Flowers - July 31

Might as well keep a record:

Flower arrangements at work

A month or so ago a colleague and I moved a table and chairs into a spot in the 2nd floor atrium, to create a little place where people could sit and talk. Later I started putting wildflowers in a vase on the table, and I have been doing more and more careful arrangements. Here is my most recent one, which I like a lot:

Lupine, Queen Anne's Lace, and some kind of ground pea.

In the form of wampum:

Narwhal makes it easy

I gotta brag. Programming a chatbot with Narwhal turns out to be a breeze. Everything falls into place easily, expansions occur as needed, in a balanced and maintainable way, and the ideas feel mellifluous.

An asymmetry of gender grammar

I note that "him" is distinct from the possessive "his" but that "her" is not distinct from its possessive form. So it easy in English to distinguish between talking about a man and talking about his possessions but it is not easy to do that with a woman - as if it did not matter.

Topic/Subject matter in language is the same as 'key' in music

From the edge of sleep comes this insight: that jumping without modulation from one key to another is very similar to jumping from one topic to another. Modulation in music would have its equivalent in language in the 'sequitur' from one topic to another.

Another joke about MBL Friday Evening Lectures

Went to a Friday Night Lecture and one of the speakers favorite methods was to "find out what happens in mice". I was dozing off thinking "what happens in mice stays in mice".

Overheard at the beach

As a guy, I really don't know what is in women's minds, or what sorts of things they talk about when guys are not around. So it was a treat at the beach where I was standing up to mid-chest in water, and two teenage girls paddled bye, talking and not noticing that I was there. They were looking over at a rock [Paradise Rock - we're at Stoney Beach in Woods Hole] where some people they know were diving into and playing around. The dialog was this:

 - Who are the boys?
 - No idea
 - Maybe cute?
 - Let's go find out

The Future of Digital Dentistry is "mind share"

I want to tell a certain stalwart of the Dental industry (for whom I have a certain affection) that this is not a winning business model:

Compete by having a more sincere desire than competitors to do the right thing.

 It is a way to guarantee a stable stock price or a slowly declining one. However to triple the stock price and compete with the companies currently earning 5x as much in the Dental industry (namely Patterson and Schein) can only happen if this stalwart company takes on the business model of:

Occupy the minds of more dentists, labs, and customers, than any other company.

Now: you can only occupy the mind with a product that has the capacity to occupy minds - namely a communication product, not a family of well marketed dental parts. Hence dental communication must become the product.