Letters Remain

Month: March 2009

  • Alibi Club

    Alibi clubs are loose collections of people willing to help each other out with alibis for every occasion: skipping work for the day, travelling to another country with your mistress, or getting out of a blind date. Your imagination—and morality—is your only barrier. There is nothing new about making excuses or telling fibs. But the…

  • Writing ‘On Writing Well’

    William Zinsser—author of 17 books—talks in length on the trials and tribulations of writing ‘On Writing Well’. My initial fear of immodesty was misguided. The best teachers of a craft, I saw, are their own best textbook. Students who take their classes really want to know how they do what they do—how they grew into…

  • Causes of Poverty and Prosperity

    Matt Ridley—author of The Red Queen, among others—discusses the causes of poverty and prosperity, offering new (to me) insights on innovation, technology and markets. It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. […] The…

  • Grade Inflation

    With news that Cambridge University is to demand A* grades at A-Level as a prerequisite for entry (a grade that currently doesn’t exist), there is much in the news about ‘grade inflation’. However “grade inflation” is actually the answer; the problem is “grade distortion”: True grade inflation would mean each grade was equally devalued, with…

  • The Evolutionary Role of Cooking

    Cooking is “the evolutionary change that underpins all others” and is what makes us human, according to Richard Wrangham, Harvard University. The theory: the process of cooking makes our food more digestible, freeing up a huge amount of calories that are then expended on other, more important, activities. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique…

  • The Decay of Social Networks

    Unaccountability and anonymity on the Internet has brought about “the end of empathy”, says Jason Calacanis, as he discusses the ‘condition’ of Internet Asperger’s Syndrome: This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost. […] In this syndrome,…

  • The Nun Study

    The ‘Nun Study’ is a longitudinal study of ageing and Alzheimer’s that uses data gathered from over 600 nuns over the past 20+ years. Some interesting correlates are starting to appear: The nuns make for a very unique population to study […] because of their similar lifestyles. “They don’t smoke, they don’t drink, so you can…

  • Separating Conversations: The Cocktail Party Effect

    The ‘cocktail party effect’ is the name given to our unusually adept ability of separating out conversations from one another. However it appears that we are unusually bad at retaining information from the discarded conversation(s): Cherry [1953] found his participants picked up surprisingly little information [from the ‘rejected’ conversations], often failing to notice blatant changes…

  • The Dunbar Number and the Limits of Social Networking

    The Economist looks at whether Dunbar’s number, the supposed limit of stable social relationships, holds true on social networking sites. That […] online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. […]…

  • Leaving Infants in Cars

    A child is accidentally left in the back seat of a car and dies from hyperthermia: a parent’s worst nightmare, I imagine, and something many believe wouldn’t happen to them (itself a big part of the problem). In an article debating the legal ramifications of such an accident, The Washington Post presents not only a…