Letters Remain

Month: January 2009

  • Psychology of Learning

    Tom Stafford—co-author of Mind Hacks—has written a series of posts on what psychologists know about learning. For anyone interested in education and personal development, these provide an interesting introduction to a few topics of note. Learning Makes Itself Invisible Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or…

  • Geckos’ Toes, Wan der Waal’s and Walking on Ceilings

    Only having seen one gecko in my life I’ve given them little thought. One thing I am sure of, however, is that I didn’t expect the answer to how geckos manage to navigate walls and ceilings so dextrously to be as awesome as it is. The bottoms of a gecko’s feet are [
] covered with millions…

  • The Anthropology of YouTube

    I personally find the examples given in this article quite uninspiring (even quaint), but the following quote from Clive Thompson’s look at the anthropology of YouTube is rather piquant: What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface…

  • Books on Molecular Gastronomy

    Molecular gastronomy is defined as the “scientific discipline involving the study of physical and chemical processes that occur in cooking”. Following on from a conversation I had with Andrew this past weekend—and after reading this great article from The New York Times—I decided to compile a shortlist of the best books on molecular gastronomy (according to me):…

  • Overnight Success Takes Years

    Paul Buchheit—original developer of Gmail and Google AdSense, founder of FriendFeed—discusses how projects can obtain ‘overnight success’. This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you’re starting something new, expect a long journey. That’s no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will…

  • Action Through Advertising

    Taking a leaf out of the advertisers’ book may be the key to succeeding in the fight against global warming and ecological apathy. At least, that’s the view Robert Butler takes after looking at the successes of a novel advertising campaign used to cut the incidence of littering in Texas: The ads avoided the negatives…

  • Hedge Funds: An Overview

    Like David, I’ve often been curious about the minutiae of hedge fund operations: I’ve long known the vague generalities, but never the specifics. For those in a similar situation, the London Review offers a thorough introduction to hedge funds. This was the basic strategy of the first hedge fund, as run by A.W. Jones—sociologist and financial journalist:…

  • From Evanomics to Stephanomics: The Blog of the BBC’s Economics Editor

    While Evan Davis was economics editor for the BBC he wrote the excellent Evanomics—a blog in which he attempted to “understand the real world, using the tool kit of economics”. When he temporarily stepped down from this role in March 2008 (for a yearlong sabbatical) Evanomics was sorely missed and his replacement, Stephanie Flanders, didn’t…

  • Typography and Design (Two Free Ebooks)

    Getting Real is the undisputed bible of agile software development—a manifesto that can change your view in a single reading. However when it comes to typography and design, the closest I have ever come to such a document was Mark Boulton’s Better Typography presentation. Now there’s a contender: The Vignelli Canon (pdf) I can’t do…

  • Spaced Repetition and the SuperMemo Learning Algorithm

    Spaced repetition is a learning technique taking advantage of what is known as the ‘forgetting curve’: a predictable pattern of how we forget information. With this in mind, Piotr WoĆșniak developed SuperMemo—an algorithm specifically designed to predict the future state of a person’s memory to schedule information reviews at the optimal time. Wired profiles WoĆșniak, taking a closer look…