Professional Organizing Service:
Plan-it JanetOrganizing the World One Closet at a Time Mark's sister, Janet, is a Broadway stage manager with
extraordinary powers of organization!
Check out the terrific
songs of
Stephen Shapiro
(including new Iraq anti-war songs)
This is the best of classical and other compositions from
2003, finally produced in MP3 format so you can download and play them. Hope you
like them.....
Diet Construction Kit TM
Anyone who can use Excel can use this tool to lose weight. It's free and it really works.
In a classic case of putting one's money where one's mouth is, here is
One Year on a Diet, a
lean, if not mean, example of some turned curves from personal experience.
Fractals are an important new way
to see the world. A fractal is a pattern that is similar at every level of
magnification. Snowflakes, ferns and coastlines are
classic
fractals. Here are some beautiful fractals from the granddaddy of all fractals,
the Mandelbrot set. Click here to see them. They're
taken from a wonderful computer program called Fractint. (Note that the
Results-based budget schematic - Volume I and Volume II - is also a
fractal - and is now click-on wallpaper.)
But Fractint has been surpassed by another amazing program: Ultra Fractal.com.
This is brilliant software that allows you to control all aspects of a fractal's
creation. Click here to see
some of the fractals produced with Ultrafractal.
Chaos and complexity theory, including
fractal imagery, have much to teach us about how the social universe works.
Click here to read the
Epilogue of Trying Hard Is Not Good
Enough
Most all games have a winner and a loser. The basic version of The
Collaboration Game is one where the
only way to win is for everyone to win. But there are also variations which
simulate the different roles and conflicting objectives found in real life
groups working together. Consider it an over-the-edge experiment in group process.
Click here for a copy of the
rules and game board. And, if you are crazy enough to try this, please let me know how it
turns out. Check out Collaboration Game #2 for Large Groups.
Click here.
Humorous Meditations of a Frequent
Flier The full text is now available. (So much for selling the book.)
Click on the picture. Enjoy. (Anyone who still wants an
official printed copy can send $ 14.95 to the address on your screen.) An
excerpt from Miracle of Flight was published in the July 2001 issue of the national humor magazine
"Funny Times." Ironic timing as you'll see when you read the section
on airport "security." Unfortunately not much has changed.
What
does a Chess Game "look like?"
A graphic mathematical representation of a chess game can be generated using a formula that converts
each move into a point in the xy plane.
Green chile stew, green chile salad and green chile garlic
bread!! NEW: Green chile lentil soup
Humor, Humility, Honesty, Hard Work
Another version of four H's which seems to work. These are the words we live by
(or try to) here at the Institute. Look for future mindless rhetoric and moralizing
on this site.
An old piece of writing about one of the biggest problems in management: bad
supervision. I once asked a group of managers at the beginning of a supervision
course: "How many people here know someone who left a job because of a bad
supervisor?" Almost every hand went up. Here's a simple guide that will
help get new (and some old) supervisors thinking in the right direction. Click
here.
Take a look at this posting from AOL:
The 7 Pitfalls of taking a new job - great advice for new and old
supervisors alike.
A Street Map of the USA
An interesting simplified schematic of the US interstate highway system. Click
here.
A theory of chord progressions using the three 4-tone diminished chords as
hyperspace shortcuts.
This schematic can be used to explain many of the innovative chord progressions
used by classical and other composers and to create new ones. Click
here for a description of the theory and some examples.