Archive for the ‘Measuring’ Category
March 24th
Until it was mentioned in yesterday’s Times, I never realized that Good Friday marks the official birthday of the peace sign. Gerald Holtom, a designer from West London, came up with the now-famous symbol by combining letters from the semaphore, or flag-signalling, alphabet. An N stands for “nuclear”; a D for “disarmament”; and the circle around the two is meant to symbolize Earth.
The peace sign had its first official outing 50 years ago at a Good Friday demonstration in England that was organized by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
March 7th
Here’s an email we recently received:
I have been a loyal customer for 10 years now. I am becoming more aware of the environmental issues relating to paper use and deforestation, and will be rethinking my purchase of next year’s planner if recycled (not “recyclable”) paper isn’t used in producing it. Please let me know your plans for moving to recycled paper. This would be a major selling point for many customers as well as likely to be highlighted in the media, so a win-win-win solution for the company, customers and our environment. Thank you.
– Emily S., Berkeley, CA
Thank you, Emily, for prodding us to include planners made entirely from recycled paper. This new line - “Equology” - will be available in the U.S. for the 2010 calendar year, possibly sooner.
But Emily, not all recycled paper is good for the environment. Actually, recycling papers can be very toxic when chemicals are used to de-ink the paper. There are a lot of questions we need to ask manufacturers of recycled paper products. It is not enough to say “recycled!”
Read the rest of this entry »
March 4th
Brooklyn based artist Katherine Hubbel spent a year photographing everything she threw away “in an effort to better understand what—if anything—our trash says about the way we live.” The photographs were published in the June 2007 issue of Good magazine and are still available online. (I found out about them recently when they were reprinted in Edible Brooklyn.)
Sure makes you stop and think about all the stuff that’s in your own trash, doesn’t it?
February 21st
My February 2008 newsletter from the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals featured an interview with Mark J. Penn, the CEO of Bur-Marsteller and president of Penn, Schoen & Berland. PSB provides market research and communications strategies for political figures, corporations and crisis situations.
Mark Penn was the man who identified “Soccer Moms” as a crucial constituency in President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. He is known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our culture that are wielding large influence on business, politics and our personal lives.
In his new book, “Microtrends: The small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes,” Mark Penn shows the most important trends in the world today are the smallest ones. The largest driver behind microtrends is personal choice, and how people adapt product usage to personal preference.
Another large driver is the power and influence of small groups. “In today’s mass societies, its takes only one percent of people making a dedicated choice–contrary to the mainstream’s choice–to create a movement that can change the world.”
Penn manages to unearth a few unforeseen gems. The New Luddites, more cynical and lonelier than their counterparts with a Facebook following, are much more numerous than imagined, and are striking back at technology “with their pens, legal pads, index cards and scraps of paper in pockets containing all their to-do lists.”
February 20th
Here’s another great environmental resource: Slate’s Green Lantern series, which debuted last fall and answers one very concrete, practical question each week. (Are manual transmissions really better for the environment? What kind of tree should you plant in your backyard to soak up the most carbon?)
The answers are typically fair, balanced, and—as I realized when I read this week’s piece on the environmental merits of fresh vs. frozen orange juice—they almost always illuminate the real difficulty of pinning down just how “eco-friendly” something is: it’s not just the transportation but the production that counts. (It’s for this reason, in a well-publicized example, that environmentally sensitive Britons are better off buying imported lamb from New Zealand than they are consuming the home-grown variety.) And then, of course, there’s the matter of packaging and waste disposal, which further complicates things…
Of course, as this week’s article points out, “changing your mode of orange juice intake isn’t going to save the planet.” But it’s still nice to understand the many factors that go into these small, daily choices.
February 19th
Arts & Letters Daily is one of my favorite websites. Edited by Denis Dutton, a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, it brings together an eccentric selection of articles, book reviews, and essays from all across the Internet—from a meditation on creating fictional characters to an examination of the explosive growth of the Chinese and Indian economies.
