Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Deep Brain Stimulation and ‘Conscious’ Brain Surgery

    Wired Science have got a great short film that follows two people who have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their brains to treat tremors.While most people assume brain surgery is all pre-planned beforehand, for many treatments for cognitive or behavioural functions, the surgeons need to wake up the patient after they’ve open their skull…

  • Stocks and Shares ISAs

    There are a lot of very good US-based personal finance blogs around, but sometimes the information given is difficult for a UK reader to understand as the terms used are completely alien to us. One of the newer additions to my RSS reader is Plonkee Money – a site I found when searching for a…

  • The 50 Best Works of Art

    The Telegraph has compiled a nice list of The 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them) Zen garden, Ryoan-ji Temple (late 15th century) Kyoto, Japan Getting there: bearable This is the most celebrated example of what in Japanese is called a karesansui, or “dry landscape”. Since it consists of nothing but raked…

  • 100 Best Last Lines

    The 100 best last lines from novels, as chosen by the American Book Review Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how…

  • The 50 Most Powerful Blogs

    The Observer shows us their top 50 blogs, and the top 5 were: The Huffington Post Boing Boing TechCrunch Kottke Dooce via Kottke

  • The Man in Seat Sixty-One

    The Man in Seat Sixty-One has been one of my favourite travel websites for a few years now – it contains all the information you could ever hope to know about train travel around the world. Along with WikiTravel, this is an indispensable travel website: you’ll never buy an out-of-date travel book again! Many people…

  • The ‘Easy’ Way to Intelligent Asset Allocation

    NPR‘s All Things Considered recently profiled David Swensen and analysed his investing strategy (Swensen is Yale University’s head investor): Yale University recently announced a 23 percent return on its investments, swelling its endowment to a whopping $18 billion. The man behind that investment success is David Swensen, one of the most gifted investors in the…

  • Y Combinator and Starting a Startup

    Y Combinator is a seed-stage startup venture capital firm with a refreshingly novel outlook on venture capitalism. Their Startup Library provides a wonderful selection of links to stories, articles, and many other resources. Be careful; once you start thinking about going ‘startup’ you’re likely not to go back for a long, long time.

  • Official: Money Makes Us Happy, Happiness Makes Us Money

    Newsweek ran an article last year on the link between happiness and money. Here’s an executive summary: Money will make you happier, up to a point. After that, it makes no difference. That point is the wonderfully quantitative ‘point of comfort‘. If you’re happy you’ll typically earn more than those less happy than you. If…

  • Pavlov’s Musical Dog

    Back in early December 2007, I submitted one of my favourite Psychology jokes to Mind Hacks. The comic strip I sent in was duly posted along with some other interesting links: Ivan Pavlov and Brian Wilson – together at last! This rather unlikely combination seemed to spark a bit of interest, so here is a…