Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Our Fascination with Cookbooks
Cookbooks are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cooking while hiding that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduction of the sauce. That wonderful proposition comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fascination with cookbooks, and how they are used in our homes. The first thing a cadet…
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The Neuroscience of Comedy
There is one essential condition required in comedy: “some kind of incongruity between two elements […], resolved in a playful or unexpected way”. That’s according to a fairly comprehensive article summarising the neuroscience research conducted to discover more about the phenomenon of why we find things funny (or not). Of particular interest was how we…
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Comedic Writing Tips
There are six essential elements of humour, suggests Dilbert‘s Scott Adams, as he looks briefly at how to write comedy: Pick a Topic: The topic does half of your work. I look for topics that have at least one of the essential elements of humor: Clever, Cute, Bizarre, Cruel, Naughty, Recognizable. Simple Sentences: Be smart,…
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The Benefits of Side Projects
The creation of 3M’s Scotch Tape, the Declaration of Independence and Metallica: just three of the stories Ben Casnocha retells to show the importance of innovation through side projects. Is giving away a day a week of your employees’ time worth it? Google executives seem to think so. They cite first the enormous goodwill generated internally:…
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Personal R&D
Many successful companies run expansive research and development departments, allowing them to enhance their capabilities and discover and exploit the new opportunities this speculative research often brings. Josh Kaufman suggests that we create our own personal R&D budgets–akin to those of corporations–for our personal development: What would it look like if you set aside 10-20%…
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Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky
In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck. Wiseman states that the…
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When (and When Not) to Consider Venture Capital
On discussing why he and his co-founders are seeking venture capital funding for their programming question and answer site (StackOverflow), Joel Spolsky provides a number of scenarios for when a company should give consideration to VC funding: There’s a land grab going on. There is a provable concept that’s repeatable. The business could benefit from…
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Icon-Based Business Plans
Depending on who you listen to, a business plan is either a waste of your time or an essential document. A good compromise could be Peter Hilton’s idea to create a concise, icon-based business plan visualisation: Inspired by the simplicity and success of the Creative Commons icons, which condense pages of information that no one ever…
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Nature Improves Attention
When studying complex tasks, taking a moment away from the problem is a proven way to refocus one’s thoughts. How different surroundings affect this “attention restoration” has now been studied and it has been discovered that the more complex a problem, the more a natural (non-urban) scene benefits our focus and study–whether this natural scene…
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Sleep and Weight Loss
While asleep our metabolic rate increases such that we lose more than three times the amount of weight than if we are awake (awake but lying dormant, of course): 1.9g/min compared to 0.6g/min. This increase in ‘caloric expenditure’ is not yet fully understood, but there are a number of reasons why we may lose more…