Letters Remain

Month: June 2009

  • The Most Important Century

    The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer. It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that…

  • Body Language Mimicry

    It is said that mimicking a person’s body language helps to create false camaraderie–a manufacturing of attraction, if you will. Conventional wisdom holds that this is because it helps you, the mimicker, empathise. This is false, recent research shows, but not far off; face and body motion mimicry actually “helps you to see them as they…

  • The Realistic Threat of Terrorism

    To think rationally about risk is to think probabilistically / statistically about the dangers we face. Noting that “the most dangerous person you’re ever likely to encounter – by several orders of magnitude – is the one you see in the mirror every morning”, John Goekler offers some perspective on what risks we really should…

  • The Mars Bar Unit of Account

    The fluctuating weight of the Mars Bar is quite a contentious issue here in the UK. Answering a query as to whether economists take this into account (and not just price fluctuations) when calculating inflation using the Retail Prices Index, economist Tim Harford offers some entertaining information regarding the Mars Bar unit of account. The Mars…

  • The Evolutionary Grounds for Depression

    Depression is an emotional response that has evolved to prevent us from experiencing mentally damaging events, a number of recent studies are starting to suggest. As pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and…

  • How To Be Happy in Business

    ‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Business’ Venn diagram. Reminding me of the love–growth–cash triangle (previously posted), this Venn diagram is an infographic worth looking at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly…

  • The Innovation Deficit

    Disregarding software and much hyperbole (not necessarily mutually exclusive), one might think that recent times have been an innovation desert. This is the opinion of Newsweek’s Michael Mandel who believes that the lack of innovation over the past decade may be responsible for America’s economic situation. There’s no government-constructed “innovation index” that would allow us to…

  • Female Sexuality Research: What Women Want

    The question ‘What does a woman want?’ was, according to Freud, “The great question that has never been answered”. One person trying to answer this question, however, is Meredith Chivers—a psychologist specialising in sexual behaviour whose work was extensively discussed in The New York Times earlier this year. The article, focusing on female sexuality, is…

  • Economic Experts: Insightful, Biased

    Be wary of advice and forecasts from economic ‘experts’, says economist Zachary Karabell—not because they are trying to sell their services or because they are lying, but because they truly believe their (unintentionally) skewed opinions. Being wrong in the past is not much of a liability as long as one is right in the present.…

  • Don’t Implement Ideas, Solve Problems

    Taking inspiration from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Startups essay, Martin Zwilling offers some further thoughts—to wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, and there is no market for ideas.…