Letters Remain

  • Our Fascination with Cookbooks

    Cookbooks are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cooking while hiding that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduction of the sauce.

    That wonderful proposition comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fascination with cookbooks, and how they are used in our homes.

    The first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between […] are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? […]

    Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of [Mark Bittman’s] approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? […]

    [Conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s] much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles.

    My ideal cookbook: one that explains why certain recipes work. Not a book on ‘grammar’, but a science book mixed with art.

    And one final quote:

    In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dressup, we always end up making.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Neuroscience of Comedy

    There is one essential condition required in comedy: “some kind of incongruity between two elements […], resolved in a playful or unexpected way”.

    That’s according to a fairly comprehensive article summarising the neuroscience research conducted to discover more about the phenomenon of why we find things funny (or not).

    Of particular interest was how we react differently to certain types of jokes depending on our sex and on our personality type:

    • Women use more language-based decoding than men–this takes longer.
    • Extroverts receive greater neural rewards from comedy than neurotics.
    • ‘Experience seekers’ react to specific types of comedy more than others: they prefer ‘nonsense’ jokes to resolvable jokes (the latter is technically called “incongruity-resolution humour”).

    The crux: a joke’s content seems to be secondary to how it is solved (neurologically speaking) if you’re targeting a certain audience:

    Although you might expect the subject matter – music or politics, for example – to determine joke preference, [researcher Andrea Samson] found that it is the way a joke is solved that is most important. “The logic by which the incongruity is resolved matters most, in terms of what kind of person a joke appeals to,” she says.

    via Arts and Letter Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Comedic Writing Tips

    There are six essential elements of humour, suggests Dilbert‘s Scott Adams, as he looks briefly at how to write comedy:

    • Pick a Topic: The topic does half of your work. I look for topics that have at least one of the essential elements of humor: Clever, Cute, Bizarre, Cruel, Naughty, Recognizable.
    • Simple Sentences: Be smart, but not academic. Prune words that don’t make a difference.
    • Write About People: If you must write about an object or a concept, focus on how someone (usually you) thinks or feels or experiences those things. Humor is about people, period.
    • Write Visually: Paint a funny picture with your words, but leave out any details that don’t serve the humor.
    • Leave Room for Imagination: Leaving out details allows readers to fill them in with whatever image strikes them as funniest. In effect, you let readers direct their own funny movie.
    • Funny Words: Funny words are the ones that are familiar yet rarely used in conversation. It’s a bonus when those words have funny sounds to them.
    • Pop Culture References: References to popular culture often add humor.
    • Animal analogies: Animal references are funny. If you can’t think of anything funny, make some sort of animal/creature analogy. It’s easy, and it almost always works.
    • Exaggerate, then Exaggerate Some More: Figure out what’s the worst that could happen with your topic, then multiple it by ten or more. […] The bigger the exaggeration, the funnier it is.
    • Near Logic: Humor is about creating logic that a-a-a-lmost makes sense but doesn’t. No one in the real world could put gum on his penis and retrieve an iPod from a storm drain. But your brain allows you to imagine that working, while simultaneously knowing it can’t. That incongruity launches the laugh reflex.
    • Callback: A callback is when you end with a funny reference that already got a laugh. It puts a nice period on your humor writing.

    I wonder how much of this applies to speaking, too?

    via Ben Casnocha

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Benefits of Side Projects

    The creation of 3M’s Scotch Tape, the Declaration of Independence and Metallica: just three of the stories Ben Casnocha retells to show the importance of innovation through side projects.

    Is giving away a day a week of your employees’ time worth it? Google executives seem to think so. They cite first the enormous goodwill generated internally: “20-percent time sends a strong message of trust to the engineers,” says Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products and user experience. Then there is the actual product output which of late includes Google Suggest (auto-filled queries) and Orkut (a social network). In a speech a couple of years ago, Mayer said about 50 percent of new Google products got their start in 20 percent time.

    Jack Hipple, a consultant who works with companies on innovation, says corporate support for employees’ natural curiosity can lead to better new product ideas than traditional focus groups: “You have to have some vehicle for side-project time because senior managers or customers don’t know enough about the future to know what’s coming.”

    Casnocha notes that not all companies can offer side-project time, especially startups:

    There are too many essential tasks that need to get done simply to survive.

    Tom Kinnear, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at the University of Michigan, says Google and 3M both could support experimenting after their core products became profitable: “At the outset there are such tight margins it’s hard to allow for side projects. The pressure from your investors to focus, focus, focus is just overwhelming.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Personal R&D

    Many successful companies run expansive research and development departments, allowing them to enhance their capabilities and discover and exploit the new opportunities this speculative research often brings.

    Josh Kaufman suggests that we create our own personal R&D budgets–akin to those of corporations–for our personal development:

    What would it look like if you set aside 10-20% of your monthly income as a personal R&D budget? […] That money can then be used – guilt-free – in any way related to improving your skills and capabilities: purchasing books, taking courses, acquiring equipment, or attending conferences.

