Some time ago I saw this video that I would like to share you. Helvetica is a documentary about typography and graphic design. Helvetica is a story about how a typeface created 50 years ago proliferated, it's about how type influences our lives.

Helvetica starts with a weird question: What did Helvetica tell you today?

Enjoy the trailer here.

Parkinson's law first published in an article of 1955 states: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

This observation by C. N. Parkinson is finding now a quantitative justification in a recent arxiv preprint.

Peter Klimeck and collaborators at the University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute have recently reported the results of numerical simulations:

"Within the proposed model it becomes possible to work out the phase diagram under which conditions bureaucratic growth can be confined. In our last model we assign individual efficiency curves to workers throughout their life in administration, and compute the optimum time to send them to old age pension, in order to ensure a maximum of efficiency within the body – in Parkinson’s words we compute the ’Pension Point’ " they claim.

Another of Parkinson's findings stating that "committees with more than 20 members are unstable", or in other words, that there is a threshold value for the committee size above which it becomes inefficient was also tested by the austrian-american team.

Have you ever felt that your workplace or learning environment is hindering you from doing your work? Have you ever felt being inside a box where your ideas cannot grow? Then you will probably find this video by the author of Brain Rules interesting.



The bottom line, supported by research, is that there is a need to redesign work and learning places. In this sense physical exercise seems to be a crucial ingredient that is missing.

" There's an ancient reason our brains respond to exercise. Millions of years ago, if we sat around on our behinds for even a few minutes, we could be somebody's lunch. We walked up to 12 miles a day, scientists think." Taken from Brain Rules, watch it here.

This time I would like to comment on an interesting language tool I found. I spend a big deal of my time writing and I was always looking for a tool like ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus.

If you type for example the word vision in Visual Thesaurus, then you get something like the map shown below.


If then you click on the node "the formation of a mental image" you get the following map:



I think that by now you know what I mean. Congrats to the people at ThinkMap for this very cool tool which unfortunately is not for free...

PS: By the way, this seems to be available in many languages as well. Cool!

Let us know your opinion about Willie by answering our first Poll. Just use the widget on the right. The final results will be published in two weeks.

UPDATE:
The time to vote in our first poll is over. Thanks to all of you who voted!
Here are the results.

Which of the theories about Willie is more likely?

1. The east German theory. 14%
2. The silicon theory. 0%
3. None of the above, I'm Willie. 86%
4. Other. 0%

Therefore we can conclude that most of us feel identified with Willie, after all we are all somehow striving to get out of the box. I hope that this thoughts serve as a sort of forum to share our experiences and bring some light on issues related to creativity and scientific communication, but not only.

PS: If you didn't do it yet, subscribe to this blog either by email or in a reader!

Following the first post, you would probably be willing to know more about Willie. Together with some friends we collected the main theories about his whereabouts.

1. The East-German hypothesis
This theory leads us somewhere in the East of Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs andReisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders." Wired

The East-German hypothesis says that Willie would be a piece of one of those documents schredded by the dying stasi (the east german secret agency). Due to the increasing pressure, there would have been a defect in the schredding process that led to Willie’s fate. If this hypothesis turns out to be correct, Willie could now probably be lying in an office aimed at reconstructing the old documents somewhere in Berlin.

2. The Silicon hypothesis
Other clues seem to indicate a different scenario named the “the silicon hypothesis”. According to this, Willie would be a defected piece of silicon on insulator somewhere in Crolles (near Grenoble, France). Due to the financial crisis, the project for which Willie was produced would now be suspended and Willie would be stocked in a cellar “for future use”.

This site was inspired by Willie. Willie is a being of whom the only concrete information I got is an old notebook containing a collection of thoughts attributed to him. Although Willie lives in a world of perfect squares, his aspect ratio is that of a rectangle and, to make things even worst, two of his corners are smooth.


This blog was built not only as a tribute to Willie’s struggle to escape from Squareland but also –and more importantly- it was built in the hope of helping him to achieve the awaited freedom.

The best drawing I could make of Willie is shown in this post.