Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • MAD Magazine’s Fold-Ins

    I like how MAD Magazine’s ‘fold-ins’ were used to bring another dimension to the illustrations… A classic feature of MAD magazine, and arguably the best thing in it, fold over the pages to reveal a hidden image and message by artist Al Jafee. We were left a bit confused by some of the more US-centric…

  • Presentation Masterclass

    LifeHack has just started what I hope will become an informative and useful series entitled Presentation Masterclass, courtesy of Rowan Manahan. Audiences are so deluged with advertising messages and radio jingles, with phone calls, voicemail, email, SMS and IM, with… stuff in their personal lives that unless you, the presenter, are wowing them with every…

  • Books That Make You Dumb

    BooksThatMakeYouDumb is a little ‘statistical’ graph on how average SAT scores correlate with what books people read. Accepting it’s unscientificness Virgil (the creator) lists the most notable things about the data: Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like…

  • Bash’s IRC Quotes

    Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time in various IRC channels. If you did too, you’ll feel a pang of nostalgia reading the great quotes at Bash.org. <Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam <bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls…

  • Online ‘Shopping

    That’s photoshopping to you, Mr Layman. Yesterday, Adobe released the long-awaited, online version of the coveted Photoshop; Photoshop Express. At first glance it looks impressive and offers many neat features. Now before you go berserk, let us exercise some journalistic caution — it’s not everything you can do in Photoshop fit into a web browser.…

  • Overestimating Threats Against Children

    Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read. …there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have…

  • The Fear Hierarchy

    Jan Pettit’s list of fears, ranked from childhood through parenthood. I’m currently somewhere between 13 and 17: 13. Fear of selling out Deserting dreams. Embracing capitalism. 14. Fear of the dark (continued) Parking lots at night. Deserted streets at night. Apartments at night. Houses at night. Bedrooms at night. 15. Fear of rejection (continued) By…

  • Sir Arthur C Clarke’s Final Message – Peace and Climate Change

    By now everyone knows that Sir Arthur C Clarke recently passed away – a truly sad event. However, you may not have watched his ‘final message to earth‘. Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in…

  • Lies I’ve Told

    I’ve been a long-time fan of Raul Gutierrez’ blog, and he’s just posted another beautiful item: Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently: If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. We are all held together by invisible threads. Books get lonely too. Sadness can be eaten.…

  • Jill Bolte Taylor – Neuroanatomist On Her Own Stroke Experience

    Lots of people have been saying how impressed they were by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk at this year’s conference. None, however, have summed it up better than Vaughan: It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed…