Part of the patio at the progressive dinner’s first house.
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Last Friday, our neighborhood — Northeast Seminole Heights, an area with trees, bungalows, and hip restaurants and bars galore — held its annual progressive dinner (or, as it’s called in the UK, a “safari supper”). It was a multiple-destination dinner party, where four different courses were served in four different houses within walking distance of each other. While we’ve gotten to know some of the people in our neighborhood thanks to the weekly happy hour at Ella’s Americana Folk Art Cafe, Anitra and I are still new to the area. We figured that this would be a chance to get to know more of people who live nearby.
Our house is a five minute walk from the Hillsborough River, on whose banks you’ll find the pricier houses. The progressive dinner’s first stop was at one of these houses, which had a large patio complete with a huge outdoor tiki bar.
One view of the bar at the progressive dinner’s first house.
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We were among the first to arrive, but we weren’t lonely for long. There were easily eighty or more people on the patio in short order.
Another view of the bar at the progressive dinner’s first house.
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This was the appetizer course, and people came hungry! Luckily, the place was prepared.
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The patio was built right up to the edge of the river, which provided a great view. I had to get a photo:
A view of the Hillsborough River from the first house.
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After about an hour, it was time to mosey on over to the next place. I took one last photo before leaving:
One last photo before leaving the first house!
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I was so engaged in meeting new people at the next house that I didn’t take any pictures there. The soup and salad course was served there, and there were several to choose from. The stand-out dish was a cold spliced pear soup, which was fantastic. I got a couple of servings of that one.
The main course was served at the third house, which had a nice large kitchen island and buffet counter:
The third house’s nice large kitchen, as seen from the living room.
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As the place where the mains would be served, they were expecting the biggest crowd. Luckily, they had a back yard big enough to accommodate everyone and had even set up rows of tables, a fire pit, live entertainment, and a couple of off-duty police officers:
The back yard at the third house.
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There was a break in the entertainment so that the dinner’s organizer, Christie Hess, could address the crowd. She’s been putting the event together for the past 12 years, and it’s a key part of the neighborhood’s character. I’m glad that we’ve got people like her here.
Christie Hess addresses the crowd.
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Here’s another look at the crowd. It was a cool night by Florida standards (52°F / 11° C), so Anitra wore her festive zebra-strip fun fur coat:
Another look at the crowd.
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Finally, we made our way to the dessert house, which was also on the river. As with the other courses and houses, the food was a group effort. Our contribution to the dessert table was an assortment of brownies.
The dessert house.
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Some folks stayed closer to the house (and desserts), while others chose to get a better look at the river:
The view near the river.
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Another view near the river.
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While we were done with the houses, we weren’t yet done with the party! The final stop of the evening was London Heights pub with a handful of drink tickets…
Some of the taps at London Heights that evening.
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…and an invitation from Willie, one of the owners, to perform some numbers to close out the evening.
The accordion comes in handy once again!
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It’s been a while since I’ve lived in a place with this much of a sense of community. I’ve talked more with my neighbors here in the past five months than with the neighbors in the old place in the last five years, and I’m a schmoozy guy. The progressive dinner was a great excuse to walk around the neighborhood and get a better look at a couple of places, as well as to catch up with the people we already knew, and get to know dozens of other folks in the area. I look forward to greeting more people on the streets here by name, and hope to be at more of these local get-togethers!
On Friday, February 2nd at Oxford Exchange — a fantastic combination of bookstore, shop, restaurant, coworking space, design studio, and event venue in downtown Tampa — author Daniel Pink gave a presentation as part of the promotional tour for his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
The presentation took place upstairs, in Oxford Exchange’s Commerce Club, a space with many beautiful rooms, including a large conference space where the Friday breakfast salon series of talks called Café con Tampa takes place. If you live in Tampa Bay and want to hear and meet the area’s big thinkers and movers and shakers, you should attend.
Pink opened his talk by dealing with the elephant in the room: the scar on his forehead, which gave him a very Harry Potter-like appearance. He said that he wished that there was an interesting story behind the scar, but it was simply the product of slipping in the shower. The bad news was that the result was ten stitches in his forehead. The good news — and the reason why would soon become clear — was that it happened in the morning.
“We lead lives that are series of episodes,” Pink said at the start of his talk. “Episodes by their nature have beginnings, endings, and midpoints. Each of these has a different effect on our behavior.”
His talk, like his new book, was about the oft-overlooked importance of when we do things. Among the questions he would answer, either at the talk or in his book, were:
When should you exercise — early in the day, or late?
Why should you never go to the hospital or schedule an important doctor’s appointment in the afternoon?
