Letters Remain

  • The Two Words for Tea: “Tea if by sea, cha if by land”

    The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) chapter on Tea tells us that the word you use for ‘tea’ is highly influenced by ancient trade routes. Specifically, whether your country first got tea via the Silk Road (by land, originating from inland China) or from sea imports (by sea, originating from Dutch ports in the coastal province of Fujian).

    The WALS chapter is a bit academic, so I recommend this summary article from Quartz on the origins of ‘tea’ vs ‘cha’.

    With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term […] the other is some variation of cha. […]

    Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Subway Maps of Roman Roads

    Sasha Trubetskoy is a “geography and data nerd” who makes data visualisations and maps. His Roman Roads project styles the Ancient Roman road network as modern transit maps.

    That’s the full Empire, as of ca. 125 AD. Trubetskoy also made similar maps for Britain, Italy, Gaul and Iberia. I recommend clicking through and reading about the process, including how he developed a framework for choosing twenty colours at various levels of contrast and accessibility.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Three Important Response Time Limits

    There are three important response time limits in user interface design, and this has remained constant since 1968, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Those three time limits?

    • 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously […] for users feeling that they are directly manipulating objects […] as opposed to feeling that they are ordering the computer to manipulate objects for them.
    • 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted. […] The limit for users feeling that they are freely navigating the command space without having to unduly wait for the computer. […] Users notice the delay and thus feel the computer is “working” on the command.
    • 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the task. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish. […] More than 10 seconds, and you break the flow.

    Chess, anyone?

    It’s worth also looking at Nielsen’s Powers of 10, detailing further time scales of user interaction. My summary:

    • 1 minute is the limit in which users should be able to complete simple tasks.
    • 10 minutes is a long visit to a website.
    • 1 hour is the limit for completing most web-based tasks.
    • 1 day is the maximum turnaround for (good) customer service and the start of habitual routines.
    • 1 week is another common time frame for habitual routines or complex tasks requiring extensive research.
    • 1 month is the time it might take for business processes, as various people need to be involved in decisions.
    • 1 year is the time it takes for organisational changes to start taking place, and is how long it takes to nurture experienced users (for whom interfaces can be more complex).
    • 10 years is how long it takes deep expertise to develop for a complex system.
    • 100 years is sufficient for complex social changes to take place.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • “If you like to play [computer game], then try [book]”

    If you like to play [computer game], then try [book].

    That’s the simple premise of a post from the imitable Powell’s Books, back in 2018. In Console-free camping, for a bunch of popular computer games, they recommend a book you might like.

    The list, for posterity (non-commission, non-tracking links to Powell’s):

    • If you like playing The Last of Us, then try Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry
    • If you like playing Beyond: Two Souls, then try The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
    • If you like playing Call of Duty: Black Ops (Zombies), then try World War Z by Max Brooks
    • If you like playing Grand Theft Auto, then try American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
    • If you like playing Sid Meier’s Civilization, then try A Game Of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
    • If you like playing Final Fantasy, then try Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa
    • If you like playing Mass Effect, then try Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
    • If you like playing Alice: Madness Returns, then try Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis
    • If you like playing Halo, then try Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein
    • If you like playing Portal, then try House Of Stairs by William Sleator
    • If you like playing Mario Kart, then try The Lovely Reckless by Kami Garcia
    • If you like playing Dark Souls, then try Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake
    • If you like playing Life Is Strange, then try We Are Okay by Nina Lacour
    • If you like playing Stardew Valley, then try How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
    • If you like playing Fable, then try Young Elites by Marie Lu
    • If you like playing Borderlands, then try Velocity by Chris Wooding
    • If you like playing Dishonored, then try Airman by Eoin Colfer
    • If you like playing The Oregon Trail, then try Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee
    • If you like playing the Elder Scrolls series, then try The Naming by Alison Croggon
    • If you like playing Red Dead Redemption, then try Vengeance Road by Erin Bowman
    • If you like playing Bioshock, then try Dark Life by Kat Falls
    • If you like playing Fallout, then try Razorland by Ann Aguirre
    • If you like playing Assasin’s Creed, then try The Way of Shadows Night by Brent Weeks
    • If you like playing Dragonage, then try Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
    • If you like playing The Legend of Zelda, then try Graceling by Kristin Cashore
    • If you like playing Until Dawn, then try Ten by Gretchen McNeil
    • If you like playing Sonic, then try Maximum Ride by James Patterson
    • If you like playing Overwatch, then try Bluescreen by Dan Wells
    • If you like playing Uncharted, then try Passenger by Alexandra Bracken
    • If you like playing Pokemon, then try Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them by JK Rowling, and Newt Scamander
    • If you like playing Mario Party, then try Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Intentional Delays in Apple Chess (so you don’t feel so bad)

