Letters Remain

  • The Bible a Prerequisite for Understanding Literature?

    Poet Laureate Andrew Motion (incidentally, the first Poet Laureate to not hold the position for life) suggests that the classics and the Bible should continue to be taught in school, as to cease doing so will prevent a whole generation being able to understand great literature and culture.

    I can’t help but find myself agreeing with his argument.

    The poet, who describes himself as an atheist, called for an overhaul of the school curriculum to reverse the “depressing” trend which threatened to leave future generations unable to fully understand the works of Milton and Shakespeare or even more recent writers such as TS Eliot.

    […]

    He insisted that while secularist ideas had put many people off studying the Bible, parents who do not believe in God should have nothing to fear from their children learning about the Bible.

    “If people say this is about ramming religion down people’s throats, they aren’t thinking about it hard enough,” he said.

    “It is more about the power of these words to connect with deep, recurring human truths, and also the story of the influence of that language and those stories.”

    And he warned that growing ignorance of the great stories of the Bible as well as classical mythology was becoming an increasingly serious handicap for those studying literature.

    The discussion puts me in mind of the latest thing to make me laugh on twitter: “@pagecrusher: Your inability to catch references to Greek mythology is your Achilles’ heel.”

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Are the Risk Appetites of Successful Traders Innate?

    Given that confidence and risk tolerance are correlated with high levels of pre-natal testosterone, John Coates—Wall Street trading floor manager turned academic—wondered if the behaviour of high-frequency, successful traders is similarly influenced, and thus innate. Unsurprisingly it was; but it was the extent to which it was found to be true that was surprising:

    Coates, Gurnell and Rustichini found what they were expecting: that high-testosterone foetuses grew up to be excellent high-frequency traders. What was surprising was the huge size of the effect. Traders with a low 2D:4D ratio made six times as much money as those with high 2D:4D ratios. In an environment when the best traders earned more than ÂŁ4m a year, this is hardly a trivial discovery.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Ira Glass on Effective Storytelling

    Ira Glass is a master storyteller, as anyone who has ever listened to This American Life can attest. Below, in a series of occasionally hilarious videos and articles, Ira reveals his secrets of effective storytelling: from how to tell when a story isn’t working, to turning the creative process into a polished, finished product.

    The 13 principles to creating “more, better radio”, from a 1998 lecture

    Three-part ‘manifesto’ on storytelling and working in radio, from 2004

    Ira’s fantastic speech at Gel (32:25)

    Four-part interview series:

    (Mostly) via Kottke (1, 2)

    Lloyd Morgan

  • What it Takes to Do What You Want

    In an inspired and inspiring essay on “everything [she believes] about writing”, author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about what it takes to do what you want (in her case, write).

    I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling. I became a writer the way other people become monks or nuns. I made a vow to writing, very young. I became Bride-of-Writing. I was writing’s most devotional handmaiden. I built my entire life around writing. I didn’t know how else to do this. I didn’t know anyone who had ever become a writer. I had no, as they say, connections. I had no clues. I just began.

    Elizabeth Gilbert has also presented at TED, musing on “the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses—[sharing] the radical idea that, instead of the rare person ‘being’ a genius, all of us ‘have’ a genius”.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Personal, Printable CEO

    Freelancer David Seah realised that he needed a novel system to keep himself productive, efficient, and continuously developing. Borne from this need he developed The Printable CEO system:

    The Printable CEO was born from a desire to focus my time more productively. For me, that means things that make my freelance practice sustainable and fun. The Printable CEO name comes from the idea that a good CEO should focus primarily on those things that move the company forward; since I can’t afford to hire my own CEO, being able to print one out seemed like the next best thing!

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Wasting Our ‘Cognitive Surplus’

    From a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference in April 2008: Clay Shirky tracks the history of our cognitive surplus, explaining what we could, or need to do with it:

    So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. […]

    And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus that’s finally being dragged into what Tim O’Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Art of the Commencement Speech

    The Art of the Commencement Speech is a project by The Humanity Initiative to collect the best commencement addresses since 1936. To date there are 29 speeches available, from John F. Kennedy (American University, 1963), VĂĄclav Havel (Harvard University, 1995) and The Dalai Lama (Emory University, 1998).

    The commencement ceremony affirms each student’s search for knowledge. It often includes a graduation speech which seeks to put their recent hard (or not so hard)  work into the context of their future. Many of us hear one or two commencement addresses as graduates or listen to a handful as spectators. Yet — as we graduate from one year to another, one relationship to another, one experience to another — we always are learning.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Google as the Extended Mind

    In response to The Atlantic’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Discover Magazine’s Carl Zimmer argues that Google is actually making us smarter thanks to the ‘extended mind’ theory—the idea that the mind exists not only in ourselves but is extended out to the technology we use.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Evaluating Decision-Making

    With a hat tip to Robin Rubin’s commencement speeches at NYU (1999) and Harvard (2000), Venture Hacks implores us to evaluate decisions by the decision-making process itself, rather than the results produced.

    Decisions tend to be judged solely on the results they produce. But I believe the right test should focus heavily on the quality of the decision-making itself.

    […]

    It’s not that results don’t matter. They do. But judging solely on results is a serious deterrent to taking the risks that may be necessary to making the right decision. Simply put, the way decisions are evaluated affects the way decisions are made.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Get Your Own Eponymous Law

    Always wanted to achieve intellectual immortality? Now it’s possible thanks to Samuel Arbesman—a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School—who shows us how to get a theorem, formula or law named after yourself, in a few easy steps.

    Of course, before you go out and begin to grace the world with your newly minted eponymous idea, don’t forget Stigler’s Law of Eponymy: “No scientific law is named after its original discoverer.” (Stephen Stigler attributes this to Robert Merton.) This law, which we shall generously apply to all realms of knowledge, has the following implication: By naming a concept after yourself, you have just established that someone else thought of the idea first. But that’s the risk you have to take in achieving intellectual immortality, and making your way toward the Arbesman Limit.

    via Seed

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    Lloyd Morgan