Why does beginning your career in a recession depress your wages 20 years later?
Why do both human beings and great apes experience a slump in midlife?
Why is singing in a choir good for you?
When during the year is your spouse most likely to file for divorce? “One of them is next month,” quipped Pink. “Check your email.”
“When we talk about units of time — things like seconds, and minutes, and weeks — you realize that most of them are completely made up,” he said. “They’re not natural in any sense; they’re things that human beings have created to corral time. But there are unit of time that are natural, like the day…and that has a big effect on us.”
With that, he introduced his thesis: that during the day, we experience a pattern that in turn affects the way we feel and how we perform.
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He talked about a Cornell study using software called LIWC — Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count — to analyze 500 million tweets (“None of them written by the President,” he joked) for emotional content. The researchers of the study wanted to find out how emotional content varied through the day. This kind of study is called sentiment analysis, and in performing it on a large corpus of tweets, they found a pattern:
In the early part of the day, they saw that “positive mood” has a peak.
In the middle of the day, around the early afternoon, that general mood entered a trough.
And finally, as the afternoon wore on, positive mood rose again, in a recovery.
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He then pointed to Princeton researcher Daniel Kahneman’s“Day Reconstruction Method”, in which he gave people diaries to track what they were doing and how they were feeling for every hour they were awake. Its purpose was to determine what activities made people feel better or worse (commuting was the daily activity that makes people feel the worst), but it also gave them a look into whether time of day affected “net good mood” — and according to their data, it does. “Net good mood”, it turns out, experiences a peak in the morning, a trough in the afternoon, and recovery in the evening.
This peak-trough-recovery pattern occurs in many places, and while the pattern is hidden to many people, its effects are decidedly not.
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He then went to a different topic: standardized testing in Denmark. Danish students take these tests on computers, but the students outnumbering computers, they had to schedule students to take the tests at different times of the day. When they mapped performance against time of day, they found something interesting, which they summarized as follows: a general trend that the later a student took the test, the worse they performed. In fact, the effect was pronounced enough that it was written up like so:
“For every hour later in the day, scores decrease… We find that an hour later in the day causes a deterioration in test score that is equivalent to slightly lower household income, less parental education, and missing two weeks of school.”
Given that policy and decisions about a student’s future can hinge on a standardized test, the edge or setback created by when the test is taken could make a big difference.
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He cited some scary medical peak-trough patterns:
Anesthesia errors: 4 times more likely at 3 p.m. than 9 a.m.
Hand-washing in hospitals: Drops as the day goes on.
In colonoscopies, they find half as many polyps in afternoon exams as in morning exams.
Doctors are more likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics in the afternoon than in the morning.
“We’re very intentional about what we do — anyone here have a to-do list? We’re intentional about who we do things with — that’s why we have HR departments. We’re intentional about how we do things. But when it comes to when, we’re kind of loosey-goosey about it.”
This is a shame, because the difference in our performance between the time of day when we’re at our peak and when we’re at our worst can be just like getting legally drunk.
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One way to help mitigate the effects of time of day on how we perform is to determine your chronotype, which is a fancy way of whether you’re a morning person, or a night owl. It’s simple to do: make a note of the time you go to sleep on “free days” (that is, a day when you don’t have to go to work the next morning) and when you wake up, and calculate the midpoint between those two times.
If the midpoint is before 3:30 a.m., you’re a Lark or morning person. 15% of people are Larks, and a disproportionate educators are Larks.
If it’s after 5:30 a.m., you’re an Owl or night person. 20% of people are Owls.
It it’s between 3:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., you’re a Third Bird — something in-between.
If you’re a Lark or Third Bird, you follow the pattern of peaking in the morning, trough in the early afternoon, and a late afternoon recovery. Owls go through the pattern, but in reverse: they have the recovery in the morning, a trough in the late afternoon, and a peak in the evening.
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Whether you’re a Lark, Owl, or Third Bird, you should adjust what you do to match the peak-trough-recovery pattern:
During the peak, you should do analytic work.
When in the trough, do rote, mechanical work: administrative tasks and other things that can be done “on autopilot”.
The recovery period is one where your analytical powers are improved, and your mind is more flexible, which is great for insight tasks.
To prove the bit about the recovery phase and insight tasks, Pink presented the audience with a couple of brain-teasers which the majority of people get wrong. I’d seen the first one before — it’s “The Linda Problem”:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?:
a) Linda is a bank teller.
b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
(The answer is a; case b is a subset of case a, and therefore can’t be more probable.)
