Letters Remain

  • Fiction-Writing Rules, from Fiction Writers

    Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s lauded book of the same name, Ten Rules of Writing, The Guardian asks a selection of 28 authors (from Margaret Atwood to Will Self) for their ten rules of writing for the aspiring fiction author (part two).

    Elmore Leonard’s ten are included, and he summarises them with the following:

    My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

    The article’s been mentioned in a few places, being discussed at length by Intelligent Life and Salon (the latter adding five of their own rules).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Social Networks and Their Far-Reaching Influence

    In a short and balanced review of Connected–“a scientific look at the ties that bind us together”–we are treated to some interesting findings on social networks and their myriad external effects–including how far these effects ‘travel’ through said networks.

    Controlling for environmental factors and the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together […] Christakis and Fowler found that we really do emulate those we care about, whether we mean to or not. Being connected to a happy person, for instance, makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy yourself. “And the spread of happiness doesn’t stop there,” they note. It radiates out for three degrees of separation, so that, say, your sister’s best friend’s husband’s mood exerts a greater influence on your personal happiness than an extra $10,000 in income would. If he gains 50 pounds, it will be that much harder for you to stay slim, as the frame of reference for what’s “normal” changes through your network. Or, on the positive side, if he quits smoking, your chances of kicking the habit improve, too, even if you’ve never met him. […]

    Public health workers can more effectively stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases if they know what kind of network they’re dealing with: a hub and spoke (e.g., a prostitute with many clients) or a more transitive “ring” network where people have few partners, but many of these partners overlap (which could happen at a small high school). On another front, they point out that voting makes little sense for an individual—one vote never decides an election—but is far more rational in a network context. As with happiness and obesity, the decision to vote has repercussions through three degrees of connections. […] Since liberals and conservatives tend to form their own social networks, this means that your decision to vote can increase the likelihood of hundreds of other people voting for the same candidate.

    I do wonder if these degrees of separation that exert influence on us fluctuate with the size of each ‘degree’?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Things Every Programmer Should Know (Languages)

    As part of a continuing series*, O’Reilly requested “pearls of wisdom for programmers” from leading practitioners of the craft, publishing the responses. The end result is the O’Reilly Commons wiki, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.

    The contributions that appear in the final, published book are freely available as are sixty-eight further contributions that didn’t make it.

    This from Don’t Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture:

    Realizing how interwoven foreign words and phrases gave [James Joyce] new ways of expressing himself is something I’ve kept with me in my programming career.

    In their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas encourage us to learn a new programming language every year. I’ve tried to live by their advice and throughout the years I’ve had the experience of programming in many languages. My most important lesson from my polyglot adventures is that it takes more than just learning the syntax to learn a language: You need to understand its culture. 
[…]

    Once you’ve learned the ropes of a new language, you’ll be surprised how you’ll start using languages you already know in new ways.

    Some might argue that Finnegans Wake is unreadable, while others applaud it for its stylistic beauty. To make the book a less daunting read, single language translations are available. Ironically, the first of these was in French. 
Code is in many ways similar. If you write Wakese code with a little Python, some Java, and a hint of Erlang, your projects will be a mess. If you instead explore new languages to expand your mind and get fresh ideas on how you can solve things in different ways, you will find that the code you write in your trusty old language gets more beautiful for every new language you’ve learned.

    I guess another could be Don’t Rush?

    *Other books in the series (full-content wikis): 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Making Applications Viral, Without Spam

    Virality isn’t an indispensable feature of all successful applications, but for those where it can be hugely beneficial there are four core principles that help the virality of an application, says Daniel Tanner:

    • Invitation should be a core process, that is essential to using the application – this will maximise the chances that your users do invite new users.
    • Keep pulling people back in, rather than letting them forget you after the initial invitation, and make this “reminder” process also be central to the use of the application.
    • Be useful even to the lone user, because that lone user is the source of all your other users.
    • Remove artificial invitation limits, to recognise the reality that most invitations come from a few very active users, and help those users spread the word.

    Tenner also notes–in passing–the concept of the viral loop. Andrew Chen’s take on the loop is the best I’ve read on the topic.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Long-Term Thinking and Climate Change

    One of the reasons the general public are slow in acting on climate change in the manner the situation’s importance demands is our reluctance to think too far beyond our immediate time horizon. However this shouldn’t stop us.

    That is the suggestion of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term thinking more eloquently than I’ve heard before:

    “As in politics,” he says, “the immediate trumps the important.” Our future-blindness may reflect a basic limitation of the brain. “In so far as brains evolved to cope with everyday life on the savannah, they evolved in a context where you didn’t plan 50 years ahead and you cared about your local community. Although…” A pause. A sip of tea. “Although, it’s odd—I gave a talk at Ely cathedral not long ago. The people who built the cathedral had a limited view of the world. Their world was the fens, and they thought it would end quite soon, but nevertheless built this wonderful structure which is part of our heritage 1,000 years later. And it’s shameful in a way that we, with our longer horizons and greater resources, are reluctant to think 50 years ahead.”

    via The Browser

    Note: The full article is behind a pay wall. The above quote and the context thereof is available.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Taxes (Not Subsidies) Control Calorie Intake

    It’s not surprising to discover that in an experiment looking at how taxes and subsidies can be used to influence healthier food purchases it was the taxing of unhealthy food that improved choices, not the subsidisation of healthy options.