    The source code for Apple Chess reveals the intentional inclusion of a time delay in the computer making its moves. As a comment in the source explains:

    //
// Paradoxically enough, moving as quickly as possible is 
// not necessarily desirable. Users tend to get frustrated 
// once they realize how little time their Mac really spends 
// to crush them at low levels. In the interest of promoting 
// harmonious Human - Machine relations, we enforce minimum
// response times.
//
const NSTimeInterval kInteractiveDelay	= 2.0;
const NSTimeInterval kAutomaticDelay	= 4.0;

    Taking a rudimentary look at the code, it looks like kInteractiveDelay is for computer-human game modes (so an intentional delay to make us feel better), while kAutomaticDelay is for computer-computer game modes (so a delay likely there to give us some time to process the moves).

    From my own experience, it is pretty demoralising to get absolutely crushed at chess by a computer taking only a few milliseconds to decide each move!

    via @bazscott

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Paper Aeroplanes for Young and Old

    Being a father to two six-year-olds means that I spend a not-insignificant amount of time folding and colouring paper. Paper aeroplanes are an infrequent but not unusual sight in the house.

    For those times, Fold ‘N Fly is my go-to website, offering “a database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials and printable folding plans”. My go-to design: The Buzz.

    When researching material options (paper vs card), I came across the following on the paper plane Wikipedia entry:

    Unlike balsa gliders, paper gliders have a far higher strength-to-thickness ratio: a sheet of office-quality 80 g/m2 photocopier/­laser printer paper, for example, has approximate in-scale strength of aircraft-grade aluminium sheet metal, while card stock approx­imates the properties of steel at the scale of paper model aircraft.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Perceptions of Probability and Numbers

    Back in 2011 I wrote about “words of estimative probability“; the quantitative ranges we apply to ambiguous words and phrases, based on Sherman Kent’s research for the CIA in the 1960s.

    In 2015, Reddit user zonination duplicated the study using /r/samplesize. His resulting post in /r/dataisbeautiful made the longlist for the 2015 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards:

    They have since updated their diagrams to beautiful ridgeline / joy plots, making the data fantastically easy to understand (and much more shareable to those not used to reading statistical plots):

    Full information on the data and visualisation process is on zonination’s Github.

    In 2021, the research was repeated in my home country (the Netherlands), with Sanne Williams, a researcher from Leiden University, publishing the following for the Dutch language equivalent:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The (Edited) Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

    On March 20, 2022, the New York Times published a 14,000-word puff piece on cryptocurrencies, both online and as an entire section of the Sunday print edition. Though its author, Kevin Roose, wrote that it aimed to be a “sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is“, it was a thinly-veiled advertisement for cryptocurrency that appeared to have received little in the way of fact-checking or critical editorial scrutiny. It uncritically repeated many questionable or entirely fallacious arguments from cryptocurrency advocates, and it appears that no experts on the topic were consulted, or even anyone with a less-than-rosy view on crypto. This is grossly irresponsible.

    So begins The (Edited) Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto, a version of that article, annotated inline by fifteen crypto researchers and critics.

    Led by (?) Molly White (of Web3 is Going Just Great and @web3isgreat), the article is not only required reading on the topic, it also showcases a great way to provide inline commentary on articles.

    As it relates to NFTs, the above applies to Dan Olson’s Line Goes Up, too.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Cooking for Engineers, Geeks, and the Impatient

    The vast majority of new and original cooking content feels like it comes from YouTube, with few original developments happening on independent sites (although I’ll happily be corrected here, as Wadsworth Constant certainly applies to the vast majority of cooking videos, too). Meanwhile, the long-running joke of a rambling, sombre life story complementing a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe is as true today as it ever has been.

    based.cooking is a direct response. Taking a minimalist, straightforward approach, recipes can be contributed via Github (although I believe the project may be abandoned). Great for the impatient recipe seeker, if your recipe happens to be there.

    Cooking for Engineers is another (long dormant) site that does something inventive. While the recipes are nothing to write home about, I can’t get over this brilliant style of presenting recipe ingredients and instructions:

    I’ll certainly adopt this for my big Christmas cooking spreadsheet.1

    The site also reminded me of Cooking for Geeks: a pretty fun and accessible book that you can think of as a fun beginners version of McGee’s On Food on Cooking.

    1 To complement my Gantt-style planning charts:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Side-by-Side Car Comparisons

    Car Sized is a simple web app that lets you compare car dimensions and designs from a street perspective. Front, back and side by side.

    As a frequent car renter, this site’s been incredibly useful for my last few holidays. It’s also just fun to do some comparisons, like this Ford F-150 against my last city-run rental, the Citroën C1.

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    Lloyd Morgan