Letters Remain

  • Growing Sentences

    How to develope sentences in the style of David Foster Wallace (visit Jason’s post to see an example of how powerful this can be for prose):

    1. Begin with an idea, a string of ideas.
    2. Use them in a compound sentence.
    3. Add rhythm with a dependent clause.
    4. Elaborate using a complete sentence as interrupting modifier.
    5. Append an absolute construction or two.
    6. Paralell-o-rize your structure (turn one noun into two).

    STOP HERE IF YOU ARE A MINIMALIST, WRITING COACH, OR JAMES WOOD

    1. Adjectival phrases: lots of them. (Note: apprx. 50% will include the word ‘little’).
    2. Throw in an adverb or two (never more than one third the number of adjectives).
    3. Elaboration — mostly unnecessary. Here you’ll turn nouns phrases into longer noun phrases; verbs phrases into longer verb phrases. This is largely a matter of synonyms and prepositions. Don’t be afraid to be vague! Ideally, these elaborations will contribute to voice — for example, ‘had a hand in’ is longer than ‘helped’, but still kinda voice-y — but that’s just gravy. The goal here is word count.

    STOP HERE IF YOU ARE NOT WRITING PARODY

    1. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts. (Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ‘shoes’ into ‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’? Ahem.
    2. Practice. Take one sentence — any sentence — and Wallacize it. Turn ten boring words into a hundred good ones.

    I suppose you could say that this technique is almost the antithesis of William Zinsser’s style.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Future of Human Health

    In seven videos, each between 9 and 19 minutes in length, some of Stanford’s best researchers discuss cutting-edge cognitive science research.

    Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford’s most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference, each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20 minutes about his or her research. Learn about Stanford’s newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Talk to Strangers

    In an article discussing collaborative spam filtering and the Tor project, Bruce Schneier offers some refreshing advice: telling children not to talk to strangers isn’t strictly the best advice:

    When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.

    And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.

    These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.

    I suppose it’s a form of the selection bias.

    So do as @zambonini suggests, and head over to Omegle and talk to strangers!

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Alibi Club

    Alibi clubs are loose collections of people willing to help each other out with alibis for every occasion: skipping work for the day, travelling to another country with your mistress, or getting out of a blind date. Your imagination—and morality—is your only barrier.

    There is nothing new about making excuses or telling fibs. But the lure of alibi networks, their members say, lies partly with the anonymity of the Internet, which lets people find collaborators who disappear as quickly as they appeared. Engaging a freelance deceiver is also less risky than dragging a friend into a ruse. Cellphone-based alibi clubs, which have sprung up in the United States, Europe and Asia, allow people to send out mass text messages to thousands of potential collaborators asking for help. When a willing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and the helper then calls the victim with the excuse — not unlike having a friend forge a doctor’s note for a teacher in the pre-digital age.

    via Schneier

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Writing ‘On Writing Well’

    William Zinsser—author of 17 books—talks in length on the trials and tribulations of writing ‘On Writing Well’.

    My initial fear of immodesty was misguided. The best teachers of a craft, I saw, are their own best textbook. Students who take their classes really want to know how they do what they do—how they grew into their knowledge and learned from their wrong turns. Thereafter, in every edition, I wrote more revealingly, trusting my readers to trust me if I veered down some unlikely trail of anecdote to illustrate a point.

    It now occurs to me that I didn’t really find my style until I wrote On Writing Well, at the late age of 52. Until then my style more probably reflected who I wanted to be perceived as—the urbane columnist and humorist and critic. Only when I started writing as a teacher and had no agenda except to be helpful did my style become integrated with my personality and my character.

    via Arts and Letters Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Causes of Poverty and Prosperity

    Matt Ridley—author of The Red Queen, among others—discusses the causes of poverty and prosperity, offering new (to me) insights on innovation, technology and markets.

    It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. […]

    The only institution that really counts is trust, if you like. And something’s got to allow that to build. […]

    But human beings are spectacularly good at destroying trust-generating institutions. They do this through three creatures: chiefs, thieves, and priests.

    via Arts and Letters Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Grade Inflation

    With news that Cambridge University is to demand A* grades at A-Level as a prerequisite for entry (a grade that currently doesn’t exist), there is much in the news about ‘grade inflation’.

    However “grade inflation” is actually the answer; the problem is “grade distortion”:

    True grade inflation would mean each grade was equally devalued, with A grades superseded by AA, AAA and AAAA as new labels for superlative performance became necessary. One hundred per cent would become 110 per cent.

    Yet examiners are reluctant to award 110 per cent and there are no AAAA grades. What we see is not inflation but a classic price distortion. Eventually all students will get A grades and they will be meaningless. A* grades are a small, belated step in the right direction.

    Grade distortion is a serious affair. Students and their teachers are forced to switch to grey market transactions denominated in alternative currencies: the letter of recommendation, for example. Like most alternative currencies, these are a hassle.

    Grade distortions, like price distortions, destroy information and oblige people to look in strange places for some signal amid the noise. Students are judged not on their strongest subjects – A grade, of course – but on whether they also picked up A grades in their weakest. When excellence cannot be displayed, plaudits go instead to those who deliver pat answers without stumbling.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Evolutionary Role of Cooking

    Cooking is “the evolutionary change that underpins all others” and is what makes us human, according to Richard Wrangham, Harvard University. The theory: the process of cooking makes our food more digestible, freeing up a huge amount of calories that are then expended on other, more important, activities.

    And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

    Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

    via Link Banana

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Decay of Social Networks

    Unaccountability and anonymity on the Internet has brought about “the end of empathy”, says Jason Calacanis, as he discusses the ‘condition’ of Internet Asperger’s Syndrome:

    This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost. […]

    In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.

    […] In IAS, screen names and avatars shift from representing people to representing characters in a video game. Our 2600’s and 64’s have trained us to pound these characters into submission in order to level up. We look at bloggers, people on Twitter and podcasters not as individuals, but as challenges–in some cases, “bosses”–that we must crush to make it to the next phase.

    A good article discussing the perils of living our lives in public, although I feel it loses something toward the end when it takes on a more personal tone.

    via LA Times

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Nun Study

    The ‘Nun Study’ is a longitudinal study of ageing and Alzheimer’s that uses data gathered from over 600 nuns over the past 20+ years. Some interesting correlates are starting to appear:

    The nuns make for a very unique population to study […] because of their similar lifestyles.

    “They don’t smoke, they don’t drink, so you can reduce the effects of some of these other environmental factors, and focus in on other factors that might be harder to get your hands around in other population studies.” […]

    Among the study’s findings are a relationship between early childhood education and reducing the susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease, [and] a relationship between traumas to the brain, such as strokes, and an increased susceptibility to Alzheimer’s. […]

    Another interesting finding has been that some of the nuns brains look like they have Alzheimer’s but the women weren’t exhibiting symptoms before they died.

    “If that’s the case, there may be things you can do, even though you have the disease to slow down or prevent the expression of the disease symptoms”.

    Reading this article, I’m not sure what I enjoyed the most: learning about this fascinating study, or the picture of the neuropathologist standing in front of over 600 plastic containers each holding a nun’s brain!

    For more information on this study, Time wrote a comprehensive article back in 2001, and there’s a dedicated section on the University of Minnesota’s site.

    via @mocost

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    Lloyd Morgan