• Ted Kennedy’s Eulogy for Bobby Kennedy

    Earlier this week I listened to and read Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother, Robert Kennedy. I had never heard this speech before and it is a fantastic oration worth listening to in full. However…

    • I would advise listening to the speech on the embedded video while reading along so that you can hear the emotion in Ted Kennedy’s voice—fantastic!
    • Don’t just listen to the speech using the embedded video as the overlaid music is horrendous and occasionally distracting.
    • The recording of the speech is 9:45 in length, seven minutes of which is an excerpt from Robert Kennedy’s own Day of Affirmation Address to the students of the University of Capetown, South Africa (June 6, 1966).

    via Ben Casnocha

  • Map of Science

    By crunching data from more than a billion user interactions on scholarly databases, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers produced a high-resolution map of the relationships between different fields of science.

    That’s from Wired where they display the ‘Map of Science‘ that was produced, in part, to “help researchers frame discipline-hopping questions and identify neglected cooperative opportunities”.

    For those interested PLoS ONE has the original research article.

  • 10 Design Commandments

    The 10 commandments of design , as set forth by Dieter Rams:

    Good design…

    • is innovative
    • makes a product useful
    • is aesthetic
    • helps a product to be understood
    • is unobtrusive
    • is honest
    • is durable
    • is thorough to the last detail
    • is concerned with the environment
    • is as little design as possible

    As Jason points out, Rams is the designer behind many Braun products and has described his design approach as “less, but better”.

    He’s also the influence behind much of Jonathan Ive’s work for Apple.

    via Kottke

  • Design Patterns for Errorproofing

    Persuasive technologies are those which are designed to change the attitudes or behaviours of users. Errorproofing, on the otherhand, is concerned not with behavioural change, but in ensuring certain behaviours are met.

    Errorproof technologies, then, are those which “[make] it easier for users to work without making errors, or [that make] errors impossible in the first place”.

    Dan Lockton of the excellent Design with Intent compiles a list of eight design patterns for errorproofing a system:

    • Defaults
    • Interlocks
    • Lock-in/out
    • Extra steps
    • Specialised affordances
    • Partial self-correction
    • Portions
    • Conditional warnings
  • 13 + 17 Tips for Startups

    Two articles of fundamental startup tips, from two people who know what they’re talking about:

    Startups in 13 Sentences, by Paul Graham of Y Combinator. Of the 13 sentences, which one does Paul believe is the most important?

    Understand your users. That’s the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users’ lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it’s mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.

    How to Save Money Running a Startup, by Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Weblogs, and Silicon Alley. Purely financial, this post details some simple ways to save money running a startup. Many may not be suitable, but you can get the general gist of it.

  • Tournament of Books

    The fifth annual Tournament of Books is currently in progress. The tournament—dubbed the “battle royale of literary excellence”—pits 16 of the best novels published in the previous year against each other to find the winner of the coveted Rooster.

    Round one:

    1. 2666 vs. Steer Toward Rock
    2. Netherland vs. A Partisan’s Daughter
    3. The White Tiger vs. Harry, Revisited
    4. Unaccustomed Earth vs. City of Refuge
    5. Shadow Country vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
    6. The Northern Clemency vs. The Lazarus Project
    7. A Mercy vs. The Dart League King
    8. Home vs. My Revolution

    The first five matches have already taken place (winners in bold), and a new match will be played every weekday in March. The ‘Zombie’ round brings two books back from the dead (two that were previously eliminated).

    Previous years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.

  • Recipes and Vegetables: Now and Then

    A study looking at recipes in ‘classic’ recipe books such as The Joy of Cooking has found an average 40% increase in calories per serving over the last 70 years—about an extra 77 calories—due, in part, to a vast increase in portion sizes.

    Lisa Young, an adjunct nutrition professor at New York University, had similar findings in a 2002 study that compared the book’s brownie recipe from the 1960s and ’70s editions to the recipe from the 1997 edition.

    “Same recipe. Same pan. But in the ’60s and ’70s, it yielded 30 brownies,” she says. “In the 1997 edition, it yielded 15.”

    Another study looking at the nutritional content of modern food finds that supermarket vegetables now contain 5-40% less nutrients than they did 50 years ago. Time looks at three possibilities for these findings:

    • Inaccurate test data
    • The ‘dilution effect’
    • The ‘industrialisation’ of agriculture

    (via Lifehacker, @HackerNewsYC)

    (Apologies for RSS problems with this post.)

  • The Cult of Done

    The Cult of Done Manifesto is a compelling list of ‘rules’ for getting things done. I think the premise of The Cult of Done is: to do; to be unconcerned with failure; to learn from outcomes, be they good or bad.

    I particularly like the Rubix Cube manifesto poster.

    1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
    2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
    3. There is no editing stage.
    4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
    5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
    6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
    7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
    8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
    9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
    10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
    11. Destruction is a variant of done.
    12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
    13. Done is the engine of more.

    Of course, for every ‘manifesto’ there are always dissenters (who usually have a good point, too).

    via Carl Morris

  • Periodic Table of Typefaces

    Periodic Table of TypefacesThe Periodic Table of Typefaces is a fantastic visualisation of 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces available.

    Grouped by families and classes of typefaces ((sans-)serif, script, glyphic, grotesque, etc.), each ‘element’ lists the designer, the year designed and a ranking of 1 through 100.

    Sites used to calculate the ranking:

    via @Dave_Gorman

  • Paternal Age and Child Development

    Advanced paternal age at conception has previously been shown to affect the resulting child’s health in many ways. Now, advanced paternal age has also been associated with impaired neurocognitive abilities (“the ability to think and reason, including concentration, memory, learning, understanding, speaking, and reading”).

    Advanced paternal age showed significant associations with poorer scores on all of the neurocognitive measures apart from the Bayley Motor score. The findings were broadly consistent in direction and effect size at all three ages [8 months, 4 years, and 7 years].

    Interestingly, advanced maternal age was associated with better scores on all the same measures. Why is this?

    It is suspected that damage to sperm, which can accumulate over a man’s lifetime, may be responsible. A woman’s eggs are formed largely while she is herself in the womb, but sperm-making cells divide throughout a man’s lifetime, increasing the chance of mutations in sperm.

    Damn me and my mutating sperm!