Brain Food!

http://www.behance.net/gallery/What-have-you-got-in-your-head-set-2/614949

"Dear Dr. Starr,"

A letter (in six bullet points) to the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools Superintendent is available.

Snow-Day Dog-Blogging!

Bucky levitates. [Backyard, this afternoon.]

"A Shocking Omission."

This.

Curious is Part of Smart

I am in the midst of rethinking the Thaler Pekar & Partners website. I've recently spoken with two web design experts, one of whom said, "I would never click on "cake", because I don't know where it will take me." The other said, "I love 'cake'! I always go there, precisely because I don't know what I will find."

Consultants are encouraged to have an ideal client in mind. For some time, I've feared that my simple desire to work with smart people was lacking in the details that would result in proper marketing gravity. Now, I am learning that I do have a more nuanced idea of my ideal client.

"There’s been an accident at the traffic lights and we need an ambulance fast!"

What is Lego saying about cycling?

(h/t: Bike Snob NYC)

Title of the week!

"Of Toasters and Molecular Ticker Tapes" by Dr. Konrad P. Kording appears in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Collaboration, Trust, and Improvisation

Readers of NeuroCooking know that I've been studying Improv for several years. (You can read some of my previous posts about Improv here, here, and here.) Recently, I've been working with Jay Rhoderick, and exploring ways in which we can collaborate, melding my expertise in communication and story with Jay's Improv brilliance. Last month, Jay and I delivered the opening plenary of the 2011 New Jersey Non-Profit Conference, leading close to 300 professionals in an exciting and interactive session exploring the traits necessary to successful collaboration, using some Improv techniques. The Foundation News Digest blog, PhilanTopic, just published an excerpt from our plenary, Productive Partnerships: Building Trust and Creating Collaborations.

To read the excerpt, 3 Ways Your T-Shape Helps You Collaborate, click here.

Why Story Matters

"Communication is more than transactional. Communication can be transformative."

Stanford Social Innovation Review just published an excerpt from a lecture I recently delivered at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University (my alma mater).

Click here to see my advice to future professional communicators, including:

• Why focus on storysharing, as opposed to storytelling
• The importance of story elicitation in business communication
• The transformational power of story

New Year's Day Dog-Blogging!

(10/16/11)

New Year's Day Horse (& Donkey) Blogging!

(South Range, WI, 12/23/11.)

New Year's Day Cat-Blogging!

(Poolesville, MD, 9/18/11)

New Year's Day Cat-Blogging!

(South Range, WI, 12/23/11)

New Year's Day Dog-Blogging!

(12/17/11)

Our final word about beer, this year.

Just one sentence by Mr. Garrett Oliver – from the second paragraph of his editor's introduction to The Oxford Companion to Beer:

"Beer does not resemble wine so much as it resembles music."

What's plugging your bars?

For a short time, the fine people at Rivendell Bicycle Works have our favorite Nitto anodized aluminum bar plugs on sale, reduced from $16 to $11 the pair (in blue, gold, & red; for road (drop) bars only, not mountain bars).

(photo from 1/10/11; that bolt takes a 3 mm allen wrench)

2011's "rise of civic consciousness"

‎"A positive development that has gathered strength over the past year has been the rise of civic consciousness, the acceptance by ordinary citizens that they too must play a part in the process of change and adaptation. This is not so much protest against the inadequacies of government as recognition of the importance of balancing rights with responsibilities." 

- Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician and Nobel peace prize-winner


[from "A sense of balance" by Aung San Suu Kyi, in "The World in 2012" from The Economist Newspaper.]

Our 2011 Top Ten.

The top ten* NeuroCooking posts of 2011:

1. "Yesterday, in the early evening, we went out to shoot..."
2. Making Sense of Occupy Wall Street
3. Made in Japan by Mr. Shin-ichi Konno.
4. Those who Espouse Only Evidence Typically Lose
5. "ASH, WHITE"
6. e.g., "less hairy mothers would have to park their young"
7. "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D"
8. Heart, Head, Hand, & Complexity
9. Something about a story is not a story.
10. The things we do...

Cherry tree from "Yesterday, in the early evening, we went out to shoot...", April 12. 

Tree tag from "ASH, WHITE", February 13.

Steers from "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D", September 4.

Venn diagram from "The things we do...", February 6.

_____
*As ranked by number of pageviews, per google analytics.

Hey Porter!

The opening sentence of the four-page article on Porter, written by Horst Dornbusch and Garrett Oliver, in The Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garrett Oliver:

"Porter, a type of dark beer that first saw life in the 1700s, built London's greatest breweries, slaked the thirsts of America's revolution-minded colonists, and then traveled the world, morphing as it went to meet the changing needs of time and place."

(Post title refers to this.)

Boxing Day Dog-Blogging!

(12/4/2011)

First annual mid-December NeuroCooking holiday gift recommendation!

Best gift for less than ten dollars for a lover of rock-and-roll:

"The Black Keys Live at the Crystal Ballroom" (2008) DVD. 

A superlative record of two gentlemen from Akron, Ohio, doing what they do so well.

Jung Slices His Brain.

An excerpt from "The Red Book (Liber Novus)" by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961):


The Cabiri:  "We forged a flashing sword for you, with which you can cut the knot that entangles you."

I:  "I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow."

The Cabiri:  "We also place before you the devilish, skillfully twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will cut through it."

I:  "Let me see, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly, a human brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?"

The Cabiri:  "The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both: entanglement and severing."

 ______
Notes: 
Jung's Red Book was the most influential unpublished book, ever. Almost a century after it was begun, it was published in 2009 in a facsimile edition, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
This passage appears on pp. 166-167.
The Cabiri were ancient deities.