Sound therapists and stress specialists worked with the band Marconi Union to develop “Weightless”, the most relaxing song ever:

Weightless works by using specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener. A continuous rhythm of 60 BPM causes the brainwaves and heart rate to synchronise with the rhythm: a process known as ‘entrainment’. Low underlying bass tones relax the listener and a low whooshing sound with a trance-like quality takes the listener into an even deeper state of calm.

Dr David Lewis, one of the UK’s leading stress specialists said: “‘Weightless’ induced the greatest relaxation – higher than any of the other music tested. Brain imaging studies have shown that music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions.” [...]

The top 10 most relaxing tunes were: 1. Marconi Union – Weightless 2. Airstream – Electra 3. DJ Shah – Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix) 4. Enya – Watermark 5. Coldplay – Strawberry Swing 6. Barcelona – Please Don’t Go 7. All Saints – Pure Shores 8. AdelevSomeone Like You 9. Mozart – Canzonetta Sull’aria 10. Cafe Del Mar – We Can Fly

Would you add any songs to this list?

via Scientists Develop the Most Relaxing Tune.

Or I just go as my favorite politician – the original party animal himself.

What do you think?

In retrospect, everything is obvious. But we fail to recognize that it is genius that makes it obvious. It took Isaac Newton to make gravity obvious after thousands of years of ignorance, same with Einstein, same with Jefferson and Adams, same with many countless others, less famous, but who all shared something in common – they refused to settle for the accepted answer. They chose to prove to themselves and to the world one basic truth: that we live in a world of our own making.

If you do not like something, it is within your power to change it. Right now you can change it. It does not require an act of congress, no government grant, it just requires you, rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. A loose board, a creaky floor, an inefficient process at work, a single missing pixel in the website your designing, a new world – design it, build it! It takes genius to make the obvious more, well “obvious” – but that genius is 100% human and its a crown any one of us can wear. I will miss Steve Jobs.

Help me internet. Thanks.

Suggestion. If we think of the icon as a stack of things of that type: a stack of browsers – then the natural thing to “scatter them across the desk to look at them” would be a click and toss movement. Click the icon and lightly toss it upward to see the windows.

As for the natural scrolling…pushing the page versus “scrolling” the page. It will take a while to adapt to that. I decided to wait a week before having an opinion. But when I went into the Apple store this weekend to pick up my new laptop, I literally thought the mice we upside down at first.

But after the first full day, I’m still finding it very hard to adapt.

It all starts now so if there are any questions that you would like to ask me, tell me in the comments. I would be glad to talk about anything from web design to world history.

My skype id is: ben.shoemate

Base22 team hard at "work" on Base22 Day (the 22nd of every month at 2:22pm we do some team building, in this case a Rubix Cube competition).

For the humans in the audience not familiar with Technorati:

“Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

The leading blog search engine and directory, Technorati.com indexes more than a million blogs. The site has become the definitive source for the top stories, opinions, photos and videos emerging across news, entertainment, technology, lifestyle, sports, politics and business. Technorati.com tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the Blogosphere.

Technorati now publishes high quality, fully edited, original content daily on a wide range of topics, written by hundreds of member writers.

Read more: http://technorati.com/about-technorati/#ixzz18rwdzUf1

But even though it says all is well as of 12:20 CST I’m still not able to sign in. You just don’t realize how much you need something till it’s gone. Now I have to rely on the phone, or email, or twitter, or my blog, or facebook to communicate…it’s like the dark ages..or google talk (but I stopped using that a long time ago). Truth is, Skype has become a mission critical tool for our company and has so few problems (other than a slow decent into unusability with each interface iteration – especially on the Mac).

Get it together guys.

Update (12:30pm): I forget sometimes that Skype is a peer-to-peer network. Apparently an update to the software took out some of the “super-nodes” (users that are online a lot – heck, I might be one of them). When those nodes failed, the network came down, at least for me.. http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/skype_downtime_today.html?cm_mmc=PXTW|0700_B6-_-downtime-20101222

Update 2 (6:34pm) : A full day of yelling a Skype on Twitter yielded nothing but some mild comic relief. If you enjoyed this post – you’ll really like my twitter diatribe: http://twitter.com/#!/benshoemate

We all know that it is important to choose your words wisely in the business world. Below are a few of the more important word choices you can make. I bookmarked this a few years ago and thought I would share it.

Think about these two words: spend and invest. Would you like your bank to spend your money or invest it? Since spending implies the money is gone, you probably want a bank that invests. Now apply these same words to corporate budgets and see how that influences thinking. Early in my career, I saw budgets as allocated company money I had permission to spend. And I did spend it. I never thought of budgets as investing in the company’s future until I was given profit and loss accountability for a new department and discovered my flawed thinking. I learned that in order to grow the department, I needed to budget with an investment mentality. Shifting words shifted my thinking and my results.

Try these words: problem and challenge. Would you rather a boss see your mistake as a problem or as a challenge? It’s more than semantics. Problems are fixed; challenges are met. Different words evoke different feelings. I have a more positive frame of mind meeting a challenge than fixing a problem. But a word of caution. I’m not suggesting you play the buzz-word game like a colleague of mine who walked into my office saying, “Do I have an opportunity for you.” We both knew differently.

Here are two favorites: bodies and people. As a young manager, I was jolted every time I heard another manager talking about how many “bodies” they needed, or putting “butts in seats.” Later, I learned many of those managers struggled with departmental morale problems. I could understand why if they saw people as interchangeable pieces to a puzzle rather than individuals playing an important role in their departments.

I realized the words I use to think and talk about my workload, my goals, my projects and the people I worked with influenced my thoughts and actions about them. So, I changed my words. If I say I work “for” someone I have a different vision about my work-life than if I work “with” them; same with my staff working with, not for me.

Poorly chosen words can kill enthusiasm, impact self-esteem, lower expectations and hold people back. Well chosen ones can motivate, offer hope, create vision, impact thinking and alter results. I learned in twenty years in management my words have power over my thoughts and actions. They also impact and influence people I speak them to.

via The Power of Words.