Month: October 2008
-
Top 10 ‘Gen Y’ Blogs
Ryan Stephens has produced a list of the top ten blogs for Generation Y. It’s an excellent list containing a number of blogs I already subscribe to; those I don’t read I’ll be checking out soon. Personal Branding Blog Hard Knox Life Employee Evolution Driven Leaders Newly Corporate Ben Casnocha Brazen Careerist: Penelope Trunk I…
-
Startups and Bad Economies
Two weeks ago the renowned VC firm Sequoia Capital gave their portfolio CEOs a presentation on how startups should deal with the bad economy. In the presentation, the “entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs” gave some good advice any startup should follow in good and bad times (for example, “spend every dollar as if it were your…
-
The Elements of Style: Programming Edition
Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is one of the most popular and influential writing guides available. By replacing a few key words, it can be used as a text on programming style and the craft of software. 2.12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it. A basic structural design underlies every kind of…
-
Impossible Ideas are Great Ideas
After his presumption that both eBay and Wikipedia would never go mainstream was proven wrong, Joel Spolsky realised what he calls “a fundamental lesson about the nature of technological innovation”. For Inc. Magazine Joel describes his idea that the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed. […] “seeming impossible” is…
-
The Seven Sins of Memory
According to Daniel Schacter, there are seven fundamental ways in which our memories fail us. Schacter elaborates in his book of the same name, and now PsyBlog has produced a series of articles on each of these ‘seven sins of memory’: Transience Absent-Mindedness Blocking Misattribution Suggestibility Bias Persistence
-
False Advertising (With Statistics) Works
Recent advertising research shows how numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience. Bigger numbers, it seems, are what we want: no matter how abstract or inane. The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one…
-
Our Evolutionary Predisposition to Faith
The anthropologist Pascal Boyer asks, “Is religion a product of our evolution?” and in doing so he concludes that it may be easier to believe than to reject faith. In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It does not try to identify the gene or genes…
-
How Cats Control Human Culture
I’ll admit I may have overstretched myself slightly with this sensationalist title. What it should say is, “How the Toxoplasma Gondii Brain Parasite May Influence Human Culture“; but that’s not nearly as fun. Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled brain parasite spread by cats. Our feline companions are its preferred home and […] like most parasites,…
-
Powers of Ten
Powers of Ten is a 1977 IBM-commissioned film taking us on a journey out to the edge of the observable universe before returning to an atom’s nucleus in the hand of a man picnicing in a Chicago park… all within 9 minutes. Depicting the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten, the film…