Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Google and ‘The Physics of Clicks’

    Hal Varian is the Chief Economist at Google, engaged primarily in the design of the company’s ‘advertising auctions’; the auctions that happen every time a search takes place in order to determine the advertising that appears on the results page. After introducing us to this concept, Steven Levy looks at Google’s “across-the-board emphasis on engineering,…

  • Top Ten Foreign Affairs Articles

    After compiling a few ‘top ten’ lists of classic foreign affairs books, Stephen Walt—professor of international affairs at Harvard University—compiles a more digestible version: the top ten articles in the field of international relations. The ten articles Walt recommends are below, but click through to the original to see his reasoning behind each choice and…

  • A Primer in Type Terminology

    David’s lead encapsulates my thoughts on typography perfectly: “I’m fascinated by typography even though I don’t understand a thing about it”. Hopefully this won’t be the case for much longer, as Paul Dean has written a five-part “type terminology tour de force”. From the excellently illustrated Anatomy of a Letterform (part two): They speak the arm (of,…

  • Observations on London and Paris

    Returning from a trip to Europe, Nate Silver—proprietor of the political analysis website FiveThirtyEight—has promptly compiled a list of observations on London and Paris from an American point of view. As an ‘insider’ it appears that I’ve take a lot of these gradual changes for granted, not really making any conclusions. London, and the United…

  • The Scientific Scoreboard

    After becoming disillusioned by the seemingly elitist system of publishing in scientific journals, Jorge Hirsch devised the h-index; a system to quantify the scientific impact of a researcher’s publications (regardless of journal) and thus the scientific impact (importance) of the researcher. There’s a clear pecking order [for scientific journals], established and reinforced by several independent rating…

  • Thought Suppression

    After reading this roundup of research into the psychology of thought suppression you will see that the results are fairly conclusive: it’s counter-productive in almost every circumstance. From research into substance cravings, so-called ‘intrusive’ memories, and even depression, thought suppression has been shown to not work and the act of remembering when attempting to suppress has been…

  • Being Rational About Risk

    Leonard Mlodinow—physicist at Caltech and author of The Drunkard’s Walk, a highly-praised book looking at randomness and our inability to take it into account—has an interview in The New York Times about understanding risk. Some choice quotes: I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to…

  • The Shortcomings of Data Visualisation

    The problem with pie charts and how this relates to data visualisation as a whole. Many visualization types have cropped up just in the past two decades, riding the growth of the internet. But they nevertheless share many characteristics with the garden-variety pie chart, including some of its primary weaknesses and a slew of new ones.…

  • Suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge

    Having just finished watching The Bridge (a 2006 documentary chronicling the stories of those who committed suicide at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge throughout 2004), I came online in search of Jumpers—the article that inspired the film with its comprehensive look at suicide at the bridge. Both the documentary and the article pose some difficult questions but…

  • The Culture of Alcohol

    Realising that “drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in [British] culture”, Vaughan of Mind Hacks offers a short introduction to what could be an interesting topic; the cultural ‘benefits’ of binge drinking. There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In…