Creative Think

An Arm -or- A Leg?

Question: If you were forced to make the choice between having:

     A) One arm and two legs
     B) Two arms and one leg

Which would you select (assuming you would be otherwise able-bodied)? What criteria would go into your selection process? Which do you take more for granted: your arms or your legs?

It's not my intent to be macabre or insensitive with this question. 
Rather, for the past few weeks I've trying to come to grips with the idea of which limb is more important in my day-to-day life.

Natalie du Toit, "My Inspiration of the Month" (at left). Natalie is a 24 year old South African swimmer who lost part of her left leg in a scooter accident in 2001. But she never gave up on her swimming dreams! Last week, in a grueling two-hour swim in Seville, Spain, Natalie placed fourth in the Women's 10K Open Water Swim against the world's top international competition. As a result, Natalie qualified for the Beijing Olympics (that's Olympics, not Paralympics). An amazing story!

Your Ideas for a Calendar Redesign

It's time for one of my favorite "What If of the Week!" questions.

What if the world's authorities got together
and asked YOU to re-design the calendar?

What would you come up with? How many months would your design have? How many days in a month? How long would a week be? Would they vary by season? Would there be some weeks that weren't part of a month? Would you add special days? What would your reasons be? What's something really different?

How would your calendar affect business and commerce? What impact would it have on family life? On religious festivals and celebrations? Who would be threatened? What new features would you design into your calendar?

Have fun with this! I'd love to hear your ideas.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The 25th Anniversary Edition (completely revised, redesigned, and updated) of the book "A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative" will be published by Business Plus on May 5, 2008. It is currently shipping from Amazon. The retail price is $16.99 ($11.55 at Amazon). Yowie! Zowie!

It's time for one of my favorite "What If of the Week!" questions.

What if the world's authorities got together
and asked YOU to re-design the calendar?

What would you come up with? How many months would your design have? How many days in a month? How long would a week be? Would they vary by season? Would there be some weeks that weren't part of a month? Would you add special days? What would your reasons be? What's something really different?

How would your calendar affect business and commerce? What impact would it have on family life? On religious festivals and celebrations? Who would be threatened? What new features would you design into your calendar?

Have fun with this! I'd love to hear your ideas.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The 25th Anniversary Edition (completely revised, redesigned, and updated) of the book "A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative" will be published by Business Plus on May 5, 2008. It is currently shipping from Amazon. The retail price is $16.99 ($11.55 at Amazon). Yowie! Zowie!

Father of the Acid Trip is Dead at 102

Albert Hoffman, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD, died this past Tuesday at the age of 102 in Switzerland.

Hoffman discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while working as a chemist at Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant.

This is a great example of the unpredictable twists and turns of the creative process.

Hoffman thought he was looking for medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat. Instead, he helped to create the 1960s!

So, now in death, Hoffman is entering the "mother of all trips."

So what was an acid trip like?

By sheer coincidence, today my son Alex sent me the following link about High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) pictures.

This is what the blurb about HDR says:

It can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion. . . . [Sounds like an acid trip to me!]

The intention is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows. . . .

Interesting technique. See for yourself. Go to the link for more examples.

This is a cosmic landscape (God is getting ready to reveal Himself from behind the clouds).

Yes, those childhood memories! It was all innocent and warm.

I feel transported back to antiquity (how ya' doin' Plato).

Something is about to happen to the Golden Gate Bridge (feels like something out of an Indiana Jones film).

Your dinner guest has been transformed into a bass (Kafka would love it).

Today's Forecast: Five-Ninths Daylight

I read in the paper that today, where I live in northern California, there will be 13 hours and 20 minutes of daylight. (And 10 hours and 40 minutes of darkness.)

Intriguing numbers I thought. It turns out that 13:20:00 is exactly five-ninths of a 24 hour day.  That means that 5/9 of today will be light, and 4/9 be dark. That's a nice comfortable balance especially in April.

I'll get to experience 5/9 daylight again in late August, but it will feel a lot hotter then.

A Phrase Past Its Expiration Date

Do you have a phrase or expression that you're really tired of hearing? If so, I'd love to hear it.

Here's mine:

"It is what it is."

The first few times I heard it back in the early part of this decade (the "double ohs"), I thought, "Hmmmm, what an existential way of looking at things," or "Not bad —judgment free."

By about 2004, this phrase started to wear on me. People would use it as a substitute for thinking. They'd see something, and then rather than taking a moment to analyze it or think about it more deeply, they'd take the lazy way out and say, "it is what it is."

These days I regard this expression as a verbal tick — and past its expiration date.

Question: In your opinion what expressions are past their prime?

Beautiful Naked Women Attract Visitors

How to attract visitors?

During the year and a half I've been blogging, I written over 250 posts.

