Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Illness Susceptibility and Sleep Quality
I’ve been ill for a few weeks and I was fairly sure (in my amateur opinion) that it was related to a significant lack of sleep over the last couple of months. Upon returning to full health I decided to do some quick research on my favourite topic: sleep. In one recent study looking at…
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Contextual Writing (Telescopic and Responsive Text)
How can a writer cater to an audience with diverse preferences and needs (particularly, how much detail they want and how much time they have)? One way is to use telescopic or responsive text. Telescopic text is a method of iteratively displaying more and more textual detail on request (I suppose the reader becomes the user). Joe…
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Size and Complexity: Why Animals Are the Way They Are
From bone strength and oxygen absorption in larger animals, to the perils of surface tension and poor eye design in smaller ones: just some ideas to consider when studying comparative anatomy and why animals are the way they are. A perfect take on the topic is J. B. S. Haldane‘s 1928 On Being the Right Size. In this…
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A “Felt Need” Is What Makes Us Buy
A “felt need” is what differentiates a vitamin from an aspirin: when we crave something (relief from pain), a product that satisfies that desire becomes a must-have rather than a nice-to-have. Realising this and re-framing a product in terms of this craving is an important step in ensuring a product’s success, say Dan and Chip…
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Words to Be Aware Of
Wish. Try. Should. Deserve. These are four words that “lend themselves to a certain self-deception”, says David Cain of Raptitude, and when you catch yourself using them you should take note, figure out how the word is being used, and maybe try to change your perspective. Why? Because, Cain says, these are ‘red flag’ words that…
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Bribing and Restaurant Seating
Does bribing your way into a busy restaurant work as well as it seems to in movies? Is it even possible? Bruce Feiler decided to find out by visiting some of New York’s most overbooked restaurants with nothing more than a pocketful of money (i.e. no reservations). His results were not quite as expected, finding that bribing hosts…
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Year Four in Review
It’s been a quiet year on Lone Gunman with only 76 posts published over the last 366 days: but the response has been as great as ever. This year is a special one for Lone Gunman as it was four years ago today–during the last leap day–that the first post was published. It’s been a great…
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The Inefficiencies of Local Bookstores
We should not hold Amazon in contempt for pressuring local independent bookstores to the brink of closure and instead should embrace the company for taking advantage of inefficiencies, furthering a reading culture, and–believe it or not–helping us ‘buy local’ more effectively. In response to Richard Russo‘s recent New York Times article berating a recent not-so-well-considered Amazon promotion, Farhad…
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Why Software Development Estimation is Hard: Sea Lions, and Coastal Paths
Among the many valid responses to the Quora question of why software development task estimations are often off by a factor of 2–3, Michael Wolfe, CEO of Pipewise, describes exactly why this is without once mentioning ‘software’ or ‘project’. Instead, Wolfe eloquently provides undoubtedly the best analogy I’ve ever heard for explaining the difficulty in…