Letters Remain

Month: July 2011

  • The Brain on Food: Everyday Chemicals

    Regarding all the foods that we consume as a drugs is a wondrous way to examine and comprehend the complex interactions and subtle forces behind how everything we put in our mouths affects “how our neurons behave and, subsequently, how we think and feel”. In a compelling article that suggests our shared evolutionary history with the plants…

  • Advantages of Internet Friendships

    The methods through which we create and maintain relationships are constantly changing, with recent decades boosting the move from a purely location-based model to one where relationships can spawn and develop remotely, thanks to the Internet (and, to a lesser degree, the telephone and mail systems). However, while this new way of creating and maintaining…

  • Micromorts and Understanding the Probability of Death

    Understanding probabilities is hard (viz.) — and it’s especially so when we try to understand and take rational decisions based on very small probabilities, such as one-in-a million chance events. How, then, to communicate risks on a similar level, too? The answer is to use a more understandable scale, such as micromorts; “a unit of…

  • The Drinkers’ Bonus: Alcohol Intake and Increased Earnings

    Drinking alcohol — and the increased social capital that it leads to — may not just be responsible for a possible increase in life span; it may increase your earnings, too. In an analysis of both the General Social Survey and the published literature, researchers for the Reason Foundation show that alcohol drinkers earn, on…

  • Drinking Levels and Mortality Rates

    Despite the various and severe health risks that come with drinking, abstaining from alcohol appears to increase your risk of dying prematurely. The reasons for this are not clearly known, but it is thought to be because drinkers are more likely to belong to a community (albeit one that drinks), and a feeling of community is…

  • Writing Tools, Not Rules, for Better Writing

    “Tools not rules” are what’s needed to teach good writing, says The Poynter Institute’s vice president Roy Peter Clark in Writing Tools — his acclaimed book compiling fifty of his favourites. To accompany this book, Clark released his fifty writing tools to improve your writing on his blog, and here are some of my favourites:…

  • Writing Tips from Annual Reports

    Proving that good writing can be found anywhere, writer Nancy Friedman points to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s annual reports as examples of excellent copywriting. I cannot but agree. Friedman submits that we can learn to write better copy by studying Warren Buffett’s annual reports, offering these six tips, highlighted after studying his annuals: Tell…