Letters Remain

Month: June 2008

  • Independent Budget Travel and Round-the-World Backpacking Trips

    Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain Travel Independent thinks it has “everything you need to…

  • Using Cognitive Bias: Politics and Policy

    You may have noticed that I’ve recently been fascinated by everything cognitive bias. With the release of Nudge—a book looking at how politicians around the world are using cognitive bias—the general public are now going to be hearing about it a lot more too. The Times has a nice case-study where the theories are used…

  • How to Write a Business Plan

    BBC Business’ How to Write a Business Plan has some sound advice for that basic business plan. However, being written by a multi-national corporation, I had an inkling that it wasn’t going to be very—I hate saying this—Web 2.0, so I went to the usual suspects. This Ask Y Combinator thread has some good advice…

  • Bill Gates on Windows Usability

    The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been scouring Microsoft’s internal emails (released through various law suits) looking for an insight into Gates’ personality and to get a picture of his role at the top of Microsoft. From this epic email rant, it is obvious that even Gates himself isn’t immune. I am quite disappointed at how Windows…

  • Times’ 50 Best Websites of 2008

    Time has just released the results of its 50 ‘best’ websites of 2008 vote. Present are many you would expect, but there are a few surprising entries too. The top 5: Penny Arcade Gaia Online Kongregate GasBuddy Free Rice via Mind Hacks

  • Being Creative with gapingvoid

    You may know gapingvoid from Hugh MacLeod’s “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards“. Now he’s telling us How To Be Creative. So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years: You are responsible for your own experience. Everybody…

  • List of Thought Processes

    Thoughts – or specifically the mental processes enabling us to think – allow beings to be conscious, to make decisions, and to imagine. Thoughts are what define us as individuals. This list of thought processes is a (big) list of thinking styles, methods of thinking (thinking skills), and types of thought. When you have some…

  • 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll (100 Most Important Living Intellectuals )

    The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll is a list of the 100 most important living public intellectuals […] compiled in November 2005 by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy on the basis of a reader’s ballot. Top five: Noam Chomsky Umberto Eco Richard Dawkins Václav Havel Christopher Hitchens Foreign Policy requires (free) registration to access the list.…

  • Working With Children – Fear & False Accusations

    This news report comes as no surprise. While in the past, adults would have helped children in distress or rebuked those misbehaving, there was now “a feeling that it is best not to become involved”, it said. Report author Prof Frank Furedi, of Kent University, said: “From Girl Guiders to football coaches, from Christmas-time Santas…

  • List of Common Misconceptions

    The list of common misconceptions includes this clarification: The word “theory” in “the theory of evolution” does not imply doubt in mainstream science about the validity of this theory; the words “theory” and “hypothesis” are not the same in a scientific context (see Evolution as theory and fact). A scientific theory is a set of…