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I’m wondering if my co-workers have noticed that I smell faintly of women’s perfume today.  Could be embarrassing if they knew the full story.  I know my wife is disappointed and saddened. 

It turns out that my wife’s perfume bottle has a superb atomizer and on a whim I realized that if I spritz a shot of perfume at a aromatherapy candle in our bedroom it makes a most satisfying whoosh-like ball of  flame – sort of a mini special effects explosion on our dresser.  The perfume is evocative, mysterious, haunting, provocative (their words), and mostly alcohol (my hypothesis – presumably correct).  My wife was bemused on so many levels and finally stepped in to point out that my experiments were both dangerous and fairly expensive.

It got me wondering what percentage of mankind’s scientific advances were catalyzed by someone just messin’ around to see what happens.   

I will never forget the expression of total glee on my father’s face many years ago when he guessed (correctly) that our brand new family microwave was most likely operating at the same frequency necessary to illuminate a common fluorescent bulb.  He immediately disassembled my mom’s bathroom vanity mirror, wedged the bulb into our new kitchen appliance, gathered the family and turned the dial. Sparks were ricocheting off the metal bulb bases and the device was making a frightening zapping/sizzling noise but he still fairly danced with delight as the bulb began to glow – a cool spectacle and wireless miracle for us.

Apparently the apple does not fall far from the tree. 

The “what-if” gene can have tragic consequences – think of Marie Curie, pioneer in the field of radioactivity and winner of two Nobel prizes who most certainly died of radiation poisoning resulting from her experiments.  The damaging effects of ionizing radiation were not then known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed, without taking any safety measures. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the pretty blue-green light that the substances gave off in the dark.

You think dad would know better.

Of course today, a quick trip to Youtube can scratch your “what-if” gene from behind the safety of your computer monitor.   Want to start your BBQ with liquid oxygen?  Pepsi and Mentos?  Blend your iPhone?  Perhaps the cumulative effect of our exposure to everyone else’s what-ifs will bring a collective power to the age-old “let’s see what happens”.  I’m not sure.  Youtube doesn’t quite do justice to the sight of a modest mushroom cloud of flame rising over my wife’s jewelry box.  You’ve simply got to see that one first hand.

(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

A friend of mine sent me the following interesting article on an effort to take a more scientific/analytical approach to the design and fabrication of wood baseball bats. Weirdly enough, one of the strangest elements of this article for me wasn’t the attempt to bring science and technology to bear on this problem. I actually think that’s inevitable. Rather it was the contention in this article that bats should be struck on the flat-grain instead of the end grain. WHAT???  When I was a kid we would regularly taunt kids who hit a bat held this way. Everyone knew that the bat would most likely shatter killing everyone within miles. Is nothing sacred? But I digress. Back to the wooden bat versus technology smack-down.

In general I find this sort of thing really fascinating – it speaks to the uneasy intersection that occasionally occurs between long-held traditions and emerging technical understanding. And it’s another example when technology is only one of many considerations in the specification of a product.

These intersections can really grate on the engineers. In the instance of Baseball’s major leagues alone – as those of you who are fans know – there is the delicious bedevilment that the bats must be made of wood. It’s a decision made with almost complete deference to the aesthetics, and tradition of the game (not withstanding some concern that composite bats used at the lower levels would actually be dangerous in the hands of free swinging MLBers). In a head-to-head comparison including ease of manufacture, durability, performance, cost and general safety wood would lose (say that three times quick).

Given their choice and absent rules and tradition to the contrary I suspect few if any few modern day engineers would elect to use wood in this application- a notoriously quirky and fundamentally unpredictable material.

In point of fact, with a few exceptions engineers have generally been successful in eradicating wood from most non-building related designs (tennis rackets, car bodies, golf clubs, airplanes – even pencils are increasingly hedging towards composites). It’s not that wood is necessarily a BAD material. Quite the converse – wood’s strength to weight ratio is superb and when cost is factored in you often can’t beat wood. It’s fairly plentiful – if responsibly managed it’s fully sustainable and wood offers a plethora of ancillary technical benefits. Oh by the way – in general wood can be beautiful as well. The problem – from an engineer’s point of view – is that wood is not particularly repeatable, predicable or homogenous. A fancy way for saying that the way in which wood performs under stress depends on a whole bunch of factors not always easy to understand or anticipate. And engineers tend to really hate unpredictability.

Of course wood has a host of other aesthetic and evocative benefits – as any of you who’ve ever heard the sound a baseball makes off an aluminum bat can attest. And in my opinion, in the right application, these should weigh as importantly as the purely technical considerations. I offer up wooden boats, roller coasters and even the MLB baseball bat as products where I’m happy to let tradition trump technology. I guess it just gives the engineers a slightly different canvas to paint on. Game on.

This isn’t a very designerly post but I wanted to take a second comment on the sad passing of Manute Bol.

For those of you who are not familiar with semi-obscure former NBA athletes, Manute Bol was a freakishly tall Sudanese-born basketball player who played for a laundry list of NBA teams in the Mid ’80s. I love basketball and I’ve always had an affinity for Manute. At 6′4″ I’m sort of tall compared to many people. At 7′7″ Manute was in another zip code. He was coincidentally born a few weeks after me and I found myself watching his basketball career blossom as my own rec-league level game was fading to an inglorious close.

Manute Bol careened dramatically and unexpectedly onto the US basketball scene with more of a sense of bemusement than fanfair. It would be easy to characterize his career as a freak show / circus-like curiosity and many did. He was clearly not of our culture. Manute Bol loved to relay the story of how he once killed a lion with a spear while working as a cowhearder. Probably not going to hear that one from Lebron or Kobe. I’m just guessing.

Initially his complete lack of English combined with his skeletal frame, terrible scoring ability and incredible cultural differences made him the butt of jokes. Later the US warmed to him and at the end of his career he was a fan favorite. At one point the Bullets (Wizards now) paired him with 5′3″ Muggys Bogues making them the tallest and shortest players on the court. He was, by all accounts, a gentle giant – a quick wit and sly prankster.

His NBA career spanned 10 years and his numbers – aside from his shot blocking – were wholly unspectacular. 2.6 PPG, 4.2 rebounds. 19 minutes per game.

What made Manute truly special, however happened outside of the 94′ fantasy world we call a basketball court. Manute is reported to have spent virtually every penny he ever made on charitable causes related to his war-torn homeland. He tirelessly campaigned for human rights and peace in the Sudan trying to bring some stability to this sad place. He would do anything, anywhere at any time to raise money or awareness… he boxed William the Refrigerator Perry in exchange for an agreement from Fox to broadcast the telephone number to charity he established for refuges. Even though he couldn’t skate, he signed a one-day contract to play Hockey to raise money for Children of the Sudan.

He was a man that reached across a huge cultural divide into my heart and made me value the common threads of humanity that bind us all. I’ve often wondered if I found myself in his size 16 shoes – lifted from a place of tremendous poverty, strife and tragedy – and given unimaginable riches in new world playing a game I love – if I would never look back. Yet Manute Bol is a man who never looked forward. Never forgot and never gave up. For this I deeply admire him.

Manute Bol passed away last week at the age of 47 from a disease he most likely contracted while on a humanitarian mission in Africa. Basketball may have given Manute Bol to us – but Manute gave us so much more. The world has lost a fine human being and I am saddened.