Things to come … Endless ski-ing
First published in Management Today, February 2003The trouble with ski slopes is that they run out. Snowdonia Gateway, a firm based near Snowdonia National Park in Wales, hopes to put an end to this with a ski slope where the fun never stops.
Taking a lead from the Eden Project and with a pounds 100,000 PwC feasibility study in its pocket, SG plans to transform a disused slate quarry near Llanberis with a huge dome housing a continuous artificial ski slope.
Think of a giant metal turntable spun by electro-magnetic levitation, inclined as if on the side of hill. Over the downward-moving part, blow snow with snow guns. On the up-side, ski.
The planned slope is 300m long, but with snow hitting skiers at 25km/hr, will feel a lot longer. The concept’s inventor Kevin Feriss plans a similar slope near Sydney.
@jameswoudhuysen I use my bicycle every day. Exercise and access to shopping without any parking meters and all that fuzz. But alfa-cyclists are the worst. They are competing at 40 mph and always acting rudely to get where they are going.
A PRO-CAR CYCLIST WRITES: 12-1pm tomorrow on #R4, will be talking bikes, cars, pedestrians, public transport – and #JeremyVine
Stimulating piece on the #CrisisOfCustomerService by clever @ClaerB @FT.
All that Clinton-era #CustomerExperience guff was always for the birds - certainly compared with, er, price.
The new thang? Often there is NO service - and thus no #CX!
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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