

I realized that I only ever take Excursions or Visits. Looking at the definitions Feld gives, it's not surprising that I never return from them as rested and refreshed as I hoped. I'm not sure that I can swing the Spend Time Away soon, but I'm seriously considering incorporating the Go Dark Weekend into my life.

In the vacation post, he refers to another post of his on how he discovered work life balance. I actually found this post more helpful and it's what inspired me to write this post. Again, he has 5 habits for keeping himself in balance:

1. Spend Time Away (this one seems to be key)
2. Life Dinner
3. Segment Space
4. Be Present
5. Meditate

I can't wait to start doing these. I love the idea of the Life Dinner. I do a good job at the segmenting space (I tend not to work at home and rarely work at home after being in the office all day). But I certainly need improvement on the being present and meditating.