The SizeUSA project has scanned 10,800 men and women and their report on American body sizes is now complete. You can buy the full results for $20,000. Whether or not the clothing industry adjusts its sizing based on this new data remains to be seen. One point of information that the project director was willing to disclose is that although size 8 is considered a baseline size for American women, less than 10% of the women scanned for the survey met the definition for that size. Overall, Americans are getting taller and heavier, but the weight is increasing faster than the height, so the size proportions are no longer a good fit. Size of the machine, cost, and sheer practicality are keeping clothing stores from using the sizing scanner for creating customized clothing. I think we’ll have to cope with squashing or swimming our nonstandard physiques in the standard sizes for a while longer yet. (source: NY Times article)

Leaving California meant leaving the home of “It’s the Cheese” and “Happy Cows” promotions (though I never saw a talking cow and I never hope to see one). The commercials have followed me up north, but I am far away from my favorite places to buy cheese. But cheese is everywhere, and now Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, an artisan cheesemaker, has opened up shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Their milk comes from Cherry Valley Dairy, in Duvall.

The N.Y. Times Magazine published their excellent Design issue this past weekend and I’ll try to refrain from linking to every article. There’s a profile of Amy Smith of MIT who invents gadgets that improve life in developing countries, a slide show on the making of a $5,500 Hermès Kelly bag, examples of designs for political campaigns, a piece on Auldbrass, the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Yemassee, S.C., and an update (for me anyway) on the work designers Andy and Kate Spade are doing for Delta‘s low budget Song Airlines. And best of all, there’s a revealing look at how undergarment maker Warnaco hired design firm IDEO to examine how women shop for bras and suggest improvements for the lingerie department. The revealing part is that Warnaco execs don’t seem to think there is anything wrong with the design and selection of their bras; it’s just that they are hard to find. I say give IDEO a crack at getting rid of underwires.

World Aids Day
The first time I participated in Link & Think, I linked to AEGiS, the AIDS Education Global Information System. It’s still my favorite link to mark World Aids Day. AEGIS was a grassroots effort, born out of BBS systems, way back before the Web hit it big. Sister Mary Elizabeth has made it her life’s work, nurturing it into the largest HIV knowledgebase in the world. The Daily Briefing gathers AIDS related news from around the world and the news archives contain articles going back to 1983. The site has links to drug information, conference proceedings, court decisions, and publications for all audiences. AEGIS provides information and education, the best tools against the stigma and discrimination blocking awareness, prevention, and care.

Happy Thanksgiving! Back on Monday.

Not many Washington state wineries take on the huge effort to make ice wine, but during the recent cold snap, the ones that do brought in their frozen harvest and ran the presses. Ice wine is a very sweet dessert wine, concocted from the super concentrated sugars and acids that remain unfrozen when the water in grapes turns to ice. First made in Germany, eiswein production began in Canada in the 1980s and is now spreading to other suitable climates. Ohio wineries have discovered that their long autumns and late November freezes are ideal. A few wineries bucked standards and froze harvested grapes in freezers instead, but the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has ruled that only wine made from grapes frozen on the vine may be labeled “ice wine.” Demand for this sweet concoction is high and supplies are low enough to fetch excellent profits for the winemakers who have to tough out freezing overnight harvests and the scary experience of running the equivalent of ice cubes through their valuable grape presses.

I’ve watched the Pepsi commercial with the dog and the sandwich (oh and the Pepsi too) over and over to make sure that the last part is a special effect (I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it yet). At first I thought it just might be for real, but my husband has convinced me otherwise. We will probably not be undertaking scientific experiments to make absolutely sure, which a certain member of our family should be very happy with. The ad is currently available on Pepsi’s ad page, titled “Just Lunch.”

When last we visited Steinway No. K0862 in the N.Y. Times‘ ongoing series, woodworkers had built out the rim and added the keybed. Now it’s time for the intricate installation of the hammer and key mechanism that will ultimately define the precision “action” of the Steinway. The motion of the keys, the action, is what a pianist will feel, the heartbeat of the instrument itself. The action must not be too light or too hard. “Two grams, plus or minus a gram” is the tolerance of the force to move the hammershank. Behind each of the 88 notes, each of the 88 keys, are 54 parts that make that one tone happen. The piano I played growing up (not a Steinway) had a few keys that would stick in humid weather. At one point in time, Steinway used Teflon bushings to avoid that problem. But the Teflon solution caused clicking noises and was eventually dropped in favor of soaking the bushing material in Teflon, which seems to help. Surrounding the technical details of the continuing construction of K0862 is coverage of contract negotiations between Steinway and its workers, and the company’s plans to stay ahead in an uncertain economy.

It’s Thanksgiving week and you know what that means: time for the Presidential Turkey Pardon. This year, White House website visitors voted for the names of the fortunate turkey and its alternate. Stars and Stripes are now headed off for a comfortable farm life.

The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has been behind a multitude of major high tech companies in its 30 year history. Working at a startup funded by Kleiner Perkins lends some cachet to your cause, as their successes are famous. Sun, AOL, Lotus, Intuit, and Compaq are some of the names in their older portfolio. Then there was Netscape, Amazon, Macromedia, and Genentech. Now there’s Google, Friendster, the Segway, and possibly the Next Big Thing. Eugene Kleiner, the first partner in the list, died Thursday. Kleiner was one of “the Traitorous Eight” who left William Shockley’s group to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Prior to teaming up with Tom Perkins, Kleiner also invested in Intel Corp. He was truly one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley.