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 experience and the site has evolved a lot, as you can see if you take a look through my previous ‘in review’ posts (Year One, Year Two, Year Three).

And so the passing of another year can mean only one thing… Lone Gunman is four, and this is Year Four in Review; a compilation of the best things I’ve read on the Internet over the last twelve months.

Visualisation of the 50 most frequently used keywords on Lone Gunman in year four.

Items definitely not to miss are highlighted (probably not through an RSS feed reader). [LG] denotes my original post.

First, the three most read and shared posts from the past year: Food-Based Body Clock the Key to Jet Lag, Inventive Ways to Control Trolls and Optimal Caffeine Consumption.

Relationships

• A favourite of mine from this past year was when David Hayes (you’ll hear more from him later) shed light on the advan­tages of Internet-originating rela­tion­ships and how friend­ship cre­ation has evolved. [LG]
• It’s no surprise to most of you that I’m an introvert of sorts. This year’s addition to the ‘introversion’ tag is Carl King’s list of myths about intro­verts. [LG]
• On a larger scale, we delve into the research around Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point theory and discover that ‘six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion’ is cor­rect, but there is no evi­dence for super-connected ‘trend gate­keep­ers’ (such as Gladwell’s ‘Con­nec­tors’). [LG]
• From society to the workplace, and I look at the winner of the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for Man­age­ment: beating the Peter Principle by promoting at random. [LG]
• Vonnegut describes, like only he can, the narrative arcs in our stories and lives. Derek Sivers goes into more detail, explaining that this is why we cre­ate unnec­es­sary and non-existent dra­mas in our lives. [LG]
• Finally, one that I can’t believe I’ve not posted about before: David Fos­ter Wallace’s 2005 com­mence­ment address at Kenyon Col­lege. [LG]

Negotiation/Persuasion

• A mix between this category and the one above, I was fascinated by the devi­ous secret ways to effec­tively con­trol trolls and other abu­sive users on online communi­ties (i.e. the hell­ban, slow­ban, and errorban). [LG]
• Moti­va­tion, Abil­ity and Trig­ger are the three elements that are necessary to change a person’s behaviour, according to BJ Fogg’s behaviour grid that explains the fif­teen ways that behav­iour can be changed. [LG]
• I loved the story behind Syd­ney Frank’s marketing/branding strat­egy for Grey Goose vodka. The key? Narrative sells. [LG]
• Negotiating? We already know the opti­mal start­ing prices for nego­ti­a­tions and auc­tions, but this year a researcher from that study goes into detail on nego­ti­a­tion tac­tics and the rea­sons why you should make the first offer. [LG]
• Common wis­dom would suggest that the more cer­tain a per­son is on a sub­ject, the more per­sua­sive and cred­i­ble we per­ceive them to be. The opposite is sometimes true: for experts, uncer­tainty has a positive impact on per­sua­sive­ness and cred­i­bil­ity. [LG]
• Infomercial master Tim Hawthorne, in an interview on Mixergy, let us in on the many infomer­cial sales tech­niques that his data show are the most per­sua­sive. [LG]

The Brain, Our Senses

• Let’s start at the beginning with this fascinating evolutionary his­tory of the brain. [LG]
• And now something very modern on the evolutionary scale: the neuroscience perspective on what’s happening when we read. [LG]
• Two photons on the retina? Three molecules up your nose? Almost hearing Brownian motion? It blew my mind when I discovered how sen­si­tive and amaz­ing our senses really are. [LG]
• The brain, our senses, and a bit of psychology are all involved in a short extract from the book Art and the Senses that sum­marises the var­i­ous ways that our taste per­cep­tion can be altered by our other senses. [LG]
• The foods we eat every day has an effect on our brain (of course), and here’s a wonderful article where the author of Your Brain on Food briefly describes how some of the chem­i­cals present in ‘drugs’ such as choco­late, bananas, alco­hol and nut­meg affect us (with a bit of space travel included, just for fun). [LG]

Food

• Following on from that last post, one of the most used ‘drugs’ is caffeine. Isn’t it time you learn­t the opti­mal way of con­sum­ing caffeine, the world’s most-used stim­u­lant? [LG]
• So we know the varied ways that food can influence our bodies, but here’s a novel approach to a modern problem: recent research suggests that food can help us with avoiding jet lag (thanks to food-based cir­ca­dian rhythms). [LG]
• This past year saw the end of Mark Bittman’s wonderful NYT food column, The Minimalist. To round-up those thirteen years, here’s a list of Mark Bittman’s favourite twenty-five recipes from his Min­i­mal­ist years. [LG]
• Another drug, but a bit more dangerous than caffeine, is alcohol, right? Well the jury’s definitely still out and the research is fascinating but contradictory. The latest: abstain­ing from alco­hol appears to increase your risk of dying pre­ma­turely. [LG]
• And if you need another reason to get to the bar, it seems that alco­hol drinkers earn, on aver­age, 10% more than abstain­ers (pdf). Drink up! [LG]

Learning

• Are the names Mono­type Cor­siva, Comic Sans Ital­i­cized or Haettenschweiler enough to make you run for the hills? Maybe you should give them another chance, as long-term learn­ing and reten­tion improved when class­room mate­r­ial was set in a hard-to-read font. [LG]
• One to be aware of if you find yourself around infants and want to instil a good image: if you’re “unre­li­able” infants will quickly learn not to learn from you, opt­ing instead for adults that appear con­fi­dent and knowl­edge­able. [LG]
• And what about when the children are not around you, but in front of the TV? Go for Sesame Street over Teletubbies: for a child’s cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment, the medium (TV/games/books) doesn’t mat­ter but the con­tent is cru­cial. [LG]
• Something that’s worth remembering and taking the time to consider is the realisation that when we first encounter infor­ma­tion we believe it imme­di­ately and with­out thought, only to fully eval­u­ate its truth­ful­ness moments later pro­vided we are not dis­tracted. In other words: engineer a distraction-free environment when doing critical tasks. [LG]

Design

• Think about the meaning behind a lot of the icons you see and use on a daily basis. If they’re well designed, they’ve found what Lukas Mathis, taking his cue from the excellent Under­stand­ing Comics, calls the sweet spot between uni­ver­sal­ity and real­ism that allows for optimum recognition. [LG]
• Negotiation, psychology and programming: three of the five most impor­tant non-designer skills that every designer should master. [LG]

Technology

• Going for a coastal walk? Think about how you could estimate that distance, because that’s undoubt­edly the best anal­ogy for explain­ing the dif­fi­culty in pro­vid­ing esti­mates for soft­ware projects. [LG]
• If you’ve got just one tweet, here’s how to com­press and encode the Mona Lisa (and other pieces of art) to fit within a 140 char­ac­ter text limit. [LG]

Other

• So Amazon is destroying local bookstores and this is a Bad Thing, right? