A home on the web to encourage thoughtful, rich, and well-orchestrated execution in all things. "High amplitude" denotes a heady mix of (possibly disparate) ingredients, skillfully and admirably orchestrated into a new and amazing entity. Try your hand, or learn of others' examples here.

Maybe you've never heard about amplitude before. Maybe you think it has something to do with sound, or music.

It can, but it doesn't have to. It can apply to anything, in the sense that I'm about to explain to you.

One night, I was home alone, and reading the New Yorker online while I was eating. I started reading a Malcolm Gladwell article that he called, "The Ketchup Conundrum." (You can read the article here: http://tinyurl.com/687l8) You may also know Gladwell from his books "The Tipping Point" and "Blink."

Well in his ketchup article, Gladwell went on at some length about why ketchup was such an amazing invention. Ketchup, you see, cleverly (and perhaps inadvertantly) covered all the taste bases at once (sweet, sour, salt, etc.), even including "umami": a sense of protein, texture, or just a sense of higher complication. For example, babies, once they taste sugar-water, will ever after prefer sugar-water over plain water. You get the picture.

Along with Coca-cola, ketchup, it seems, has earned a famously high standing in the food industry for being "high amplitude": its creators struck a home run by skillfully orchestrating a panoply of elements into a peach of a product. Its owners now had a product that was so innately appealing, it would virtually sell itself.

All right. Well enough. And it was at least an appropriate article to read while I was eating, another of the New Yorker's "ain't-they-colorful?" pieces about a handful of quirky characters, bobbling about.

I wondered if I had any ketchup. (I didn't.) But I also started to wonder if I were frittering away yet more mind-space on a magazine article. Why bother to read a chattering piece about ketchup? And why did the article bother me so much?

Then I realized it: Gladwell hadn't followed the real gem in the piece. It was the umami, and the amplitude. He'd missed the most interesting angle completely, the thing that transcended the piece itself, what made it really relevant, even potentially life-changing for the reader.

The concepts of umami and amplitude could be applied to anything. Even people.

This, to me, was that rarest of things: a genuine epiphany. This was something really useful, even elegant. Mired as I was in a series of personal ruts at the time, I looked for ways to apply this new set of priciples.

I was doing a bit of sewing as a pastime, and decided to start with that. I needed a warm hat to wear to a camp-out. Aha, I thought, now I know what to do with that amazing, complicated, fuzzy, (and expensive!) fabric I saw downtown. The fabric already had umami and amplitude, I thought. I plunked down $30 for a yard of the stuff, and decided the best strategy would be to let the fabric do the bulk of the work for the piece. In riding, sometimes you need to get out the horse's way, and this was my hunch for this work.

Taking such a small task so seriously, and in such a multi-disciplinary way, seemed to work magic. When I wore the hat, people came out of the woodwork to talk to me about it. Strangers everywhere complimented it, asked to touch it, and wanted to try it on. They asked to buy one just like it. I took their names and ended up designing and sewing over two hundred more, making a bit of pocket money for the holidays, not to mention burning man.

Not only that, but the apparent high amplitude of the hats seemed verified by the fact that I received streams of unbidden stories back from buyers, about how strangers accosted them too, asking about the hat, wanting to touch it, wear it, buy it... from European ski slopes, to Washington DC, Japan and and Rio de Janiero, their stories were all the same: craziness over a bit of fluff.

But it was the idea itself that kept cycling through my mind, refreshing and inspiring me like a micro-portable insta-muse.

I normally work as a video editor and writer; I applied it to my online reel and got work. I applied it to my writing and helped improve the producer's video quality to a level that attracted much higher-bidding buyers, and moved tens of thousands of DVD's.

I applied it to choosing people, and became a more astute judge of character: potential employers, roommates, friends, and lovers - which among them had higher amplitude? And how could I improve mine?

And all without a guru.

I saw the principle nowhere else. I explained it to people, and they liked the idea, but that was taking a long time. Plus, I wanted to lay claim to its discovery, and maybe capitalize on it: doing well by doing good, as they say. (We can't all be Craigslist - I have to pay the bills!)

So as Mulholland might say, when he famously released water into Los Angeles, there it is, take it.

More on the concept as the blog evolves.

Have fun with it - and tell me how it works for you.