Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • The Lowball Strategy

    Ryan Holiday on the military strategist John Boyd’s lowball ‘technique’: John Boyd had a rule that whenever he was using data as support for an argument, he’d deflate the numbers to understate his case. The idea was use lower number while making a strong case; when he was challenged and fact checked, it’d always be…

  • The Best of Esquire’s 75 Years

    75 years since its initial publication, Esquire shares the 7 greatest stories and the 70 greatest sentences to have been published in the magazine. Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. –Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936 via Kottke

  • What Should Any Educated Person Know?

    Tucker Max creates a list of what he believes is the information any educated person should know. By no means a definitive list (far from it), but some good information regardless. English lit: Read lots of novels, especially the classics. There are hundreds of sites out there that purport to list the Western Canon, browse a…

  • Scouting New York

    Even though I’ve never been to New York, I love the Scouting NY blog; a collection of often over–looked and unique locations discovered by a NYC film location scout. The ‘About’ section says all you need to know: I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing…

  • Food Production: Where ‘TV Dinners’ Come From

    The video of the production line at a Goodfella’s frozen pizza factory (originally via Richard Holden) has been widely shared and I’m sure you’ve already seen it (and been fascinated by the machine that puts the tomato base on). Some may also have seen a few of the slightly less appetising videos such as this one on hot…

  • Menu Consultants (or: Tips to Hack Restaurants)

    A short piece in Time profiling Gregg Rapp: a “menu engineer” who optimises restaurant menus to maximise profits. The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. “This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get…

  • Running a Social Experiment on a City

    When academic Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá he used the opportunity to run a social experiment on a grand scale. Soon enough, crime was reduced, road deaths were down, and there were 400 trained mimes improving both traffic and citizens’ behaviour. Seriously. “The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task,” Mockus said. “Knowledge empowers people. If people…

  • Vitamins: A Pointless Expense?

    Medical research is beginning to suggest that vitamins have questionable health benefits. One study found that vitamin C is ineffective for cold–prevention unless you’re exposed to extreme physical stress (read: ultramarathon runners and “soldiers during sub-Arctic winter exercises”). The New York Times looks at this trend, noting that in some cases, vitamins may do more…

  • Scale of Stressful Life Events and The Misdiagnosis of Sadness

    Mind Hacks points us to a recent article in Psychiatric News arguing that the current definition of ‘major depression’ has led to misdiagnoses of ‘normal sadness’. They argue that the diagnosis contains no qualifications about whether the reaction is appropriate in the context of the person’s life, meaning that people who have suffered unemployment, relationship…

  • The “Broken Windows” Theory of Crime

    The “broken windows” theory of crime, dating back to an article in The Atlantic from 1982 and more recently popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and Rudy Giuliani (mayor, NYC), suggests that signs of petty crime, like littering and broken windows, trigger further criminal behaviour. Now, recent research is starting to suggest that…