Now Dutton and his colleague Douglas Campbell have started a new resource devoted exclusively to making sense of the science behind global warming. Climate Debate Daily links to scientific articles, news stories, economic studies, polemics, editorials, and more, and gives equal voice to dissenting views as it does to calls to action. The objective: “to allow readers to form their own judgments based on the best available information.”
A timely idea, indeed…
February 13th
Here in New York, snagging a good restaurant reservation is always a competitive affair, but the struggle grows particularly fierce when Valentine’s Day comes around. Tables book up weeks, if not months, in advance, and woe to the hapless souls who wander in on the spur of the moment, hoping to be seated at 8:00!
Personally, I’d rather stay home and cook (or get takeout), anyway. Why stress yourself out for a holiday that’s supposed to celebrate love? Some things are better left un-planned.
If you don’t have anyone to cook for (or get takeout with), on the other hand—and you live in the New York area—you can order your meal from FreshDirect, an online grocery delivery service with a special menu “for the brokenhearted”:
From bitters (to match your mood) to thyme (said to heal all wounds) these items might just cushion the bumpy trip from your blind denial all the way to newfound acceptance of single life.
What are you doing on Valentine’s Day?
February 11th
A couple weeks ago we received the following suggestion by a visitor to the Quo Vadis website: “Have you ever considered making a planner ‘Specifically Designed With The Truck Driver In Mind’?”
This product will greatly help drivers in their daily routine, where they can record daily records to reflect back on their maintenance, deadhead mi., trip routing, advances, fuel stops for each trip, po#, pick up ID# and so on. There is still a need for simple products instead of high tech products.
I’m not sure it’s ever occurred to us that truck drivers were interested in our planners, but I’ll second the suggestion that simple products can still triumph over technology. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a small set of shelves on eBay, and the UPS package they were mailed in had a typo in the address—the ZIP code was off by a single digit. Everything else was correct, and what’s more, that wrong ZIP code was all of 7 miles away from my house, in a different part of Brooklyn.
Ok, I thought; no problem. I’ll just call UPS and sort it out.
So I called, every day, for a WEEK, and was told, variously, that the correction had already been made, that the local center would call me back, that the package had been lost, that it would be there within a few hours, etc. Meanwhile I followed the tracking number on the UPS website and could see that it would go out for delivery each day, only to come back every night undelivered (fortunately, there was no street by the same name in that other part of Brooklyn). In the end, I had to ask the sender to ship another package, while the first one was returned to her as “undeliverable.”
So much for sophisticated logistical systems—a map and a pencil would have sufficed!
February 7th
Happy New Year!
Chinese New Year 4706, which begins today, is the Year of the Rat, which holds a place of honor as the first creature in the 12-year cycle of the Chinese lunar calendar.
Legend has it that the rat was the first to arrive when Buddha summoned 12 animals to name a year in each cycle after each one of them. The rat was followed by an ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
“The charm and innovative personality of the rat is legendary - he did not become the first sign of the cycle without good reason,” Theodora Lau wrote in her “Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes.”
The Chinese lunar calendar is based on the cycles of the moon, and is constructed in a different fashion than the Western solar calendar, with the beginning of the year falling somewhere between late January and early February, according to the Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco. In China, the horoscope is often consulted to learn how to deal with a difficult boss or understand different personalities.
The Steamy Kitchen, a blog featuring modern Asian cooking, can help you get ready for tonight’s feast.
February 2nd
Punxsutawney Phil, our official Groundhog, predicts six more weeks of winter.
Here Ye! Here Ye! Here Ye!
On Gobbler’s Knob on this fabulous Groundhog Day, February 2nd, 2008, Punxsutawney Phil, the Seer of Seers, Prognosticator of all Prognosticators, Rose to the call of President Bill Cooper and greeted his handlers, Ben Hughes and John Griffiths.
After casting a weathered eye towards thousands of his faithful followers, Phil consulted with President Cooper and directed him to the appropriate scroll, which proclaimed:
“As I look around me, a bright sky I see, and a shadow beside me. Six more weeks of winter it will be!”
Groundhog Day has been celebrated for a long time in the United States. Back on February 4, 1841, a Morgantown, PA shopkeeper named James Morris wrote in his diary…”Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas Day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”
