Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • Our Self-Centered ‘Default’ Worldview: DFW’s Commencement Address

    Recent talk of the correspondence bias (here) reminded me of possibly the best commencement speech that I’ve not yet written about (and I’ve written about quite a few): David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only public talk concerning his worldview, was adapted following…

  • Vonnegut: Narrative Arcs and Why We Love Drama

    For millennia we have told and absorbed fantastic stories with simple yet strong narrative structures, and the structure of these stories is in contrast to the much less erratic “plots” of our own lives. This discrepancy between the dramas present in our stories and our real lives causes many of us to create unnecessary and…

  • Year Three in Review

    And so another year has passed since my last review. It’s been a busy year of learning a new language in my equally new country of residence, changing jobs (and everything that entails) and, of course, writing 200 posts here on Lone Gunman (and thanks again to you: there’s been hundreds of comments… and 49,810 spam comments). The…

  • Background Noise and Taste Perception

    It has been suggested that the physiological effects of pressurisation are responsible for the blandness of in-flight airline meals. However the real reason behind “diminishing gustatory food properties” (food tasting rubbish) while 32,000 feet above sea level could be a lot simpler: the background noise. A study conducted by Unilever R&D and the University of…

  • The Numbers in Our Words: Words of Estimative Probability

    Toward the end of this month I will almost certainly post the traditional Lone Gunman Year in Review post. Exactly how likely am I to do this? Am I able to quantify the probability that I’ll do this? By using the phrase “almost certainly”, I already have. To provide unambiguous, quantitative odds of an event…

  • Cosmic View to The Know Universe

    In 1957, the Dutch educator Kees Boeke wrote Cosmic View, a essay exploring “many levels of size and structure, from the astronomically vast to the atomically tiny”. Boeke’s essay went on to inspire the 1968 animated short, Cosmic Zoom. Cosmic View and Zoom then inspired the more famous Charles and Ray Eames documentary, Powers of Ten,…

  • The Statistics of Wikipedia’s Fundraising Campaign

    Yesterday, 15th January 2011, Wikipedia celebrated its tenth birthday. Just over two weeks before, Wikipedia was also celebrating the close of its 2010 fundraising campaign where over sixteen million dollars was raised from over half a million donors in just fifty days. The 2010 campaign was billed as being data-driven, with the Wikipedia volunteers “testing…

  • Douglas Coupland’s Thoughts on the Future

    Throughout his most popular novels, Douglas Coupland defines terms that come to define generations and also manages to create stories that perfectly describe and connect with a certain culture at a certain time. In a series of recent articles, Coupland has done this once more, but looks toward the future, instead. One, an article covering Coupland’s prophecies for…

  • Oil Spills and Nature’s Resilience

    Faced with an oil spill of the Deepwater Horizon‘s magnitude, nature is resilient and well-adapted to cope with the consequences–that is, provided we don’t try to clean it using methods that will do more damage. Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist (and many of my favourite popular science books), discusses what we should remember…

  • Recognising Bad Advice and Expertise Failure

    Why do we blindly follow experts when their advice is so often so wrong*? How can we differentiate between good advice and bad? These are just two of the questions David Freedman attempts to answer in Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us (a book that sounds like it could be a nice complement to Kathryn…