(oh.. and by the way… if you’re one of many people who are wondering if this should be “just deserts” or “just desserts”… you can check this out.. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/just_deserts.  I’d thank my 7th grade English teacher if I could remember her name. Darn)

This is another completely non-design related post but as it relates to cosmic karma I simply could not resist.

I’m a fairly avid bike commuter and try to bike into work at least a couple of times a week when the weather is nice. Last night I was on my way home, biking in heavy traffic on East Washington avenue – a fairly major Madison surface street with a nice fat bike lane. I was passed on my left by a whitish SUV with a rolled down passenger window when there was a blur of motion, a crash and I found myself drenched with a deluge of sticky soda. In my shock I almost face-planted my bike but wobbled and recovered in time to hear the SUV passenger laughing as sped away.

I can’t even begin to describe how infuriated I was. I stood on the pedals with everything I was worth trying to catch up to this fool. I’m not certain what my objective was – probably to get the crap beat out of me, but I at least wanted the satisfaction of shouting a few choice profanities. Traffic was moving pretty slowly and there was a red light in the distance, so for a moment, I thought I’d have the chance, but the driver must have seen me gaining because he pulled into the bike lane himself and sped around the traffic and disappeared.

Soaked, sticky and shaking I continued to slog along the road, sputtering and muttering to myself and cursing the injustices in the world. However, just a bit later, I noticed the pulsing of a red and blue police light in the distance. Could it be???

As I rode up to the scene, there indeed was the same car pulled to the side of the road and hemmed in by not one but FOUR police cars. I pulled up into an adjacent parking lot where another car was parked and the police were questioning the driver. She leaned out and shouted – “I saw the whole thing and called the police!” Awesome! My only disappointment was that by the time the police had finished taking my statement my good Samaritan had driven away, and I never had the chance to thank her.  

Chalk one up for our fair city and just deserts.

Because I was curious, I did the following quick math over the weekend.

This is NOT intended to trivialize the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but rather to show just how tremendously fragile our ecosystem is and how very careful we have to be to jealously guard and defend our planet.

The estimated volume of salt water in the Gulf of Mexico is 650 Quadrillion Gallons (650,000,000,000,000,000 gallons)
The BP oil spill has dumped approximately 180 million gallons of crude oil (neglecting anything that has been skimmed or recovered).

This means the Gulf is now 0.000000028% oil.
This is the equivalent of dropping 10 drops of crude oil out of an eyedropper into an Olympic sized swimming pool.

Yikes!

Notes:
Olympic sized swimming pool = 2,500,000 liters
Average drop from an eyedropper is .07cm^3

To look for the next generation of engineering and design talent, look no farther than the kids selected to participate in the University of Wisconsin – Madison College of Engineering’s Camp Badger program. On Friday, July 23rd, Design Concepts’ staff members were visited by thirty-three, soon-to-be eighth grade students attending the week-long residential learning opportunity held on the UW campus each year.

Their creativity and enthusiasm were clear as they pondered a better way to move books from class to class and make today’s backpack obsolete. Their free-wheeling brainstorming session generated amazing ideas that got everyone talking and thinking about how great ideas become successful new products.

Q: What does Lady Gaga have to do with the Wayans Brothers?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 30, 2010
Contact: Sandy Rodgers, marketing manager
Ph.: 800-344-2623

MADISON, WISCONSIN – Design Concepts, Inc., a nationally-recognized innovation consultancy located in Madison, WI, has expanded its human factors expertise with the addition to the staff of Curt Irwin, Ph.D., human factors engineer.