But one in particular, written well over a year ago, is still responsible for nearly 15% of all my daily visitors. People from all over the world come to see this post — day in, day out. Month in, month out. Amazing!

I wrote this particular post when I was in Berlin in February, 2007 and its subject matter was outdoor advertising along the famed Unter den Linden.

This is what I called the post: Giant Beautiful Naked Older Women in Public! Take a moment to check it out.

I thought it was a straight-forward post. But when I playfully wrote the title, I wasn't thinking of what the search engines would do with it.

It turns out that a lot of people go to Google and type in some variant of (can you imagine?):

• Naked women
• Older naked women
• Beautiful naked women
• Naked women in public

Because I have a Google Page Rank Number of 5, the above post usually ends up on page one of the seeker's query results. Then the seeker (with high hopes!) clicks on the link and ends up at the above post on my site. I have a feeling they are usually disappointed. Sometimes they look around further on my blog, but most of the time they go back to their Google query results.

This is what I've learned: Sex seems to attract visitors on the Internet! See if it works for you.

The Alltop Aggregator

Serial entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki has a brand new venture. It's called Alltop, a blog aggregator currently following selected blogs (and sites) around fifteen categories such as Science, Oddities, Egos*, and Small Business.

I like the clean layout of this site; it's very easy to grasp what's going on.

A nifty feature is that when you put your cursor over a particular blog post, the first three or four sentences of that post pop up, and you're able to get the gist of what that author is thinking about without going to his/her site. Quite a time-saver. This allows you to cover a lot of ground. For example, if you go to the Mac category, you can imagine that you're Robert Scoble "reading a river of information" and get over 200 Mac-related articles in just minutes.

I've found Alltop to be a good place to go when my mind is stale and I'm tired of going to the places I typically go to.

Alltop is especially rewarding if you go to a category you don't spend a lot of time thinking about. For me, that's Fashion. There I can follow Almost Dressed, Style Hive, and Go Fug Yourself, among others. Delving into these is a wonderfully delicious way to get a fresh perspective. The Science category is also a useful place to go.

I asked Guy how he planned to "monetize the site," and he said, "We'd love to get a million eyeballs, and then we'll see what happens." It pays to think big!

Check it out!

*You can find me there right under Rosie O'Donnell (serving as a protective buffer for David Armano).

What Does This Population Map Tell You?

Shown below is a world map (for better viewing, turn either your head or your laptop sideways). The difference here is that countries are sized not according to their actual land area, but according to their respective populations.

Take a few minutes to study it. What do you notice? What comes to mind?

Here are several of my observations.

1) With its huge population size, why isn't India a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council? (The US, UK, France, Russia, and China are.)

2) As the GDP increases in large population states such as China, India, and Indonesia, world commodity prices will continue to soar.

3) Bangladesh and Nigeria, several places I don't think a lot about, are quite prominent. Iraq looks small wedged in there between Turkey and Iran.

4) The central Asian "Stans" — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan — which occupy a large land area look quite small on this population map (just north of Pakistan).

5) South America looks almost normal (i.e, like its area map).

6) Canada and Russia are each string-bean shaped like Chile (but fortunately for them, they each have the most Arctic Ocean waterfront property).

What do you notice?

Was That Really Only 10 Years Ago?

I was going through some old magazines over the weekend, and I stumbled on to this classic New Yorker cover done by Art Spiegelman from February, 1998. Just looking at it for only five seconds will take you to a whole different place. Did all that stuff really happen only ten years ago? Wow.

Underrated Inventions (and Discoveries)

What is an underrated discovery (or invention) that's happened during your lifetime?

I was reading through the Stanford Magazine, and the above question was posed to a half dozen people.

One respondent, Elise Bauer said:

"Ibuprofen is the only truly effective drug for menstrual cramps. Before ibuprofen, millions of women were completely debilitated with pain at least one full day every month. No wonder women didn't truly take to the working world en masse until the late '70s, early '80s. This is the drug that allowed them to function in the corporate world."

Interesting perspective.

My choice for an underrated invention would be the lightweight binocular swimming goggle. Prior to their appearance in the late 1960s, most competitive swimming workouts were rarely longer than 4,000 meters per session. That's because chlorinated water greatly irritated the eyes.

With the invention of the goggle, however, workouts could extend to 8,000-9,000 meters per session, and often 20,000 meters per day. This had a great impact on conditioning. It's interesting to note that the winning time in the Men's 1500 meter freestyle in the 1964 Olympics  was 17:01. The winning time in the same event at the 1972 Olympics was 15:58. That's a huge drop-off!

Goggles have also made swimming much more appealing to the casual swimmer.

Question: What would you nominate as an underrated invention (or discovery) that's taken place during your lifetime? Why?