Letters Remain

Month: April 2011

  • Building a Brand In a Recession

    The recent recession saw sales of condoms, guns and burglar alarms soar. This is because, when fear enters our mind in terms of losing our job or of not being able to pay bills, we focus on two of our most basic drives: fear and sex. The key to selling and building a brand during…

  • The Best of Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist

    Earlier this year The New York Times published the last of Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist: a weekly column designed “to get people cooking simply, comfortably, and well”. To honour this occasion he reviewed the 1,000+ dishes that have appeared in his almost 700 columns, the culmination of which is a list of Mark Bittman’s favourite twenty-five recipes from thirteen…

  • Food-Based Body Clock the Key to Jet Lag

    The primary cause of jet lag (or desynchronosis as it’s correctly known) is the disruption of our circadian rhythms based on the daily light–dark cycles we experience. However this is only the case when food is in plentiful supply, with new research suggesting that circadian rhythms based on food availability are able to override those of the light-dark cycle. This…

  • Random Promotions Beat the Peter Principle

    The Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” (discussed previously). This principle is typically observed when promotions are rewarded based on an employee’s ability in their current position and provided there is sufficient difference between the two positions. In such circumstances, is there a simple way…

  • The Scientific Journalism Formula

    In a near-perfect parody of science reporting in the popular press, Martin Robbins, The Lay Scientist, created “a news website article about a scientific paper“. In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? […] This…

  • Science Journalism’s Manifesto for the Simple Scribe

    “To make somebody read it”. That is the only reason for writing, according to the renowned Guardian editor Tim Radford, author of the “manifesto for the simple scribe”. This manifesto, previously distributed to editors at Elsevier and Nature, consists of twenty-five writing tips that collectively tell a science writer all they need to know to write…

  • Rhetorical Devices to Incite Timely Applause

    Any delay between the end of a speech and the audience’s applause can send strong negative signals to those watching and listening. In order to prevent this awkwardness, there are rhetorical tricks we can implement that trigger applause or laughter at appropriate moments. Speechwriter and political speech advisor Max Atkinson, in a critique of UK Deputy…

  • Non-Design Skills Needed by Designers

    Like in many other specialised fields, to become a great designer one must master or be acquainted with many non-design skills. User interface designer Aza Raskin — ex-Creative Lead at Firefox and son of Jef — offers up this list of what he believes to be most important to do and master in order to become a designer: The…

  • Login Is Not a Verb

    We do not signup, login or checkout when we buy products online. We do not startup, shutdown or backup our computers. The reason: these words, primarily used in computing contexts, are not verbs. These are just some of the “bad bad verbs” featured on a site dedicated to “informing people about words that are not verbs, even though…

  • Art in 140 Characters

    Is it possible to encode and compress an image to such a degree that the raw data can fit in a single Twitter message (140 characters) that, when decoded again, is still recognisable? The answer to the questions is a resounding Yes, as confirmed by a coding challenge inspired by Mario Klingemann’s attempt to compress…