Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Hard-to-Read Fonts Improve Learning

    Much has been written on the positive aspects of cognitive fluency (in terms of typography, accents, and almost everything else), but a recent study (pdf, doi) suggests that the opposite (cognitive disfluency) could lead to better learning. The theory is that harder-to-process material requires “deeper processing” and that this deeper processing leads to superior memory performance. Earlier…

  • Marketing Lessons for Startups

    When Ilya Lichtenstein offered free marketing advice to startups (as a way of thanking the Hacker News community) he received over 150 requests and set to work. Certain patterns started to emerge in his advice, and so he decided to produced a three-post ‘startup marketing lessons learnt’ series (parts two and three). There’s some fantastic…

  • A Primer on Behaviour Change

    Three necessary elements must be present for a behaviour to occur: Motivation, Ability, Trigger — and understanding this is fundamental to understanding how to change behaviour. That’s according to B.J. Fogg and his team at the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab, as described by their Behaviour Model. To make behaviour change easier the team identified the…

  • Guest Posts (2) – Thanks

    Last week my friend Andrew Smith looked after the site and published three posts worthy of your time: Learning storytelling from a Sitcom writer — a longer piece that perfectly dissects the story-writing process A first hand account of foreclosure How not to screw up your career I’m now back home and free from jet lag,…

  • Guest Posts (2)

    I’m away on vaca­tion, and last week david (b) hayes took over Lone Gun­man and produced this indispensable seven-part guide, How to Internet: How to Internet: Introduction How to Internet: Why? How to Internet: Dividing Attention How to Internet: Staying Current How to Internet: Reading How to Internet: Publishing How to Internet: Epilogue This com­ing week, your host is…

  • Guest Posts (1)

    I’ve recently arrived in Seattle and over the coming two weeks will be slowly making my way down to San Francisco. I’m on holiday; life is good. I’m aware that things have been quiet around here lately, so as a prelude to the “return” of Lone Gun­man I’ve got a couple of fine guest writers…

  • Robert Gottlieb on the Art of Editing

    The author-editor relationship is an intimate one, and Robert Gottlieb, editor of many well-loved books and of The New Yorker for five years, knows this more than most. One of the best insights into this relationship comes courtesy of an interview with Gottlieb in The Paris Review where the ‘questions’ are actually anecdotes provided by some of the…

  • The Brain on Food: Everyday Chemicals

    Regarding all the foods that we consume as a drugs is a wondrous way to examine and comprehend the complex interactions and subtle forces behind how everything we put in our mouths affects “how our neurons behave and, subsequently, how we think and feel”. In a compelling article that suggests our shared evolutionary history with the plants…

  • Advantages of Internet Friendships

    The methods through which we create and maintain relationships are constantly changing, with recent decades boosting the move from a purely location-based model to one where relationships can spawn and develop remotely, thanks to the Internet (and, to a lesser degree, the telephone and mail systems). However, while this new way of creating and maintaining…

  • Micromorts and Understanding the Probability of Death

    Understanding probabilities is hard (viz.) — and it’s especially so when we try to understand and take rational decisions based on very small probabilities, such as one-in-a million chance events. How, then, to communicate risks on a similar level, too? The answer is to use a more understandable scale, such as micromorts; “a unit of…