Sol
Impressions and
Tibetan Ocean
Massage:
My daughter Julie Friedman and her husband Wangho are
owners of this terrific massage studio in Breckenridge, Colorado... and are
activists in the fight for Tibetan rights. Read the Summit News article about
Wangho's background including his life as a young Tibetan monk and his escape
from China.
Click here.
Plan-it JanetOrganizing the Planet One Closet at a Time. Mark's sister, Janet, is a Broadway stage manager with
extraordinary powers of organization (and many other fine qualities, including a
great sense of humor). Her organizing business addresses everything from closets to parties,
personal bills and schedules. Also
check out Janet's
Stage Manager
website www.janetfriedman.com.
And
Bed Bug Busters
addressing the return of bedbugs (and they're not cute) to NY City. In fact the
resurgent bedbugs are coming soon to a town near you. And they can even be
brought back from staying in hotels. Once inside your house, they are difficult
and expensive to get rid of. For those of you who do any traveling, you should
check out the
Bed Bug Travel Kit.
Create your own Natural Humidifier
for free! Commercial humidifiers are dangerous breeding
grounds for mold. Follow this simple, free, four step design to raise room
humidity without mold. Check out the reference on Wikipedia.
The Diet Construction Kit
TM
The place where
The Little Book of Results-Based Dieting
began.
Anyone who can use Excel can use this tool to lose weight. It's free and it really works.
In a classic case of putting one's money where one's mouth is, here is
One Year on a Diet, a
lean, if not mean, example of a turned curve from personal experience.
Scrabble Ideas,
including how to
remove the element of luck from Scrabble
and make it more like Chess: With
the advent of the new
SuperScrabble
board (21 by 21 squares with 200 letters) we can
now create a version of the game that completely eliminates luck. With only two
simple rule changes, Scrabble becomes more like Chess, with opening moves and a
whole new way of thinking about strategy. Other interesting Scrabble ideas are
shown including fun rule variations and Nonsense Scrabble......and also a link to a
great on-line Scrabble
site.
Mark's MusicThis is the best of classical and other
music compositions that Mark wrote mostly in 2003, finally produced in MP3 format so you can download and play them.
Check out
the songs of
Stephen Shapiro
(including new Iraq anti-war songs)
Fractals are an important new way
to see the world. A fractal is a pattern that is similar at every level of
magnification. Snowflakes, ferns and coastlines are classic
fractals.
Here are some beautiful fractals from the granddaddy of all fractals,
the Mandelbrot set. Click here to see them. They're
taken from a wonderful computer program called Fractint. (Note that the
Results-based budget schematic - Volume I and Volume II - is also a
fractal - and is now click-on wallpaper.)
But Fractint has been surpassed by another amazing program: Ultra Fractal.com.
This is brilliant software that allows you to control all aspects of a fractal's
creation. Click here to see
some of the fractals produced with Ultrafractal. And check out this Cool
Fractal Website!
Most all games have a winner and a loser. The basic version of The
Collaboration Game is one where the
only way to win is for everyone to win. But there are also variations which
simulate the different roles and conflicting objectives found in real life
groups working together. Consider it an over-the-edge experiment in group process.
Click here for a copy of the
rules and game board. And, if you are crazy enough to try this, please let me know how it
turns out. Check out
Collaboration Game #2 for Large Groups.
Humorous Meditations of a Frequent
Flier The full text is now available. (So much for selling the book.)
Click on the picture. Enjoy. (Anyone who still wants an
official printed copy can send $ 14.95 to the address on your screen.) An
excerpt from Miracle of Flight was published in the July 2001 issue of the national humor magazine
"Funny Times." Ironic timing as you'll see when you read the section
on airport "security." Unfortunately not much has changed.
What
does a Chess Game "look like?"
A graphic mathematical representation of a chess game can be generated using a formula that converts
each move into a point in the xy plane.
Green chile stew, green chile salad and green chile garlic
bread!! NEW: Green chile lentil soup
Humor, Humility, Honesty, Hard Work
Another version of four H's which seems to work. These are the words we live by
(or try to) here at the Institute. Look for future mindless rhetoric and moralizing
on this site.
An old piece of writing about one of the biggest problems in management: bad
supervision. I once asked a group of managers at the beginning of a supervision
course: "How many people here know someone who left a job because of a bad
supervisor?" Almost every hand went up. Here's a simple guide that will
help get new (and some old) supervisors thinking in the right direction. Click
here.
Take a look at this posting from AOL:
The 7 Pitfalls of taking a new job - great advice for new and old
supervisors alike.
A Street Map of the USA
An interesting simplified schematic of the US interstate highway system. Click
here.
A theory of chord progressions using the three 4-tone diminished chords as
hyperspace shortcuts.
This schematic can be used to explain many of the innovative chord progressions
used by classical and other composers and to create new ones. Click
here for a description of the theory and some examples.
The
Collaboration Game 
What
does a Chess Game "look like?"
A Street Map of the USA
Musical
Hyperspace
Paintings
Computer Art:
Experiments in Color
on Color
and Color
on Black
