Letters Remain

  • Glow in the Dark Animals

    ‘Mr. Green Genes’ is a transgenic cat that glows in the dark. As a huge fan of both cats and science, I think this may be my ideal pet.

    From the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap:

    The cat’s DNA [has been injected] with a gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP), to easily visualize whether the protein was localized as desired in the cat’s body. The Audubon Center team who gave Mr. Green Genes his glow hope to use their technique to develop gene therapy methods for cystic fibrosis treatment.

    It reminds me of a letter PETA sent me a few months ago. Trying to persuade me to give them money, they wrote, “animal experiments [include] inserting jellyfish genes into the genetic code of pigs to make the pigs glow in the dark.” My response: give me the address for these ‘genetic tinkerers’ at once, I feel compelled to send them a big, fat cheque.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Top 10 ‘Gen Y’ Blogs

    Ryan Stephens has produced a list of the top ten blogs for Generation Y. It’s an excellent list containing a number of blogs I already subscribe to; those I don’t read I’ll be checking out soon.

    1. Personal Branding Blog
    2. Hard Knox Life
    3. Employee Evolution
    4. Driven Leaders
    5. Newly Corporate
    6. Ben Casnocha
    7. Brazen Careerist: Penelope Trunk
    8. I Will Teach You To Be Rich
    9. PR Interactive
    10. Guru Gilbert

    Runners-Up:

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Startups and Bad Economies

    Two weeks ago the renowned VC firm Sequoia Capital gave their portfolio CEOs a presentation on how startups should deal with the bad economy. In the presentation, the “entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs” gave some good advice any startup should follow in good and bad times (for example, “spend every dollar as if it were your last”).

    In reply, Silicon Alley Insider produced a presentation which, while a parody, also has some great advice hidden within.

    Of course, there are still many good reasons why you should start a startup in a bad economy.

    via I Will teach You To Be Rich

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Elements of Style: Programming Edition

    Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is one of the most popular and influential writing guides available. By replacing a few key words, it can be used as a text on programming style and the craft of software.

    2.12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it.

    A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing programming. Writers Programmers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition. Writing Programming, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer programmer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. This calls for a scheme of procedure… in most cases, planning must be a deliberate preclude to writing programming. The first principle of composition software development, therefore, is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.

    via Kottke

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Impossible Ideas are Great Ideas

    After his presumption that both eBay and Wikipedia would never go mainstream was proven wrong, Joel Spolsky realised what he calls “a fundamental lesson about the nature of technological innovation”. For Inc. Magazine Joel describes his idea that the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed.

    […] “seeming impossible” is practically a requirement for a truly great innovation. If something seems possible, that’s probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can’t possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work. […] On the other hand, they simply may be impossible. But on those rare occasions when you realize that something nobody thinks can work really can work–well, on that day, you just might change the world.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Seven Sins of Memory

    According to Daniel Schacter, there are seven fundamental ways in which our memories fail us. Schacter elaborates in his book of the same name, and now PsyBlog has produced a series of articles on each of these ‘seven sins of memory’:

    1. Transience
    2. Absent-Mindedness
    3. Blocking
    4. Misattribution
    5. Suggestibility
    6. Bias
    7. Persistence

    Lloyd Morgan

  • False Advertising (With Statistics) Works

    Recent advertising research shows how numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience. Bigger numbers, it seems, are what we want: no matter how abstract or inane.

    The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one with more vivid colors; they told the students that the two versions came from different cameras. When told nothing about the cameras, about 25 percent of the students chose the one that had made the sharper image. But providing a specification reversed that. When told that the other model captured more pixels […] more than half now picked it.

    As Mind Hacks states, “the researchers thought this might be a problem with the fact that not everyone is technically minded, so they tried various other experiments with everything from scented oil to ice-cream – all with the same effect.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Our Evolutionary Predisposition to Faith

    The anthropologist Pascal Boyer asks, “Is religion a product of our evolution?” and in doing so he concludes that it may be easier to believe than to reject faith.

    In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It does not try to identify the gene or genes for religious thinking. Nor does it simply dream up evolutionary scenarios that might have led to religion as we know it. It does much better than that. It puts forward new hypotheses and testable predictions. It asks what in the human make-up renders religion possible and successful. Religious thought and behaviour can be considered part of the natural human capacities, such as music, political systems, family relations or ethnic coalitions. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to change our view of religion.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • How Cats Control Human Culture

    I’ll admit I may have overstretched myself slightly with this sensationalist title. What it should say is, “How the Toxoplasma Gondii Brain Parasite May Influence Human Culture“; but that’s not nearly as fun.

    Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled brain parasite spread by cats. Our feline companions are its preferred home and […] like most parasites, T.gondii has a complex life cycle designed to get it into its final host. If it finds itself in another animal, it travels to the brain and changes the host’s behaviour to maximise its chances of ending up in a cat. For rodents, this means being eaten and infected individuals are less fearful of cats and more active, making them easier prey.

    [Human] carriers tend to show long-term personality changes that are small but statistically significant. Women tend to be more intelligent, affectionate, social and more likely to stick to rules. Men on the other hand tend to be less intelligent, but are more loyal, frugal and mild-tempered. The one trait that carriers of both genders share is a higher level of neuroticism – they are more prone to guilt, self-doubt and insecurity.

    The article goes on to note that it would be imprudent to suggest that T.gondii is the major driver of human culture, and points out that we shouldn’t confuse correlation with causation. However, when infection rates can be as high as 67% (as in Brazil), it’s worth paying attention to.

    via Mind Hacks

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Powers of Ten

    Powers of Ten is a 1977 IBM-commissioned film taking us on a journey out to the edge of the observable universe before returning to an atom’s nucleus in the hand of a man picnicing in a Chicago park… all within 9 minutes.

    Depicting the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten, the film moves by one factor of ten every ten seconds: a great way to look at the power of the log scale and the universe itself.

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    Lloyd Morgan