    Personal finance gurus might disagree with me here, but I think having a robust personal R&D budget is more important than maximizing savings. I’m all for having a well-funded emergency account and saving a minimum of 10-20% of what you earn each month, but savings can only get you so far. Investments in improving your personal skills and capabilities can simultaneously enrich your life and open doors to additional income sources. New skills create new opportunities, and new opportunities often translate into more income. Your ability to save is limited; your ability to earn is not.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky

    In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck.

    Wiseman states that the lucky “generate good fortune via four basic principles”:

    • Creating and noticing chance opportunities.
    • Making lucky decisions by listening to their intuition.
    • Creating self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations.
    • Adopting a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

    And by realising this and following three simple techniques, you can improve your luck:

    1. Follow your intuition and respect hunches in decision making.
    2. Introduce variety into your life.
    3. See the positive side of misfortune: imagine how things could be worse.

    Of the people that followed this advice, 80% identified improvements to their luck and overall happiness.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • When (and When Not) to Consider Venture Capital

    On discussing why he and his co-founders are seeking venture capital funding for their programming question and answer site (StackOverflow), Joel Spolsky provides a number of scenarios for when a company should give consideration to VC funding:

    1. There’s a land grab going on.
    2. There is a provable concept that’s repeatable.
    3. The business could benefit from the publicity of getting an investment from someone who is thought of as being a savvy investor.
    4. The investor will add substantial value to the business in advice, connections, and introductions.
    5. The business can potentially have a big exit or become a large, publically traded company.
    6. The founders are happy to give up some control to make the business more successful.

    And when a company should not consider it:

    1. The founders are risk-averse and are willing to trade a much smaller payout for lower risk.
    2. The founders are technical without substantial business experience and wish to maintain absolute control forever.
    3. If the investor is mostly “dumb money.”
    4. If you’re going into an established field with a lot of competition.
    5. If the product is immature and unproven.
    6. If the founders don’t have enough of the right kinds of industry connections, or the idea is not compelling enough, so that raising VC would take months or years
    7. If there is any other way to raise the kind of money you need.

    A number of pieces have been written disagreeing with Spolsky’s article, suggesting that either StackOverflow does not fit these criteria or that the reasoning is just plain wrong. 37signals’ post covers both.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Icon-Based Business Plans

    Depending on who you listen to, a business plan is either a waste of your time or an essential document. A good compromise could be Peter Hilton’s idea to create a concise, icon-based business plan visualisation:

    Inspired by the simplicity and success of the Creative Commons icons, which condense pages of information that no one ever reads into an easily-understandable symbol accompanied by a sentence of text, Peter proposes to apply that exact same logic to business plans. In reality many submitted business plans are simply not read by investors – they are too long, too boring, or too convoluted. Naturally, the entrepreneurs who write them want to go into as much detail as possible in their plans while the investors that read them just want to see the very core points.

    In his talk presenting the idea (pdf, local mirror), Hilton proposes a series of icon-description pairs for a number of business plan sections:

    • About the team (e.g. We can build the product – our CTO is a genius).
    • The idea (e.g. We plan to execute a proven concept).
    • The product or service (e.g. We have a demo or prototype).
    • Revenue models (e.g. We plan to monetise our service later on).
    • Funding (e.g. We need series A funding).
    • Partnerships (e.g. We need an investor with a business network).
    • Return on investment (e.g. We have a cash-flow prognosis).

    The idea was apparently not intended to be taken seriously, but it seems to solve a problem.

    Update: Hilton’s now created the Plan Cruncher.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Nature Improves Attention

    When studying complex tasks, taking a moment away from the problem is a proven way to refocus one’s thoughts.

    How different surroundings affect this “attention restoration” has now been studied and it has been discovered that the more complex a problem, the more a natural (non-urban) scene benefits our focus and study–whether this natural scene is real (e.g. a walk in a park) or not (e.g. landscape photographs) doesn’t matter.

    In a second experiment, students did both a backwards digit-span and a second, visual attention task. Instead of going for a walk between tests, they viewed pictures of natural scenes or urban scenes. Once again, scores improved significantly more on the digit-span task after viewing natural scenes compared to urban scenes. On the visual attention task, the students were only better at the task in certain cases. For very simple tasks with few distractors, there was no difference between the students seeing natural or urban scenes. But for more complex tasks requiring more focused attention, again the students who had seen the natural scenes did better.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Sleep and Weight Loss

    While asleep our metabolic rate increases such that we lose more than three times the amount of weight than if we are awake (awake but lying dormant, of course): 1.9g/min compared to 0.6g/min.

    This increase in ‘caloric expenditure’ is not yet fully understood, but there are a number of reasons why we may lose more weight while asleep than awake:

    We know that in rapid eye sleep (REM), in which we spend roughly 25% of our total sleep time, the brain’s metabolic rate (the rate at which it consumes energy) is very high, even more than while awake. And while one’s body temperature drops while sleeping, during REM it increases, and this too may cause increased caloric expenditure.

    This is in addition to “changes in the hormones which govern hunger and satiety, leptin and ghrelin”.

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    Lloyd Morgan