He then presented another one, which I’d never heard before:
Ernesto is a dealer in antique coins. One day, someone brings in a beautiful bronze coin. The coin has an emperor’s head on one side and the date 544 BC stamped on the other. Ernesto examines the coin, and instead of buying it, calls the police instead. Why?
I find that I do my most clever, creative programming in the evening, because that’s my recovery period, and as this audio recording from that part of Pink’s talk will show you, it’s my insight time:
It’s not every day that you get to impress one of your favorite authors.
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Since attending the talk, I’ve been giving more thought to the way I arrange my day. I’m taking Pink’s advice to change my schedule so that I’m taking on tasks that require analysis and vigilance during the morning, “turnkey” work in the early afternoon, and saving my creative and learning tasks for the late afternoon and evening, when the elevated mood but lower vigilance lend themselves well to that sort of thing.
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I’m also going to put more thought into when and how I take my breaks, as we tend to underestimate their restorative power.
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He showed a graph based on a study of Israeli parole boards, which showed that judges were more lenient after taking a break, and grew less lenient as time wore on.
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According to Pink, the science of breaks is where the science of sleep was 15 years ago. Back then, the value of sleep was being introduced in popular culture, and the same is now happening for taking a break. The data shows that we should take more breaks, and we should take certain kinds of breaks. The idea of “powering through” and not taking a break is as bad as sleeping less to get more done.
Here’s what’s known about taking the right kind of breaks:
Something beats nothing. Even a micro-break of a minute or two is better than no break at all.
A break where you’re moving around is better than one where you’re stationary.
Social beats solo. Breaks taken with people of our choice are more restorative.
Outside beats inside. Nature has powerful restorative effects.
Fully-detached — not talking about work — beats semi-detached.
Taking breaks — and especially the right kinds of breaks — can help mitigate the effects of the trough.
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Pink then went into the Q&A session, where we learned a few things:
The idea that amateurs take breaks and professionals don’t is completely backwards — it’s the other way around.
During adolescence, our chronotype shifts towards “Owl”, which is why many high schools are now wisely scheduling the school day to start later.
A couple with twin boys — one who’s a Lark, and one’s an Owl — were concerned about their Owl son’s performance on the upcoming SAT. Pink suggested that they could mitigate the morning’s effects on the Owl son by encouraging him to take a walk before the test, preferably with a friend.
Having a brainstorming session? Don’t hold it in the early afternoon.
There’s also something called the “Fresh Start Effect” — we’re more likely to stick with a change in behavior on “fresh start” days like a Monday, or the first day of the month or year, or on the day after your birthday rather than two days before your birthday.
When people make decisions, they generally have a default decision. When being pitched to, this default decision is “no”. People are more likely to overcome the default during the peak, and immediately after a break.
“This book has changed my behavior more than any other book I’ve written,” Pink said. “I became much more intentional about my own schedule… I take breaks in a way I wouldn’t have before — I always make a break list now.”
On when to work: If you goals are to lose weight, boost your mood, or establish a habit, exercise in the morning. Exercise in the evening is better for avoiding injury, if you want it to be more enjoyable and less effortful, or if you want to break records (a large number of which are broken between 4 and 7 p.m.).
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We then went downstairs to Oxford Exchange’s bookstore section to get our copy autographed…
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…during which time Anitra asked Pink for recommendations for books that he found interesting. He wrote these on a post-it:
My coworker Justin Downey was unfamiliar with Pink’s work, but came along based on my recommendation and greatly enjoyed the talk. I think we have a new fan!
Photo by Tampa Bay Times. Click to see the source.
Someday, perhaps a decade from now, when we’re all looking back at how far the Tampa Bay area has come, we’ll look back and remark at the key role that Café con Tampa played. Every Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. in the Oxford Exchange’sCommerce Club, Tampa’s most active, engaged, involved, and well-dressed citizens gather to hear important topics given by interesting speakers while enjoying a delicious breakfast in beautiful surroundings.
Friday’s speaker at Café con Tampa was Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, who’s campaigning in the Democratic primary and aiming to become Florida’s next governor.
Photo by Yours Truly. Click to see at full size.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to attend Café con Tampa, as work and my speaking and conference schedule have kept me busy. This was the first one I’d been able to attend in weeks. It was good to be back.
Traffic and a shortage of parking spaces (there’s a lot of construction around Oxford Exchange) meant that I missed the first twenty minutes of Gillum’s appearance. As I entered and paid my admission — $12 well spent, in my opinion — I was told “You’re in time for Q&A…the best part!”
Photo by Yours Truly. Click to see at full size.
