The days of dull, grey concrete could be about to end. A Hungarian architect has combined the worldâs most popular building material with optical fiber from Schott to create a new type of concrete that transmits light. Optics.org.
Gives a whole new meaning to “Concrete Jungle” architecture.
“In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” – Attributed to Jan L.A. Van De Snepschent
If you have an Amex card, you may earn “Membership Rewards.” This is a marketing loyalty program where you can theoretically turn in points for theoretical goods or services.
This is all in theory, of course, because in practicing it, I have had no luck.Their web site won’t let me talk to it from work, or from home. The error message talks about being non-responsive temporarily. However, the real issue is that my password was bad. But somehow my ‘firewall’ was blocking the correct page, according to their tech support person.
His helpful advice – set my IE to “no security/accept all cookies”, delete all my current cookies, turn off my software firewall, connect my computer directly to the internet, and try again. My helpful advice to him – no, I won’t do that.
Perhaps Amex should look for a solution that doesn’t require the average user to turn off all possible security to use it. Plus if he was doing this with my dad, I’d get a call about all the sites he couldn’t auto-login to because all his cookies were gone. Brilliant. Let me try something…
Hmmm. Same PC, zone alarm on, firewall on, Firefox – it works. Hmmmm. Hmmm. Beats me. If I was still at Microsoft, I would be kicking some American Express butt right about now.
Back in the early 80’s, Al Franken did a bit on Saturday Night Live, about the 80’s being the “Al Franken Decade.” I always liked this bit, and would imitate his manerism of saying “Me, Al Franken.” Example:
Well, today I met Al Franken. So here’s a picture of Me, (and) Al Franken.
Christopher Allen looks at the Sizes of groups in a fascinating article which I’ve chopped into interesting chunks, below. Read the whole thing: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
Lately I’ve been noticing the spread of a meme regarding “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 that I believe is misunderstanding of his ideas….This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups — as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages — hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50. ……In my experience the smallest viable group size seems to be somewhere in the range of 5 to 9. …In my opinion it is at 5 that the feeling of “team” really starts. At 5 to 8 people, you can have a meeting where everyone can speak out about what the entire group is doing, and everyone feels highly empowered. However, at 9 to 12 people this begins to break down — not enough “attention” is given to everyone and meetings risk becoming either too noisy, too boring, too long, or some combination thereof. [via Life With Alacrity]
Like the Brady Bunch’s Jan, I wonder if there isn’t anything else important in the world to discuss.