C'mere, c'mere, ya gotta see this

IBM made a little short film, called A BOY AND HIS ATOM, using individual atoms for the animation.

These were magnified 100 million times!

How would you like to trudge off to work and do something like this?

Hint: You will see something in this film you recognize from this blog.

Beyond kewl.

http://www.govtech.com/newsletters/Question-of-the-Day-for-051513.html?elq=3aed8a2697234d52a041a2dbc3a09e41&elqCampaignId=4052

Can you plan serendipity?

Serendipity is the unexpected...can it be structured and bottled?

Rachel Emma Silverman wrote about this in the WSJ, May 1, 2013.

Companies are not leaving chance to...um...chance. They are looking at what makes 2+2=5 and trying to institutionalize it.

Companies are analyzing their teams down to the ground, trying to fit skill sets together like puzzle pieces, and arranging for people to be thrown together where they might spawn the "big idea."

They also put "playful" prompts in elevators and on walls. Maybe the THWIM thing (see title of this blog) came from one of those in the olden days. THINK?

Google makes sure each worker is never more than a 2.5 minute walk from every other worker.

What do you wanna bet they still text?

Zappos closes off halls and a skybridge to make sure people have to go out on the sidewalk where they will encounter supposedly inspiring common folk. Expect a homeless app any day.

People also work in what is basically the building lobby--it's magic, said one exec.

People with common interests are matched up for lunch. They can even lunch with people in overseas offices via a monitor.

Salesconference.com has yes and no doors. You answer a question, such as "Is your work tapping into your inner genius?", by walking through one door or the other.

Is there a door for "Would you like to slam this door?" Enough already! Retreats, executives swapping work responsibilities...I need a morphine drip to even type more of this!

How about a million dollars and 10% of the backend for every patent you bring in that makes any money?

I could get real spontaneous for that!

How to get right under the lightning

Where do ideas come from? the WSJ asked on Apr 29, 2013.

David Cohen, TechsStars: Ideas tend to come when you are hard at work on something else. For instance, he said, I wanted info on music and could not find what I wanted, so I created earFeeder--it checks your computer for music and then sends info on those bands.

Vivek Wadhwa, Singularity University: Coming up with ideas is not necessarily a young person's game. The typical entrepreneur is a middle-aged professional who knows the market and starts a company with his or her own savings.

Angela Benton, NewME Accelerator: Look outside your industry to see how others are attacking problems. Be present in your life. Do things you are invested in.

Samer Kurdi, Entrepreneur's Organization. The key is not the idea but the entrepreneur's willingness to try and keep trying.

Ben Baldwin, ClearFit: Let your subconscious do the work. Smell the flowers and let your mind pop out a solution.

Brian Spaly, Trunk Club: Be sure you can fail fast and cheaply and move on if need be.

Victor W. Hwang, T2 Venture Capital: Listen to weird stuff, watch obscure documentaries, walk in weird places, talk to weird people.

What isn't such a good idea: Reading a market forecast from a big-name consulting firm and creating a product for that need. This from Guy Kawasaki, Apple.

Learn to see, not just look

Do you like depraved crime novels? Sure, me, too. There is a new author in town--Roger Hobbs--and his debut is GHOSTMAN. Setup: Despite, his getaway precautions and decades of near-non-existence off the grid, elusive professional thief gets in way over his head with horrible gangsters--all within a few hours.

Anyway, it backtracks some to previous jobs in this guy's life and in one he is being schooled by a professional actress turned criminal. She thinks he is cocky, so she sets him a challenge. She takes out a piece of paper and a green felt tip and says, "Draw a one-dollar bill."

He makes a rectangle. Then he puts the numeral one in each corner. He thinks the left hand corner has some leaves or vegetation, so he sketches that. The top right has a shield, he remembers, so he puts that around the numeral 1. FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE across the top--he puts that.

WRONG, she says. Start over.

He starts over. The four 1's, the oval with a stick figure Geo Washington. Some serial numbers.

WRONG!

He gets angry and throws the pen. The green pen.

She says, "The front of the bill is not green--it's black and white." He looks. Well, darn!

The lesson is: We have all seen this object many times, but it whips right by us. I could not have done even as well as he did.

Anyway--good book!

By the way, I could illustrate this with a dollar, but why don't you draw one instead?

Futurizing the past

According to an American Chemical Society (ACS) podcast (http://www.acs.org/globalchallenges), analyzing a bright blue paint called Egyptian Blue is helping scientists develop new nanomaterials.

Egyptian Blue is thought to be the first artificial pigment and it was used in tombs and on statues. Here and there in the ancient world, flecks of the stuff still exist.

Apparently the calcium copper silicate in the pigment breaks apart into sheets so thin that thousands would fit across the width of a human hair. These sheets produce invisible infrared radiation similar to beams in remote controls.

Ancient materials--modern eyes and the brains and analytics to suss out the possibilities.

These podcasts are full of these serendipitous moments.

Life is, too.

Hot idea: Phoenix AZ as new innovation hub

Silicon Valley is iconic, as they like to say--but Chandler AZ, where I landed (boy is that a long story), is trying to become Silicon City--and it is the home of Intel, the chip people.

But now, the Valley of the Sun (brought to you by the letters U and V) is going through a nonprofit called Seed Spot (http://seedspot.org), trying to rebrand this desert burg as an innovation capital.

A culture of startups, a culture of creativity--these are terms being promoted, according to a story by Eugene Scott in the Arizona Republic, Apr 18, 2013.

All this will take is...investment...the new buzzword for MONEY. And--the founders of Washington Row (don't know where that name came from) in downtown Phoenix are already worried about competition from LiL Ole Silicon City (Chandler) over here.

They think creative types need a place to hang out--such as a converted warehouse.

Creative people want to be around other creatives, they theorize. They also said people need to be aware of "best practices" in innovation.

I would say an innovation "best practice" would exist before anyone decided whether it was a best practice or not.

Lose the jargon.

As for the meetup warehouse idea, a grungy bar is good. In DC, we also used to have "salons." We would bring liquor over to a design firm's offices every Friday evening--and drink and compare notes.

Now that was a good practice.

I would say, smart people, geeks, apps people, inventors, big talkers, artists, weird little quiet people, and thinkers out of the ordinary--maybe a few cocktails or shared office space, grants, and excitement--and something could happen even here in horse country.

For all I know, the horses may surprise everyone.

Printing organs--but not how you think

I am so in "like" with 3D printing. It fascinates me. Somewhere on here, I said why not design a printer where you can load blood etc and print off spare parts for humans?

I don't think they can do that quite yet (although I later learned others had thought of it), but they are printing replicas of say, someone's heart, so surgeons can practice repairing it.

Wish they had done that with my right retina (now non-functioning).

Juro Osawa wrote about 3D printing of organs in the WSJ Apr 9, 2013. The printers lay down exact copies of organs one thin layer at a time.

Stratsys and 3D Systems (two big players) have printers that use medical images such as CT scans to construct personalized models. Some are made with polyvinyl alcohol instead of hard resin--making them slimy and soft to manipulate with the scalpel. More realistic.

From start to finish, the process can take days. The printers that do this are way over $250,000.

Some of this is being used clinically--such as models that fit inside a person's mouth showing the surgeon where to cut to revamp a face.

Modern miracles that run on electricity.