Letters Remain

Month: November 2008

  • Can Perfume be Art?

    Angus Trumble, curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, asks, why is great perfume not taken more seriously? The parallels between what ought to be more properly regarded as sister arts are undeniable. Artists and colourmen combine natural and, these days, synthetic pigments with media such as oils and resins,…

  • Upping the Odds of Startup Success

    After debunking the myth that only one-in-ten startups succeed (the rate of success is more likely around 60-70%), Dan Kehrer offers us four key factors that improve the odds of new business survival: People. If you can afford to hire employees, do it. Well-staffed businesses have better survival rates than solo operations. Startup capital of…

  • The Napoleon Dynamite Problem

    Or maybe, “The One Million Dollar Algorithm”. A competition to improve the recommendation engine of the online DVD rental company, Netflix, has been running in to problems. As the contestants edge toward an improvement rate of 10% (the point at which the $1,000,000 prize will be awarded), their progress grinds to a halt thanks to…

  • Transport and Development in West Africa

    Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist, takes a look at the problems with the transportation network in west Africa and discusses how this is a major factor in the region’s stunted development. Pity the entrepreneur who wants to do business under such conditions. If goods travel at 75 miles a day […] it is almost impossible…

  • The Nerd Handbook and Caring for Your Introvert

    Rands In Repose’s Nerd Handbook is an essay on understanding geeks; from our insatiable appetite for knowledge to our hard-to-decipher social interaction ‘skills’. The Handbook is at times painfully precise. The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the…

  • Gladwell, Journo-gurus, and Anecdotes as Science

    You can guarantee that whenever Malcolm Gladwell brings out a book he’ll make headlines. And with his latest book having recently been released, here are a number of interesting and contrasting views. First (via Kottke, and in Gladwell’s own words), what to expect from Outliers: though the story of Sidney Weinberg, from high-school dropout to…

  • The Nature of Gender

    Using the story of 8-year-old Brandon, The Atlantic discusses the nature of gender, and the issues of ‘treating’ gender identity disorder in children. It took the gay-rights movement 30 years to shift from the Stonewall riots to gay marriage; now its transgender wing, long considered the most subversive, is striving for suburban normalcy too. The…

  • Pleasure and the Multiplicity of Self

    The Atlantic has a fascinating article on the psychology of pleasure, where the author suggests that we each consist of multiple selves, all in conflict, vying for control and separate desires. Of particular interest is the act of self-binding—the taking of actions to prevent a later ‘self’ succumbing to temptation—and its development. I recently studied…

  • The Counter-Intuitive Comparison of All Things

    The Big Chart, created by The Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (CICINA), attempts to find the single best thing in the world using a tournament-style bracketing system to compare 16,384 things in 8 categories (ideas, art, people, fuels, words, other animals, places and other things). Is the Bilbao Guggenheim better than McDonald’s French fries?…

  • Finding the ‘Best’ Product

    The oddly-named Best Covery is destined to be one of my regular shopping resources. At a glance it allows you to find the ‘best’ (most popular?) products in a large number of categories, such as Best HDTV Picture Quality for the Money, Best Earbud Headphones, and many more. I’ve written previously on the troubles I…