Letters Remain

  • The Anthropology of YouTube

    I personally find the examples given in this article quite uninspiring (even quaint), but the following quote from Clive Thompson’s look at the anthropology of YouTube is rather piquant:

    What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art.

    In a sense, you could argue that even after 100 years of moving pictures, we still don’t know what video is for. The sheer cost of creating it meant we used it for a stiflingly narrow set of purposes: news, documentaries, instructional presentations.

    Now the lid is blowing off.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Books on Molecular Gastronomy

    Molecular gastronomy is defined as the “scientific discipline involving the study of physical and chemical processes that occur in cooking”.

    Following on from a conversation I had with Andrew this past weekend—and after reading this great article from The New York Times—I decided to compile a shortlist of the best books on molecular gastronomy (according to me):

    Update: There are so many books on molecular gastronomy that it can be hard to keep up with what’s available and to discover the best of the bunch and the must-haves. To help I’ve started Molecular Gastronomy Books: a site dedicated to reviewing and categorising the best books on molecular gastronomy.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Overnight Success Takes Years

    Paul Buchheit—original developer of Gmail and Google AdSense, founder of FriendFeed—discusses how projects can obtain ‘overnight success’.

    This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you’re starting something new, expect a long journey. That’s no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will never arrive, because it’s a long journey! This is also why it’s important to be frugal — you don’t want to starve to death half the way up the mountain.

    He has also written another excellent post on a number of important development aspects he learnt while writing Gmail.

    via Coding Horror (itself, an excellent post)

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Action Through Advertising

    Taking a leaf out of the advertisers’ book may be the key to succeeding in the fight against global warming and ecological apathy. At least, that’s the view Robert Butler takes after looking at the successes of a novel advertising campaign used to cut the incidence of littering in Texas:

    The ads avoided the negatives of guilt and shame in favour of the positives of pride and group identity. Within a year, roadside litter had dropped by 29%; within five years, by 72%. The campaign had targeted a specific group with a message from “people-like-them” that they were willing to hear. Compare this with the prim admonitory vagueness of “Keep Britain Tidy”.

    This brings to mind a quote from an article (discussed previously) commenting on how governments are taking advantage of the public’s cognitive biases for political and environmental gain.

    Like millions of others, Heath had found that simply being told she ought to save energy had little effect on her habits – and she actively resents the idea of being punished for disobeying government diktats on environmentalism. Drive a big car? You’re bad – pay a penalty.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Hedge Funds: An Overview

    Like David, I’ve often been curious about the minutiae of hedge fund operations: I’ve long known the vague generalities, but never the specifics. For those in a similar situation, the London Review offers a thorough introduction to hedge funds. This was the basic strategy of the first hedge fund, as run by A.W. Jones—sociologist and financial journalist:

    By adding modest borrowing to, let’s say, $100,000 of investors’ money, Jones might buy $110,000 worth of the shares in companies he liked, while simultaneously short selling $40,000 of shares he thought might do badly. He was thus partially insulated (‘hedged’) against overall market movements. If the overall market fell, the shares he had bought (his ‘long positions’, in market terminology) would lose money, but his short positions would gain because buying back borrowed shares would now be cheaper.

    Of course, you can’t have talk of hedge funds without mentioning what may very well be one of the greatest financial ‘hacks’ of all time: when Porsche/VW played the hedge funds to become the largest company in the world by market capitalisation—even if it was just for a brief moment.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • From Evanomics to Stephanomics: The Blog of the BBC’s Economics Editor

    While Evan Davis was economics editor for the BBC he wrote the excellent Evanomics—a blog in which he attempted to “understand the real world, using the tool kit of economics”.

    When he temporarily stepped down from this role in March 2008 (for a yearlong sabbatical) Evanomics was sorely missed and his replacement, Stephanie Flanders, didn’t resurrect the blog in a new form. Until now.

    As Evan suggested in his final post, the blog is called ‘Stephanomics’ and is being billed as a “discussion of the UK economy, how it relates to the rest of the world, and how it affects us all”.

    Required reading for all those interested in economics in the UK.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Typography and Design (Two Free Ebooks)

    Getting Real is the undisputed bible of agile software development—a manifesto that can change your view in a single reading. However when it comes to typography and design, the closest I have ever come to such a document was Mark Boulton’s Better Typography presentation. Now there’s a contender:

    The Vignelli Canon (pdf)

    I can’t do this tome justice. Split into two parts—The Intangibles (semantics, syntactics, etc.) and The Tangibles (paper sizes, grids, type sizes, etc.)—Massimo Vignelli’s book covers everything you could want to know about typography in graphic design.

    One definitely not to miss.

    How Do You Design? (pdf)

    Hugh Dubberly’s book looks at “over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes, from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development”.

    By reading this you can’t fail to learn something about design.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Spaced Repetition and the SuperMemo Learning Algorithm

    Spaced repetition is a learning technique taking advantage of what is known as the ‘forgetting curve’: a predictable pattern of how we forget information. With this in mind, Piotr WoĆșniak developed SuperMemo—an algorithm specifically designed to predict the future state of a person’s memory to schedule information reviews at the optimal time.

    Wired profiles WoĆșniak, taking a closer look at the psychology and applications of this learning technique.

    Wozniak's Spacing Effect Graph

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Blogging the Origin of Species

    2009 marks not only the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, but the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a work that needs no introduction.

    To honour this occasion, evolutionary biologist John Whitfield (who has surprisingly never read Origin) will be blogging Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species chapter-by-chapter.

    I have two main, and entirely contradictory, aims. First, I want to read Darwin from the perspective of someone reasonably clued up about evolution at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and see how the man’s ideas stand up in the light of what we know and think about genetics, ecology, evo-devo, paleontology and the like.

    But I also want to imagine it’s the 24 November 1859, and that the copy I’ve just picked up at my local book shop (the 1982 Penguin Classics edition) is in fact one of the 1,250 first editions published that day [
] That evening, I settle in the parlour, put a taper to the gaslight, toss another urchin on the fire, and begin reading. Will I be thrilled? Horrified? Sceptical? Baffled? Bored? Let’s use part of our brains to try and ignore all that we now know about Darwin’s biography and legacy, pretend that this is our first encounter with his theory, and that evolution must stand or fall on the quality of the science and writing in the Origin.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Better Communication

    Many people equate good communication skills with the ability to speak well and listen well. This assumption misses one essential component: two-way communication skills.

    Primarily written for mentors, this advice on good two-way communication is particularly useful for all. I especially like the Traffic Light Rule of communication:

    During the first 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is green. That means your protégé is listening and not thinking you talk too much. During the next 30 seconds, your light is yellow. That means the risk is increasing that your listener is bored, overwhelmed, or dying to respond. After the one-minute mark, your light is red. Yes, occasionally, you can go beyond a minute, for example, when telling an interesting story, but generally you should stop or ask a question.

    Lloyd Morgan