Letters Remain

Month: June 2008

  • 2008 Reith Lectures – Chinese Vistas

    If you haven’t yet discovered, the 2008 Reith Lectures are currently under way over at BBC Radio 4. This year they are being held by Jonathan Spence – a specialist in Chinese history – and the first two lectures have been on the topics of Confucius and UK-China relations.

  • The Purity Scale of Science (xkcd)

    This is for those of you who aren’t subscribers to my favourite comic, xkcd – a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Today’s episode deals with different branches of science and their purity; that is, can they be distilled down to a ‘more pure’ science. Maths is classed as the purest of sciences –…

  • 10 Ways We Get Things Wrong

    Psychology Today has an interesting article on fear, probability, and how we get things wrong. It’s not a very scannable article, so here’s an executive summary: We Fear Snakes, Not Cars – Risk and emotion are inseparable We Fear Spectacular, Unlikely Events – Fear skews risk analysis in predictable ways We Fear Cancer But Not…

  • Randall Munroe (of xkcd) Visits Google

    I absolutely, positively, know I’ve written about this and I would bet my life savings that I posted it, but alas I cannot find it anywhere. Every-so-slightly delayed (months later!), here’s what happened when Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) was invited to Google – he also gave an Authors@Google talk. More Googleplex videos here, including…

  • Japan Travel

    Hoping to have an extended visit to Japan in the near future? You may be as pleased as I was when I stumbled upon a site offering 10 Japanese Customs You Must Know Before a Trip to Japan. A perfect compliment to Tim Ferriss’ Hacking Japan: Inside Tokyo for Less Than New York (part two).…

  • 5 Years On the Road – A Hitchhiking Story

    Ludovic Hubler is a Frenchman who, in 2003, set off around the world with one goal – to travel all of it by hitchhiking. This is it ! The circle has finally been closed. 5 years, passed day by day since leaving the Alps, and now here I am back at my point of departure,…

  • The Omega Point

    The Singularity again, but this time a Gravitational (or Spacetime) Singularity. Specifically the one at the end of existence of the universe. The Omega Point is the moment during the theoretical Big Crunch when – just before the final, all-ending gravitational singularity – “the computational capacity of the universe is capable of increasing at a…

  • Daily Snopes: An Excellent Waste of Your Time

    Daily Snopes is a news monitoring service from those professional spoilsports, Snopes. A great way to waste half an hour on a slow Friday morning.

  • Geek Posters

    At least a couple of these amazingly geeky posters are derived from projects at VisualComplexity, the site taking on the task of visualising complex relationships from all walks of life. My favourites, or at least the most interesting, are those showing the evolution of various programming languages; starting with COBOL back in the mid-1950s. There…

  • Bribing Employees to Quit

    One of those ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ moments. An ingenuous—yet obvious—business practice from Zappos.com (a start-up company given funding by the infamous Sequoia Capital venture capital firm)… bribe your employees to quit so only the truly committed and enthusiastic are left. More at Harvard Business’ Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You…