Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • Paper Aeroplanes for Young and Old

    Being a father to two six-year-olds means that I spend a not-insignificant amount of time folding and colouring paper. Paper aeroplanes are an infrequent but not unusual sight in the house. For those times, Fold ‘N Fly is my go-to website, offering “a database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials…

  • Perceptions of Probability and Numbers

    Back in 2011 I wrote about “words of estimative probability“; the quantitative ranges we apply to ambiguous words and phrases, based on Sherman Kent’s research for the CIA in the 1960s. In 2015, Reddit user zonination duplicated the study using /r/samplesize. His resulting post in /r/dataisbeautiful made the longlist for the 2015 Kantar Information is…

  • Mister Rogers’ Nine Rules for Talking to Children

    Having not grown up in the US, I only became aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as an adult. However, this is entirely due to Fred Rogers himself: his kindness, his humanity, and his ability to draw children into his safe world. In the lead-up to the publishing of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work…

  • The Statistics on Link Rot

    By sampling 4,200 random URLs spanning a 14 year period, Maciej Cegłowski, the creator of bookmarking website Pinboard.in, decided to gather statistics on the extent of link rot and how it progressed across time. Interested in finding out if there is some sort of ‘half life of links’, he found instead that it is a fairly linear, fast…

  • Equipping for Emergencies: What Items Disappear First?

    As someone who lives in an economically, climatically and politically stable Western country, the chances are somewhat remote that I’ll ever encounter an emergency that requires forethought and careful planning1. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop me from enjoying this list of the 100 most in-demand goods during an emergency. This list apparently originates from someone called…

  • Mid-90s Quotes from Wired

    Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, found an old file containing a selection of quotes from the first five years of Wired. This is a nice wander down memory lane, with Wired‘s trademark embracing of technology in the face of huge change quite evident (as well as some mid-90s prophesying, positivism, and–dare I say it–fear-mongering). Some of…

  • Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion and the Importance of Recognising “Enforced Compliance”

    Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is Robert Cialdini’s 1984 book discussing what he calls the six fundamental psychological principles of compliance: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity. The conclusion to Cialdini’s book points out why, in this increasingly complex world, resisting attempts at “enforced compliance” (deception) through these key principles is as important…

  • The Long Game: Civilization II and Sim City’s Magnasanti

    After ten years of playing the same Civilization II campaign (my favourite game ever), Reddit user Lycerius has ended up creating a dystopian semi-self-sustaining world, where the three remaining “super-nations” are in a constant state of espionage and nuclear war. The details of Lycerius’ “hellish nightmare” world are absolutely fascinating: the military stalemate; the 1700-year…

  • The Wadsworth Constant: Ignore 30% of Everything

    I’ll start with a story. Last year my girlfriend and I watched the pilot episode of a new TV show and were immediately hooked. The pilot episode was refreshingly complex and forced us to guess missing plot details continuously: it’s adventurous to make your audience work so hard during a pilot, we surmised. We later…

  • Together, Unconscious: We All Sleep

    One constant that connects us all in some way is that–at the end of our day–we lie down and slowly slip into a state of reduced or absent consciousness and become at the mercy of our fellow man. Every day we fall asleep: we have done so for millions of years and will continue to…