Letters Remain

Month: May 2009

  • 25+ Etiquette

    Bringing to mind something I wrote about last week (The Quarterlife Crisis), this advice to those 25 and over is more etiquette lesson than antidote to the 20-something malaise. It is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest…

  • Social Cognition and Staving Off Dementia

    A longitudinal study of health and mental lucidity in the aged—focusing on the huge retirement community of Laguna Woods Village south of Los Angeles—is starting to show some results. From studying members of the so-called ‘super memory club’ (people aged 90+ with near-perfect cognitive abilities) it is being suggested that not all mental activities are…

  • Learn Statistics, Damn You!

    Thanks to my moderate knowledge of statistics, I know that I have a lot more to learn in the field and should never make assumptions about data or analyses (even my own). Because of this I share a grievance with Zed Shaw who says that “programmers need to learn statistics or I will kill them all”.…

  • Google and ‘The Physics of Clicks’

    Hal Varian is the Chief Economist at Google, engaged primarily in the design of the company’s ‘advertising auctions’; the auctions that happen every time a search takes place in order to determine the advertising that appears on the results page. After introducing us to this concept, Steven Levy looks at Google’s “across-the-board emphasis on engineering,…

  • Top Ten Foreign Affairs Articles

    After compiling a few ‘top ten’ lists of classic foreign affairs books, Stephen Walt—professor of international affairs at Harvard University—compiles a more digestible version: the top ten articles in the field of international relations. The ten articles Walt recommends are below, but click through to the original to see his reasoning behind each choice and…

  • A Primer in Type Terminology

    David’s lead encapsulates my thoughts on typography perfectly: “I’m fascinated by typography even though I don’t understand a thing about it”. Hopefully this won’t be the case for much longer, as Paul Dean has written a five-part “type terminology tour de force”. From the excellently illustrated Anatomy of a Letterform (part two): They speak the arm (of,…

  • Observations on London and Paris

    Returning from a trip to Europe, Nate Silver—proprietor of the political analysis website FiveThirtyEight—has promptly compiled a list of observations on London and Paris from an American point of view. As an ‘insider’ it appears that I’ve take a lot of these gradual changes for granted, not really making any conclusions. London, and the United…

  • The Scientific Scoreboard

    After becoming disillusioned by the seemingly elitist system of publishing in scientific journals, Jorge Hirsch devised the h-index; a system to quantify the scientific impact of a researcher’s publications (regardless of journal) and thus the scientific impact (importance) of the researcher. There’s a clear pecking order [for scientific journals], established and reinforced by several independent rating…

  • Thought Suppression

    After reading this roundup of research into the psychology of thought suppression you will see that the results are fairly conclusive: it’s counter-productive in almost every circumstance. From research into substance cravings, so-called ‘intrusive’ memories, and even depression, thought suppression has been shown to not work and the act of remembering when attempting to suppress has been…

  • Being Rational About Risk

    Leonard Mlodinow—physicist at Caltech and author of The Drunkard’s Walk, a highly-praised book looking at randomness and our inability to take it into account—has an interview in The New York Times about understanding risk. Some choice quotes: I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to…