Author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, offers us advice on How to Write With Style:
- Find a subject you care about
- Do not ramble, though
- Keep it simple
- Have guts to cut
- Sound like yourself
- Say what you mean
- Pity the readers
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Kurt Vonnegut: Advice to Writers
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52 Proven Stress Reducers
I’m always a bit wary when I see a list such as this, but these 52 Proven Stress Reducers are all worth reading. Common sense, of course, but it’s always nice to be reminded.
Get up fifteen minutes earlier in the morning. The inevitable morning mishaps will be less stressful.
Prepare for the morning the evening before. Set the breakfast table. Make lunches. Put out the clothes you plan to wear, etc.
Do nothing you have to lie about later.
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Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology
For an amusing take on the A-Z of psychology, Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology is close at hand.
Meme: The idea that since ideas reproduce metaphorically like genes, that they must reproduce actually like genes. Thus because ideas spread like the plague, tunes are infectious, and advertising phrases are catchy, this must mean that ideas are selected by the same evolutionary processes that make for feet, eyeballs, and a tendency to accept nonsense such as this. (see evolutionary psychology)
Similar, and worth a read: The Devil’s Dictionary.
via Mind Hacks
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Guide to Road Trip Photography
I’ve thought before on how to document a road trip: it’s a tricky area with no perfect solution. Photojojo’s Ultimate Guide to Road Trip Photography has thrown a few more ideas into the mix. I like this suggestion:
Make Your Own Postcards – Before you head out, read our tutorial on three easy ways to make post cards or stock up on some mailable photo frames. Throughout your route, stop by the nearest drug store chain, pop in your memory card and print out some home-made memorabilia to send back home.
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Food, Wonderful Food (Cooking Resources)
Recipes and Tips for Healthy, Thrifty Meals (pdf) is n ebook created by the US Department of Agriculture’s Centre for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. It contains a wealth of information including: best buys for cost and nutrition; some nice, simple recipes; and food lists for two weeks worth of meals.
If you don’t have all the necessary ingredients, head over to The Cook’s Thesaurus to see if something else you have would make a suitable replacement.
If you have ingredients but no clue what they can produce, Cooking by Numbers allows you to input what you do have, and will tell you what you can make from it, and how.
Once you know what you’re making, this simple list of Cooking Conversions will come in handy translating those pesky American measurements into British units, or vice-versa.
Also useful is the Encyclopaedia of Spices, Ingredients Guide, and these Cooking Tips.
Cook for Good is a site that provides recipes and menus for healthy, thrifty meals that “use less energy and create less waste”. The Hillbilly Housewife is supposed to be a good resource too, but I haven’t had the time to have a browse.
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Mental Math and Memory Techniques at the Mentat Wiki
In the novel Dune, ‘Mentats’ are humans trained to mimic computers: human minds developed to staggering heights of cognitive and analytical ability.
With this in mind, you may be able to guess what’s in store at the Mentat Wiki, which calls itself “a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker”:
‘Mental Math’ teaches you how to cube and cube-root numbers in your head (and fifth roots), while one memory technique presented teaches you to hold a perpetual calendar in your head (what day did/will a certain date fall on?).
Certainly gets those brain cells working again.
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Joel on Bill Gates’ Software
Bill Gates is undeniably one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. He is also one of the most derided due to the poor usability of many Microsoft applications. The following article and this email are going a long way in repairing Gates’ image. Joel “on Software” Spolsky on his time at Microsoft:
Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.
Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.
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The Best of Neurophilosophy
The Best of Neurophilosophy is a roundup of the best posts from the blog of the same name.
Posts highlighted include those on brainwashing, prefrontal lobotomies, trepanation,and the psychology of Alfred Hitchcock.
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2008 Penguin Design Award
The 2008 Penguin Design Award results are out and all of the designs are outstanding.
Choice quotes from The Penguin Blog:
‘Good design costs no more than bad design’, said Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane.
Something in the way visual communication courses are structured and delivered has fundamentally changed. We’re seeing a certain type of student […] shrewder and far more professional.
Perhaps, like our award, the art student has come of age. I’m nevertheless recommending Goncharov’s Oblomov as one of the options on next year’s brief – another kind of hero for a different kind of student.
via kottke
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Books That Changed Your Life
Lifehacker picked up on Kevin Kelly’s book list (one of the lists I wrote about here) and subsequently asked its readership what books changed their lives. The results were duly compiled in The Books That Changed Your Life. The top ten:
- The Bible
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig)
- Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
- The Stranger (Albert Camus)
- 1984 (George Orwell)
- The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
- Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)