Nicholas Pinter brought his grad students over today for a lunch discussion of the recent Walter and Merrits article in Science (bunch of links here). What a pleasure, and doesn't our office look nice?
Nicholas and Jonathan Remo (latter handing paper to former) recently published some interesting work on their retro-modeling of the Mississippi River.
We're busy at LRRD. We have a lot of Emriver clients who're working on grants and otherwise looking for money to buy models. Cara's doing a wonderful job working with them. And high fuel prices have made shipping a challenge--Jesse and Cara worked on that problem today. The seven-foot long aluminum box means the Emriver has to go motor freight; it's a pain.
Everybody thinks the Emriver is a wonderful model, and wishes us well, and we have lots of happy consulting clients. Our DVD is popular. But our task now is to convert all those good things and all that goodwill into cash, and survival.
For example, Dayna's been working with our insurance carrier, who wants not $3,000 annually, as they first proposed, but now over $8,000 for our commercial liability coverage. I thought river geomorphology was complicated. I'm glad she's figuring all this out.
And we're moving ahead on the Em4 model--I've spent a lot of time in AutoCad this week on that, and we're meeting with a second fabricator on Friday to work on a mechanized standpipe design.
Jesse and I've been working on plastic modeling media, and may have broken some barriers on getting the media color coded by size, which will enable many interesting modeling and demonstration techniques. Probably nobody else on the planet is doing this work, and breaking this ground is not easy.
And we're getting interesting consulting requests on top of all this, one involving radioactive riverbeds. Lead hip waders anybody?Labels: development, em2, em4, Jon Remo, nicholas pinter, shipping, siuc
