http://reardenmetal.com Creative destruction is good. Sun, 09 Sep 2007 19:37:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Miss Teen SC in the Miss Teen USA pageant tackles a tough question on the failings of the US educational system. Yikes. Fasten your seatbelts. I would strongly urge each state Miss USA board to institute a writing and speaking test. I have no illusions that these contests are decided on ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/08/26/too-funny-not-to-share-a-little-mean-though/ There is a medium-sized list of things that I should do less. On the list is "eating butter." However, when I saw a recipe in the NYT sunday magazine for homemade butter -- alongside a compelling essay about one man's experience with fatty, yellow heaven -- I had to try ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/07/05/homemade-butter-mmmmmm-oooooooo/ 16-year old lost both feet on a Six Flags ride. It's a terrible thing. Hopefully they can find the feet and reattach them. I don't know much about microsurgery required to do that, but I hope it's possible.Share This http://reardenmetal.com/2007/06/21/poor-girlfeet-severed-on-a-ride-at-six-flags/ Several students in Creating Infectious Action (MSE288) at Stanford came up with a very cool way to explain design thinking to others by executing, and documenting by video, a rapid design process. The four students, Mada, Ana, Dot, and Mannan are masters students in the class which I co-teach. They ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/06/03/video-case-study-on-design-thinking/ This is truly hilarious...a cadet at the Air Force Academy caught dancing in his room alone. He didn't know that his roommate had rigged up a video camera to catch it all for us to see. Most of the versions of this have been pulled down from YouTube for copyright ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/05/31/dancing-cadet/ There was a hilarious sidebar in today's NYT that recounted a focus group exercise conducted in Md -- here's the scoop... From the New York Times, May 29, 2007: Imagine that the top presidential candidates are all at an airport trying to get on a flight. There is one seat left on ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/05/29/hilarious-focus-group-exercise-election-2008/ My good friend and former colleague Jeff Jordan just was named CEO of OpenTable, the online reservation agent for dining out. This is a huge coup for OpenTable and the beginning of a great new adventure for Jeff. I was very lucky to work with Jeff both at Disney back ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/05/29/jeff-jordan-and-opentable/ There is a really sobering piece in today's NYT ("As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusionment Rises in Some GI's" - Michael Kamber, pA1.) on the rising disillusionment among GI's who've discovered that Iraqi army soldiers -- who've been receiving weapons and training from the US -- are among the insurgent forces ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/05/28/iraq-and-hawkish-withdrawal/ I don't know why feral pigs are so interesting. To me, the pictures of them lying next to their killers are oddly compelling. I wrote about Hogzilla a while back and saw this AP story on Drudgereport today (one of the best sites on earth.) Truly a shocking story and ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/05/25/bigger-than-hogzilla/ Recently we had a good discussion of an interesting topic in Creating Infectious Action -- a course I co-teach at Stanford. The conversation was about widgets and the unbundling of cool content from the url where it originated. Widgets -- small, portable units that are essentially mini-windows onto an application ... http://reardenmetal.com/2007/05/23/widgets-and-widget-thinking-are-cool/