Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • Surviving Jet Lag

    With my 25-hour flight from Sydney back to London fast approaching, my mind is wandering to the topic of jet lag–or desynchronosis, to use the medical term. The most often suggested remedies for jet lag (where recovery times are generally said to be 1 day per eastward time zone or 1 day per 1.5 westward time…

  • Blogs as Public Billboards

    First seen over at Raul Gutierrez’ Heading East, this Tim Berners-Lee quote on the role of the home page from 1996 or so seems to come from an interview with Rohit Khare and DC Denison: With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on…

  • The Association of the Dead

    An old (but still current) news story from India never gained much attention outside of the country, but seems worth sharing. For over thirty years, corruption and bribery have allowed people to declare others ‘dead’ – without formal evidence – thus allowing the claimant to take ownership of the deceased’s farming land. The newly ‘dead’…

  • Paper Towels vs. Hand Driers

    Fully accepting his bias, Paul Revere looks at the evidence in the long-standing paper towel–hand drier debate and finds in favour of the humble paper towel. There were four parts to the study: Part A looked at the drying efficiency of hand drying method; Part B involved counting the number of different types of bacteria…

  • Life Advice

    Not from a life coach, personal development guru, or some other self-professed expert on life, but from those whose advice I think it’s actually worth paying attention to: those older than you. First is Life Advice From Old People (via Kottke)–a video blog containing nothing but interviews with a wide range of ‘old’ people, including…

  • Social Ignorance and Surrogacy

    A vibrant social life and close friendships are an important part of staying healthy, many recent studies have shown, but what is strange about this is why this is the case, considering that we’re surpisingly bad at judging the beliefs, opinions and values of our friends and partners. A growing body of experimental evidence suggests…

  • The Universality of Facial Expressions

    Or not. It’s not just happiness that’s perceived differently across cultures: facial expressions are too. Recent research questioning the assumption that face processing and facial expression recognition is invariant has found that Western Caucasians and East Asians differ in how they process facial expressions. It is a widely held belief that many basic visual processes…

  • The Universality of Happiness

    Or not. Research looking at how different cultures (specifically, Americans and Japanese) perceive the concept of happiness has shown that it’s not a universal constant, at least in terms of how we define it. [The researchers] systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of [happiness and unhappiness] and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans…

  • Determination, Long-Terms Goals, Success

    Determination and long-term goal-setting may be more contributory to success than intelligence, suggests research being conducted by Angela Duckworth and her contemporaries. These two traits (perseverance and keeping long-term goals in mind) are affectionately called ‘grit’ by researchers in the field and—according to a 2007 paper on the subject (pdf)—play an important role in many…

  • Steve Jobs and Circular Visualisations (Not Just Pie Charts)

    Pie charts have been having a bad time of it lately* and I can’t see things improving anytime soon. In one of the better articles looking at this humble chart, Brian Suda notes not only at what you can do instead, but what improvements you can make if you’re forced to use the pie chart.…