Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • The Intricacies and Joys of Arabic

    I imagine that most people with a passing interest in linguistics read Maciej Cegłowski’s short essay in praise of the Arabic language when it was ‘rediscovered’ by popular social networks a few months ago. As one who has studied Arabic (albeit MSA and only for nine months or so), the essay brought back fond memories of struggling…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • How Trends Actually Spread; or, Six Degrees but No Connectors

    The small sample size of Stanley Milgram’s small world experiment means that the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’ and the conclusion drawn from it–primarily, the Influential’s theory popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point–could be deeply flawed. That was the starting point for Duncan Watts‘ research that led him to say “the Tipping Point is…

  • The Evolutionary History of the Brain

    The development of the human brain is intricately linked with almost every moment of our evolution from sea-dwelling animals to advanced, social primates. That is the the overwhelming theme from New Scientist‘s brief history of the brain. The engaging article ends with a look at the continued evolution of the human brain (“the visual cortex has…

  • Our Amazing Senses

    As neuroscientist Bradley Voytek points out, “we’re used to thinking of our senses as being pretty shite”, and this is mostly thanks to the plethora of animals that can see, hear, smell and taste far better than we can. “We can’t see as well as eagles, we can’t hear as well as bats, and we…

  • A first hand account of foreclosure

    A recent reddit thread about questionable jobs revealed an real-estate worker willing to talk about his experiences foreclosing on homes. He expanded his experiences into a longer post that is eloquent, emotionally charged and revealing about the lasting impact of the global financial crisis. [T]hey can get angry and defensive, tell me that they were never…

  • Advantages of Internet Friendships

    The methods through which we create and maintain relationships are constantly changing, with recent decades boosting the move from a purely location-based model to one where relationships can spawn and develop remotely, thanks to the Internet (and, to a lesser degree, the telephone and mail systems). However, while this new way of creating and maintaining…

  • Micromorts and Understanding the Probability of Death

    Understanding probabilities is hard (viz.) — and it’s especially so when we try to understand and take rational decisions based on very small probabilities, such as one-in-a million chance events. How, then, to communicate risks on a similar level, too? The answer is to use a more understandable scale, such as micromorts; “a unit of…