Monthly Archives: March 2011

Putt, Putt

In the mid 70’s there was a series of articles published in Research & Development magazine by Archibald Putt titled “Putt’s Law: The Successful Technocrat”. I was just a young Science Geek at the time, had been doing research on blowing holes in stuff with lasers, but wanted to develop chops as a Business and Management Geek. This became my motivation to do so. Archibald Putt was a management genius, right there with Peter Drucker, Laurence Peter, Tom Peters and Sun Tsu (who was known as “Pete” to his friends). I copied all the articles from the magazine and still have them in my files.

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Teaching

We in the US are in the unfortunate position of dealing with many years of “dumbing down” of our education system. Efforts to standardize education–while noble in concept–have really just established a standard for conformity and only served to maximize mediocrity. A car race where everyone is required to drive 55 offers little motivation for those who can go 100.

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Geek, Nerd, Dork or Dweeb?

This beautiful diagram is best definition I have found those of us who are more complex than ordinary folk. Not entirely complementary, but accurate.

If a picture is 1,000 words, then a well-crafted diagram is 10 times that.

In November, 2010 BBC Four aired a 6 part series titled “The Beauty of Diagrams”. In the series, beginning with the Vitruvian Man, mathematician  Marcus du Sautoy explains how and why pictures really do serve a thousand or more words. It is currently available on BBC’s iPlayer, and possibly on internet repositories like Netflix.

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