I walked in just in time to catch a rather aggrieved older gentleman asking where Gillum got the notion that the law preventing former felons from voting even though they have served their time in prison is a relic from the days of Jim Crow. Gillum, who’s probably no stranger to this sort of question, explained the true intent of this kind of voter disenfranchisement with great aplomb and considerable charm.
Photo by Yours Truly. Click to see at full size.
Among the other topics discussed were:
Transportation: Gillum’s stance is that the solution to Florida’s transportation isn’t “more asphalt” and individual cars, but a combination of public transit solutions, including rail, buses, and ridesharing.
The economy: As we move to a more contract-based economy, where employment becomes more short-term, he asked where people will find the benefits of the old employer/employee social contract, such as healthcare and post-retirement income.
Near the end of his session, Gillum talked about the traditional greeting of the Masai people of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania: Kasserian engeri?, which translates as “And how are the children?” He pointed out how that greeting underscores the high value that the Masai assigned to the well-being of children, and how much better we all could be if we adopted the same attitude.
Note: There’s a little more to the greeting “And how are the children?”.According to this 2012 Guardian article, the typical Masai greeting is sopa, which translates as “Hello”, and it’s the start of a long greeting process which can include “How is the homestead?”, “How is the weather?”, “How are the cows?”, and “How are the children?”. This isn’t all too different from conversations that any one of us may have had here in North America, where the question “And how’s your family” is likely to come up. Still, the fact that the use of “How are the children?” as a greeting is surprising enough to be a memorable rhetorical device while “How’s business?” isn’t illustrates where our priorities lie.
Photo by Yours Truly. Click to see at full size.
As with most Café con Tampa gatherings, there were more questions than time for them. The questions continued in the atrium, with Gillum surrounded by all manner of recording devices:
Photo by Yours Truly. Click to see at full size.
I went down to the atrium to hear the questions they were asking Gillum, and in the process met with two gentlemen from St. Petersburg’s ACT (Arts Conservatory for Teens): Herbert Murphy and Alex Harris, who spoke at Café con Tampa a couple of weeks ago. They saw the accordion — which I bring to events like this because it starts conversations — and we got into a great conversation about music, technology, and where the two intersect. Herbert and I even talked about having me do a presentation with their students, and I’d be more than happy to take them up on that offer. If you want to meet interesting people in Tampa Bay, and possibly collaborate with them and start something potentially great, you should check out Café con Tampa.
Café con Tampa is a weekly gathering where people interested in the issues that affect Tampa Bay and the world beyond meet to learn and share ideas with interesting, entertaining (and sometimes infuriating) guest speakers. It takes place every Friday between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. in the wonderful setting of Oxford Exchange, a combination of restaurant, book store, gift shop, co-working space, design studio, event venue, and one of the best “third places” I’ve ever set foot in. It’s attended by an interesting audience that’s often a mix of movers and shakers from the worlds of arts, business, academia, and government, and put together by local heroes Del Acosta and Bill Carlson, President of the communciations agency Tucker/Hall. Admission is $12.00, and it not only lets you into the event, but also gets you Oxford Exchange’s delicious breakfast spread. If you want to see interesting presentations and have great conversations with some of the area’s movers, shakers, and idea-makers — myself included — you should attend Café con Tampa!
Here are Café con Tampa presentations that I’ve written about:
I found out only because he was the speaker at this morning’s edition of Café con Tampa, a weekly gathering where people interested in the issues that affect Tampa Bay meet to learn and share ideas in the wonderful setting of Oxford Exchange, a combination of restaurant, book store, gift shop, co-working space, design studio, event venue, and one of the best “third places” I’ve ever set foot in. Every Friday between 8 and 9 a.m., Café con Tampa features not only interesting guest speakers, but an interesting audience that’s often a mix of movers and shakers from the worlds of arts, business, academia, and government. If you want to have interesting conversations with some of the area’s movers, shakers, and idea-makers (and enjoy Oxford Exchange’s delicious breakfast spread), you should come to Café con Tampa.
20th century work
Weymouth opened his presentation with a Churchill quote: “We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us.”
He then talked about his first collaboration with legendary architect I.M. Pei: the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. He talked about the goals they had to achieve: being able to house a lot of art, handle large volumes of visitors, fit in the triangular zone defined by Pennsylvania Avenue, respect the existing architecture, and of course, be beautiful.
The East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.
Creative Commons photo — click here to see the source.
“Notice the glass pyramids in the design,” Weymouth said. “Do you see an evolving theme?”
After the National Gallery project, he left Pei — still remaining friends with him — to found his own architecture firm where he designed galleries and pioneering high-tech lofts.
The Louvre Pyramid.
