Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • The Final Salute: A Touching Story

    They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. Final Salute is a double Pulitzer Prize winning article (writing and photography) from The Rocky Mountain News profiling the work of Major Steve Beck – a US…

  • The Warren Buffett Guide to Investing

    In Picking Warren Buffett’s Brain: Notes from a Novice, Tim Ferriss shares the notes he took at a recent convention for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. It’s an interesting read and here’s the crux of it all: How would you invest your first million dollars? “I’d put it all in a low-cost index fund that tracks the…

  • Bananas: An Atheist’s Nightmare, and the Scourge of United Fruit

    The Banana: An Atheist’s Nightmare is a video I’ve seen linked in numerous places. I think this video nicely sums up Intelligent Design’s ignorance arguments. God exists because bananas fit well in the human hand and peel easily. First: Hahahahaha! Second: Peels easily? Are we ignoring the fact that – if anything – the banana…

  • 2008 Reith Lectures – Chinese Vistas

    If you haven’t yet discovered, the 2008 Reith Lectures are currently under way over at BBC Radio 4. This year they are being held by Jonathan Spence – a specialist in Chinese history – and the first two lectures have been on the topics of Confucius and UK-China relations.

  • The Purity Scale of Science (xkcd)

    This is for those of you who aren’t subscribers to my favourite comic, xkcd – a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Today’s episode deals with different branches of science and their purity; that is, can they be distilled down to a ‘more pure’ science. Maths is classed as the purest of sciences –…

  • 10 Ways We Get Things Wrong

    Psychology Today has an interesting article on fear, probability, and how we get things wrong. It’s not a very scannable article, so here’s an executive summary: We Fear Snakes, Not Cars – Risk and emotion are inseparable We Fear Spectacular, Unlikely Events – Fear skews risk analysis in predictable ways We Fear Cancer But Not…

  • Randall Munroe (of xkcd) Visits Google

    I absolutely, positively, know I’ve written about this and I would bet my life savings that I posted it, but alas I cannot find it anywhere. Every-so-slightly delayed (months later!), here’s what happened when Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) was invited to Google – he also gave an Authors@Google talk. More Googleplex videos here, including…

  • Japan Travel

    Hoping to have an extended visit to Japan in the near future? You may be as pleased as I was when I stumbled upon a site offering 10 Japanese Customs You Must Know Before a Trip to Japan. A perfect compliment to Tim Ferriss’ Hacking Japan: Inside Tokyo for Less Than New York (part two).…

  • 5 Years On the Road – A Hitchhiking Story

    Ludovic Hubler is a Frenchman who, in 2003, set off around the world with one goal – to travel all of it by hitchhiking. This is it ! The circle has finally been closed. 5 years, passed day by day since leaving the Alps, and now here I am back at my point of departure,…

  • The Omega Point

    The Singularity again, but this time a Gravitational (or Spacetime) Singularity. Specifically the one at the end of existence of the universe. The Omega Point is the moment during the theoretical Big Crunch when – just before the final, all-ending gravitational singularity – “the computational capacity of the universe is capable of increasing at a…