Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • Child Well Being in Biological and High-Conflict Familes

    With the timing and sequence of ‘young adult transitions’ bearing importance for successes in later life, this news about these transitions and their occurrence in ‘high-conflict’ families shows that staying together for the sake of the kids doesn’t necessarily help: Compared with children in low-conflict families, children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop…

  • The Economist Daily Chart

    The Daily Chart from The Economist is one of those links where it’s been around so long and is so great that you feel everyone must know about it already. Visualising data from a diverse range of topics, The Daily Charts are almost always impeccably executed and surprising. The RSS feed for the feature is…

  • The Introverted Traveller

    Starting with the declaration that “We introverts have a different style of travel, and I’m tired of hiding it”, Sophia Dembling looks at the differences in how introverts and extroverts travel, and what this means. I’m always happy enough when interesting people stumble into my path. It’s a lagniappe, and I’m capable of connecting with…

  • 25+ Etiquette

    Bringing to mind something I wrote about last week (The Quarterlife Crisis), this advice to those 25 and over is more etiquette lesson than antidote to the 20-something malaise. It is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Evolutionary Consumption

    Geoffrey Miller, author of the excellent Mating Mind, has recently released Spent; a look at consumerism and marketing through his lens of evolutionary psychology. With an existing knowledge of evolutionary psychology theories the ideas in Miller’s latest will come as no surprise. These two reviews are still worth perusing, however: Jonathan Gottschall provides a concise…

  • What Beliefs Will Appall Future Generations

    “Many of our grandparents were racist, and some of our parents are homophobes. Which of our own closely held beliefs will our own children and grandchildren be appalled by?” That’s a question being posed on Reddit and the majority of responses are thought provoking and intriguing. Phil Dingra selects a few of his favourite replies,…