    Strangely, though, it turns out that the health food subsidies actually worsened choices (the study theorises that the shoppers used the ‘saved’ money to treat themselves, while still purchasing the unhealthy goods).

    Taxes were more effective in reducing calories purchased over subsides. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calories purchased, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbohydrates and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week’s groceries.

    By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food actually increased overall calories purchased without changing the nutritional value at all. It appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to less healthy alternatives, such as chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from less healthy to healthier choices.

    via Nudge

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Political Rhetoric and Speechwriter ‘Tricks’

    How the art of political rhetoric is regarded differently in Britain and America:

    In the US, the act of speechwriting has gained an almost mythical status. As keepers of the president’s words, the speechwriters are at the centre of government and are objects of fascination. It is a little different in Westminster. There are no “speechwriting offices”. There is no official Downing Street speechwriting team. […] There is none of the collaboration and, as a result, little of the powerful effect. […]

    Today, says [historian Simon Schama], it is “highly allergic in our British culture to be extravagantly rhetorical”. To turn a fine phrase suggests duplicity.

    As the article later states, when it was discovered that Gordon Brown employed the services of speechwriters for an address to Congress in 2009:

    The money – indeed, the very existence of such a service – appeared to come as a shock to us in Britain. It exposed the stark differences between the two countries’ oratorical cultures. In Washington, speechwriting is a professional undertaking; the speechwriter is a known quantity. Here, the idea that time or money has been spent crafting a politician’s presentation arouses suspicion. The realisation that the words are not his own only adds to the sense that they are false.

    The article suggests there are three speeches worth remembering in contemporary British politics (Robin Cook’s 2003 Cabinet resignation on the eve of the Iraq war, Tony Blair’s 1999 speech on humanitarian intervention and David Cameron’s 2005 Conservative Party leadership pitch) and begins with some succinct speechwriting ‘tricks’:

    Verbal tricks that make a speech fly: contradictions (Blair: “September 11 was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue”), opposites (Napoleon: “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is for ever”), phrase reversals (Obama: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America”).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Accents and Second Language Comprehension

    When teaching a second language, it may be better to speak in the accent of the student’s first language rather than attempting to imitate the accent of the target language, suggests research looking at how accents may hinder or expedite language learning and comprehension.

    The study that discovered this looked at how much aural information speakers of various fluencies and from a variety of ethnic backgrounds required in order to understand Hebrew presented to them in different accents:

    The findings show that there is no difference in the amount of phonological information that the native Hebrew speakers need in order to decipher the words, regardless of accent. With the Russian and Arabic speakers, on the other hand, less phonological information was needed in order to recognize the Hebrew word when it was pronounced in the accent of their native language than when they heard it in the accent of another language.

    So it seems that British football manager Steve McLaren was helping English learners when he gave his infamous interview in the Netherlands following his move there!

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Benefits of Touching

    ‘Touchier’ basketball teams and players (those who bump, hug and high five the most) are more successful than those who limit their non-playing physical contact. Similarly, higher satisfaction has been reported in romantic relationships in which the partners touch more.

    Just two of the findings from research looking at the importance of touching in relationships.

    Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. […] A massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.

    via @charliehoehn

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Rise of Cooking Shows, the Fall of Cooking (and Happiness)

    I almost ignored this bit-too-long piece on the rise of the TV cooking show and the simultaneous fall of the home cooked meal (via @borrodell).

    That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

    But combined with this short article discussing the joys a cooking show brought to one family, and the myriad benefits it brought to their children, I felt they were perfect complements.

    A funny thing happened on the way through the cooking show obsession. What we were seeing on the screen began trickling into our kitchen. The kids suddenly perked up during our weekly visits to the local farmers’ market, insisting on checking out exotic fruits and vegetables and, even better, buying, preparing, and eating them. […]

    What are they learning? How do I count the ways? Fine motor skills from chopping garlic. Multi-tasking from sautéing vegetables in olive oil. (Case in point is their startling realization that you can’t just leave a saucepan unattended; this skill requires the need to overcome any tendencies for ADD.) They’ve honed their organization and math skills, practiced quick thinking, and stretched to develop some original ideas. […] And, best of all, my kids are actually eating and enjoying copious vegetables and a variety of other healthful and exotic foods.

    The latter article also notes that a strong negative correlation has been found between the amount of television watched and happiness. This does not surprise me.

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    Lloyd Morgan