Letters Remain

Month: December 2008

  • The Anthropological Divide

    Times Higher Education discusses the divide between evolutionary and social anthropologists.  On one side are the evolutionary anthropologists. “(They believe) our behaviour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evolution,” says Alex Bentley, a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University. “Then we have the social anthropologists. Some of…

  • Warren Buffett’s 10 Ways to Get Rich

    Reprinted from Parade Magazine: Warren Buffett’s ’10 Ways to Get Rich’, written by Alice Schroeder; the author of Buffett’s authorised biography, The Snowball. Reinvest Your Profits Be Willing To Be Different Never ‘Suck Your Thumb’ Spell Out The Deal Before You Start Watch Small Expenses Limit What You Borrow Be Persistent Know When To Quit…

  • The Lowball Strategy

    Ryan Holiday on the military strategist John Boyd’s lowball ‘technique’: John Boyd had a rule that whenever he was using data as support for an argument, he’d deflate the numbers to understate his case. The idea was use lower number while making a strong case; when he was challenged and fact checked, it’d always be…

  • A Perfect Memory

    Hypermnesia is the condition—usually associated with a variety of mental illnesses—of having unusually exact, vivid memories. Spiegel interviews Jill Price, 42, a Californian woman with hypermnesic super-memory. In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. “I don’t…

  • A Thanksgiving/Christmas Prayer (for Atheists)

    A prayer for atheists before Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner: Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this.  Amen.

  • Barack Obama’s Speechwriters

    A profile of Barack Obama’s speechwriter, Jon Favreau, 26, from a January ’08 edition of The New York Times: “The trick of speechwriting, if you will, is making the client say your brilliant words while somehow managing to make it sound as though they issued straight from their own soul,” said the writer Christopher Buckley, who was a…

  • The Best of Esquire’s 75 Years

    75 years since its initial publication, Esquire shares the 7 greatest stories and the 70 greatest sentences to have been published in the magazine. Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. –Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936 via Kottke

  • Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

    An excellent infographic on understanding the current financial crisis from one of my favourite data visualisation sites, FlowingData.

  • What Should Any Educated Person Know?

    Tucker Max creates a list of what he believes is the information any educated person should know. By no means a definitive list (far from it), but some good information regardless. English lit: Read lots of novels, especially the classics. There are hundreds of sites out there that purport to list the Western Canon, browse a…

  • Scouting New York

    Even though I’ve never been to New York, I love the Scouting NY blog; a collection of often over–looked and unique locations discovered by a NYC film location scout. The ‘About’ section says all you need to know: I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing…