Letters Remain

  • Mister Rogers’ Nine Rules for Talking to Children

    Having not grown up in the US, I only became aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as an adult. However, this is entirely due to Fred Rogers himself: his kindness, his humanity, and his ability to draw children into his safe world.

    In the lead-up to the publishing of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, author Maxwell King wrote about Fred Rogers’ careful and deliberate way of speaking to children on his show.

    This included Rogers’ way of closely analysing each word on the show to avoid confusing or misleading children, and adjusting scripts to make the show more clear and reassuring. It’s clear that Rogers had an extraordinary understanding of how children make sense of language and the world. He was respectful, compassionate, and kind.

    Two writers on the show dubbed Rogers’ way of speaking as “Freddish” and developed a pamphlet with nine steps for communicating like Rogers:

    1. “State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street. ​​​​​​
    2. “Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.
    3. “Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.”
    4. “Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example, that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.
    5. “Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.
    6. “Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.
    7. “Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.
    8. “Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.
    9. “Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.
    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Big History: A History Course Covering 13.8 Billion Years

    Big History is an academic course covering “our complete 13.8 billion years of shared history”. From the Big Bang to modern-day society, the course is structured around eight “threshold” moments of increasing complexity, synthesising aspects of cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, and anthropology to weave a unified story of history so far. The eight thresholds:

    1. The Universe
    2. The First Stars
    3. The Chemical Elements
    4. The Earth and the Solar System
    5. Life
    6. The Paleolithic Era
    7. The Agrarian Era
    8. The Modern Era

    I first heard of Big History when I read that it was Bill Gates’ favourite academic course of all time. Like Gates, I followed the course from The Great Courses / Wondrium: Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. I recently restudied the course and it’s still an incredible resource that I would recommend to anyone.

    David Christian is considered the the ‘father’ of Big History, having started teaching a course on the topic back in 1989 (he’s also the presenter of the course above). You can watch Christian’s 2011 TED Talk, providing “the history of our world in 18 minutes”, to get an idea of the course content.

    If you’re interested in taking the course, there are now some great free options available, if you don’t want to take the ‘original’ version, including:

    In 2018, Christian also published Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, if you prefer.

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Scientific 7-Minute Bodyweight Workout

    Back in 2013, Scientists from the Human Performance Institute published an article in the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal titled, High-intensity circuit training using body weight.

    To address the limitations of traditional exercise protocols, … one of the exercise strategies we use is high-intensity circuit training (HICT) using body weight as resistance. Our approach combines aerobic and resistance training into a single exercise bout lasting approximately 7 minutes.

    Exercises in an HICT circuit should be placed in an order that allows for opposing muscle groups to alternate between resting and working in subsequent exercise stations. … If a particular exercise creates a significant increase in heart rate or intensity demand (usually dynamic exercises incorporating the lower body or whole body), the next exercise functions to decrease heart rate or intensity slightly.

    The published article is extremely readable and so I recommend reading it in full to understand the benefits of this regimen.

    The New York Times picked-up on the publication, and in 2014 popularised this Scientific 7-Minute Workout, expanding it with an Advanced 7-Minute Workout and a handy workout web app that you can use as a companion during your exercise.

    The original scientific 7-minute workout.
    Advanced 7-minute workout
    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Stretch 15: Daily Dose of Stretching Exercises

    Stretch 15 is a straight-forward web app designed to get you stretching more. You just indicate whether you’re in the office or at home, and it gives you a timer and indicates which stretches to do, when. The site tracks your total stretch time and your daily stretch ‘streak’, if you’re into that type of tracking.

    A good complement is Workout.lol, which is a similarly no-nonsense web app where you select your equipment (bodyweight, bench, band, etc.) and which muscles you want to work. You’re then presented with a routine and videos, based on data from MuscleWiki.

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Italian food and the ‘Invented Designation of Origin’

    Alberto Grandi is an Italian academic and food expert. He’s also, unsurprisingly, an oft maligned and despised figure across Italy. This is because Grandi exposes the myths surrounding Italy’s famous culinary traditions. From panettone’s industrial invention to carbonara’s American roots, and why if you want “real” Parmesan you should head to Wisconsin.

    In an interview with FT columnist Marianna Giusti, Grandi challenges the notion of “tradition” in Italian food, expanding on his mission to reveal the origins of cherished dishes and how they’ve been influenced by mass migration, cultural shifts, and ugly politics.

    “It’s all about identity, […] When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths.” Grandi says. From about 1958 to 1963 … “Italians who’d had their bread rationed were living in abundance. This level of prosperity was completely unforeseen, and to them at the time it seemed endless.” The nation needed an identity to help it forget its past struggles, while those who had emigrated to America needed myths that would dignify their humble origins.

    The ‘Invented Designation of Origin’ in the title is a play on the protected designation of origin (PDO) label, and the title of Grandi’s Italian-language book and podcast on this topic.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Congestion Tolling at the Supermarket

    To help explain why toll lanes might not be the great solution to traffic congestion many believe them to be, Timothy Lee goes to an unexpected place to draw parallels: your local supermarket.

    Supermarkets are a good analogy, suggests Lee, because they operate in a free market, are ruthlessly efficient, intensely competitive, and employ ‘lanes’ (checkout queues)… but they don’t use congestion pricing. The reasons why they don’t, he says, can also be applied to traffic congestion:

    First, we have strong and sophisticated social norms, cultivated since we were young children, for waiting in lines. This bit of self-organization is extremely important for the smooth functioning of civil society. We see waiting your turn as an obligation we have to one another, and therefore not as an obligation that a supermarket or transportation agency can waive in exchange for a cash payment. I suspect customers would see people using a tolled checkout lane as breaking an implicit social contract.

    More importantly, customers would be suspicious that the supermarket was deliberately under-staffing the free lanes to gin up demand for the express ones. […] In the low-margin grocery business, it would be a pretty effective way for a manager to pump up his short-term profits, while the long-term harm to the store’s reputation would be hard […] to quantify.

    This latter concern seems particularly relevant to the case of toll roads. The revenue-maximizing pricing schedule is not the same as the congestion-minimizing schedule. An effective congestion-pricing scheme might generate relatively little revenue if people shift their driving to off-peak times (which is the whole point). The operator of a monopolistic toll road will face a constant temptation to boost revenues by limiting throughput on free lanes and jacking up the off-peak toll rates. The widespread voter perception that they’ve “already paid for” many tolled roads through other taxes isn’t exactly right as a matter of fiscal policy, but I think it’s based on a sound intuition: there’s no reason to think the political process will set tolls in a way that’s either fair or economically efficient.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Statistics on Link Rot

    By sampling 4,200 random URLs spanning a 14 year period, Maciej Cegłowski, the creator of bookmarking website Pinboard.in, decided to gather statistics on the extent of link rot and how it progressed across time. Interested in finding out if there is some sort of ‘half life of links’, he found instead that it is a fairly linear, fast deterioration:

    Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don’t have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years.

    And even that is an optimistic result, says Maciej, as not all dead links were able to be discovered programmatically. There are also several unanswered questions:

    • How many of these dead URLs are findable on archive.org?
    • What is the attrition rate for shortened links?
    • Is there a simple programmatic way to detect parked domains?
    • Given just a URL, can we make any intelligent guesses about its vulnerability to  link rot?

    Interestingly, link rot is what inspired the creation of Pinboard.in (it features page archiving funcitonality). This is similar to why I started Lone Gunman: I was losing track of interesting links and articles, and wanted a way to easily find them again as well as help me build connections between disparate articles and topics.

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Tips and Rules: An Economist’s Take on Eating Out

    When it comes to finding, ordering, and eating at ethnic restaurants there’s only one place to look for advice: economist Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide. I’ve mentioned Cowen’s guide before (if only in passing), but it’s time I dedicated a post to this treasure trove of dining advice and, especially, the tips from Cowen’s General Remarks.

    From an article in The Washington Post, four strategies for finding good restaurants and ordering well (click through for details):

    1. For good value, avoid high-rent areas (those will be expensive or chains).
    2. Look for competition (possibly a sign of a large immigrant population, providing expertise).
    3. Know how to order ‘strategically’  from waiters.
    4. Be aware of the restaurant cycle (from opening, to accolades, to mass production).

    Four rules-of-thumb for choosing from the menu (be aware of the exceptions):

    1. Avoid “ingredients-intensive” dishes, opt for “composition-intensive” instead (i.e. contains sauces or complex ingredient mixes).
    2. Appetizers are superior to main courses in some cuisines; be willing to have a ‘side-dishes-only’ meal.
    3. Avoid desserts, especially Asian ones.
    4. Order for variety, not quantity (order more than you think necessary).

    And finally, from a recent article by Cowen in The Atlantic, six rules for dining out:

    1. In the fanciest restaurants, order what sounds least appetising.
    2. Beware the beautiful, laughing women (you’re there for food, not the scene/drinks).
    3. Get out of the city.
    4. Admit what you don’t know, and search/ask intelligently.
    5. Exploit restaurant workers (if you see expensive labour, think about what your return is… family-run restaurants may offer the best return).
    6. Prefer Vietnamese to Thai, Pakistani to Indian.

    Cowen can be a bit outspoken on the topic of food, so bear in mind this comment:

    It all makes perfect sense if you like what Cowen likes, which is interesting food for a reasonable price without much ambiance. Which is not what everyone likes.

    Whether that’s what you like or not, you’ll still definitely like Cowen’s book on the subject, An Economist Gets Lunch.

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Misunderstood Salt: The Facts About Limiting Intake

    For decades we have been told, with certainty, to limit our salt intake or risk heart disease and high blood pressure—but is this advice based on sound scientific findings? The short answer is No.

    The evidence is inconsistent, inconclusive and contradictory, says prominent cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler (who used to be an advocate for the eat-less-salt campaign back in the 60s and 80s), and therefore the “eat-less-salt” message is premature and may even be harmful.

    Last year, two [meta-analyses] were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely. […]

    [Four studies] involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range.

    via The Browser

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Equipping for Emergencies: What Items Disappear First?

    As someone who lives in an economically, climatically and politically stable Western country, the chances are somewhat remote that I’ll ever encounter an emergency that requires forethought and careful planning1. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop me from enjoying this list of the 100 most in-demand goods during an emergency.

    This list apparently originates from someone called Joseph Almond who created it in 1999 after observing the behaviour of consumers preparing for Y2K-related problems. I say “apparently” because I can’t find any suggestion that this is actually true.

    Neverthless, there’s something about this list that is inherently intriguing, even though I’m far from a member of the survivalism movement. Oh, and feel free to share this with the more voguish title: How to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. Now that will get you some of them precious retweets.

    via Ask MetaFilter

    1 Although I’m not know for my futurism.

    Tags:

    Lloyd Morgan