Speak with Your Investors, It's Tough Out There

We are in a rough time for all small businesses, but especially for relatively new or start-up businesses. The medical device market is one of them. In this excellent New York Times article the writer describes an innovative company that is suffering from current market conditions.

I went through a similar situation early in this decade when the company went from 120 people to less than 80 after a new round of money from investors. That was just after the bottom fell out from the Tech bubble (remember April 2001 - kind of gets lost because of 9/11 that year, but it was bad for the market for sure). New products get the first shaft, for sure.

In addition, professional investors are again starting to focus on under-performing companies, witness a little fight/fray going on in the Chicago suburbs as described in a recent article by Greg Burns in the Chicago Tribune. The dispute revolves around a hedge fund manager who holds a small company's stock, and it disappointed with the market performance relative its peers and focuses the complaint on overhead and related costs in the corporate suite.

These are nervous times my friends, keep hold of your cash and find ways to survive. Keep in close contact with your investors (keep those friends close, and enemies closer), make them feel special, else they might pounce and end your run.

Bubble behavior - the Sun, metals, and beer

So beer and the Sun are really more connected than we thought, eh? Seems the foam of beer behaves very much like the heat granules on the Sun (and the microstructure of metals) that heat our Earth, as described in this recent Nature article abstract (subscribe for the full article).

The article in summary states (with help from the NYTimes writer Kenneth Chang) that the authors have solved the mathematical equations for the time based behavior of 3 dimensional micro-structures. It is based on a theory that van Neumann solved for 2 dimensions more than 50 years ago.

Would this solution work for huge dimensions as well? The average size of a sun granule is equivalent to an Earth continent, but the described behavior sounds the same as for the beer bubbles or molten metal.

This is one of those solutions that sounds like a universal connection, and I hope these folks know about and are speaking with each other since math and astrophysics are very close. In any event you can decide.