You want to learn how to make a good presentation?

Who better than Cicero himself could teach you?

Here is the recipe of Chef Cicero, the master of Rhetoric in Ancient Rome:

Serves a small meeting as well as a thousand people conference. Adapt the length of the cooking to the length of the speech. Now and then, stir the pot. Adapt the cooking temperature and seasoning (delivery, especially) to the type of audience and the result expected...

First find the ingredients  

• Fresh and juicy Arguments
  

• Piquant and sharp Counter-arguments

• Toothsome Ideas

• Scrumptious Examples

• Sweet Anecdotes

• Spicy Stories

• Mouth watering Savory metaphors

• Peppery Data

• Gustatory Images

I found this appetizing piece on Marion Chapsal's blog via a post in which Kathy Rieffenstein suggests blogs you shouldn't miss. Maybe this isn't such a novel idea, though. I was also struck by a piece on Lifehacker recently which suggested structuring meetings like dinner parties for good results.

3 March

I found another reference to this theme at Presentation Advisors.

You might already know that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, but now you can confirm that number by playing kitchen scientist and melting chocolate. And then you eating the results.

The folks at Wired think that this physics experiment is ideal for all the leftover Valentine's Day candy, but I think it's great all year round.

This is what you'll be doing:

• Make sure the candy is in a microwave-proof box. Better yet, take the chocolate out and put in a microwave safe dish.
• Remove the turntable in your oven. (You want the candy to stay still while you heat it.) Put an upside-down plate over the turning-thingy, and place your dish of candy on top.
• Heat on high about 20 seconds.
• Take the chocolate out and look for hot spots. Depending on the candy you use, you may have to feel the candy to see where it has softened. With the cherry cordials we used, we saw several shiny spots and one place where the chocolate shell melted through, releasing the sweet syrup inside.
• Measure the distance between two adjacent spots. This should be the distance between the peak and the valley (crest and trough) of the wave. Since the wavelength is the distance between two crests, multiply by 2. Finally, multiply that result by the frequency expressed in hertz or 2,450,000,000 (2.45 X 109)

Ta da. In this example, the final number was a bit lower than the actual speed of light, but it's still pretty darn close considering the difficulty of finding the exact "hot spots" to measure from. And the difficulty of sacrificing chocolate to science. [Wired]

Printable "Triple Hat Trick" Checklist Helps You Knock Out a Great Week

Have a huge list of to-dos but don't feel like you accomplish enough in any given week? Productivity blog Manage This suggests simplifying your weekly goals by setting out and completing a hat trick of agendas, tasks, and delegations.

The inspiration for the Triple Hat Trick:

Sometimes it is tough to get focus with my big fancy fiddly collection of GTD lists. There are just too many items on the lists, and even when I filter on just the "next actions" the list is still pretty long. To gain focus, I plan to identify no more than three critical tasks that I want to accomplish in a given week. Sort of a hat trick if you will.

The author was kind enough to put together a printer-friendly version of his Triple Hat Trick template (pictured above), which you can grab here. Think the Triple Hat Trick might work well for you, or have some other method of laying out your goals for the week that works for you? Let's hear it in the comments.

The Triple Hat Trick [Manage This!]

This seems ambitious at first, but I guess my self-professed method of picking one task for each day actually arrives at seven tasks for a week.

Dear Diary:

A recent health problem led me to seek a cardiologist. On the recommendation of a friend, I called a Manhattan doctor to make an appointment.

In the process, I was introduced to his automated answering system — the name is slightly altered here — which left little doubt about the priorities typical in the health care industry today:

“Welcome to New York Cardiac Specialists. For the billing department, please press one. If this is a life-threatening emergency, please press two.”

From the Metropolitan Diary feature in The Times.

Vincent Pieribone is an Associate Professor at Yale University. He's also a passionate scientist working on new ways to help paraplegics move their arms and legs by bypassing the damage and having a computer do the work. While Pieribone is optimistic about the future of brain imaging advancements, he worries that we aren't moving quickly enough to understand every aspect of the brain. To him, more effort was put into creating the iPod than unlocking the secrets of the brain.

Why aren't more intelligent people going into science these days? Besides there being a problem with science education in the U.S., Pieribone thinks the public often misperceives the field entirely. "I got a lot of people who show up in the lab and they think every day is going to be like Mr. Spock running around the deck of the Enterprise making huge discoveries and stuff.  And it’s a little slow.  It’s a lot of pie petting and you know, things don’t work and like any job, it’s really like any job," he says. 

More money for iPods than brain research? This user says thank goodness Bioness is here now (but does wonder what else there could be).