Creative Commons photo — click here to see the source.
When I.M. Pei became the architect for the Louvre Project in the early 1980s, he invited Weymouth to be the chief designer. This was a project filled with challenges:
The building was a major traffic problem, what with its being a kilometer (three-fifths of a mile) long
It blocked a passage between Paris’ left and right banks
There was no easily-visible main entrance, and its signage and wayfinding were poor
Its courtyard was a parking lot of the Ministry of Finance and Louvre staff
Also, in a conversation I had with Weymouth after his talk, there was also the issue of its being championed by then-president François Mitterand, the Fifth Republic’s first socialist leader. “A number of people left France during that time because they were concerned he’d turn the whole country communist,” he said.
The design solution he came up with was to create in the courtyard — the only space for new construction — an underground city. One-third of it is open to the public in the form of parking, a shopping mall and restaurants, with other space for art storage, operations, and roadways.
If you’re even the slightest bit worldly, you know what’s above it — the now-iconic glass pyramid. Weymouth explained the rationale behind the pyramid: “If you’re at water level by the Seine and looking at the Louvre, there’s no clear entrance. You also need some way to bring light into the underground complex.” So he designed a pyramid-shaped skylight, a classic platonic solid that would clearly mark a place to enter, and provide natural light to the subterranean expansion.
Why did Weymouth move to Tampa Bay? “Because of the airport,” he said, along with the brain trust of creatives that he saw accumulating in the area. It’s becoming a hub for culture, business, and technology.
In the competition to redesign the Dali Museum, the original request for proposals was for an addition to the existing building, which was a converted warehouse by the water’s edge. “I did not hew to that requirement,” Weymouth said, stating that the original building was never meant to be a museum, but a storage facility that was vulnerable to storm surges. His design, which we now know as the Dali Museum (pictured above) was a whole new building that stayed within the budget of the original proposal for an addition.
The Dali’s glass “blob” was inspired by Buckminster Fuller, whom Weymouth met in the 1960s when he was a student. He couldn’t use Fuller’s method, which was meant for geodesic spheres, for his blob design. He found a company in Milan that specialized in making free-form geodesic designs, and the result is the Dali’s blob, in which no two panes of glass are identical, and where different sizes of glass are used to accommodate different amounts of structural stress. The design was facilitated by technology that had only been around for about a decade: a combination of computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, and computer-aided stress analysis.
During the Q&A, a member of the audience identified himself as the nephew of British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid (pictured to the right), creator of some of the world’s most beautiful super-futuristic buildings — go to her Wikipedia page and look at her designs. Weymouth’s wife Susana complimented her work and pointed out to the audience that Hadid was the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. Dame Hadid is yet another superstar architect whom I didn’t know was based in Florida (she died in Miami in 2016).
Someone asked him what his plans were when he retired. “I not going to retire,” he replied. He pointed out that I.M. Pei designed the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar in his 90s, and that he himself was planning to continue with his work. “We become freer and more creative with experience, and at the same time, more practical.”
In response to a question about the degree to which he exceeded the budget for the Dali Museum by designing a whole new building instead of an addition, Weymouth replied that he didn’t spend more than the money allotted. “You respect the budget. You do it by prioritizing. It’s like cuisine: you boil away what’s not crucial, and you use listening and logic, covering both practical and aesthetic issues.”
When asked what he thought the two greatest innovations in construction were, Weymouth’s answers were:
Computers. When he started at MIT, architects drew on tracing paper with pencils in two dimensions. With computers, they now design in three dimensions, and when they make changes to a single drawing, it gets reflected in all relevant drawings. He said that there was some concern that computer-aided design would result in all buildings “looking like grid paper”, but instead, coupled with “robots that can custom-cut”, has allowed architects to be even more creative.
Materials. “There’s fiber-reinforced concrete now,” Weymouth said, along with new forms of plastic and steel. “The glass industry has been revolutionized” — back when they were building the Louvre pyramid was being built, it required making changes to a French glass factory (with strong encouragement from then-French president Mitterand) to make low-iron glass, which is a standard today.
In closing…
I’ll close with an observation about Tampa Bay that Weymouth made (I’m paraphrasing here):
If you wanted to be at the heart of culture and interesting things happening in art around 1910, you wanted to be in Paris. Around 1920 or ’21, Berlin was the place. In the 1950s, it would be New York. And today, it’s Tampa Bay.
Bonus rock star fact
Yann’s not the only rock star Weymouth! His younger sister Tina was the bassist for the Talking Heads.
During the Q&A, a member of the audience identified himself as the nephew of British-Iraqi architect 
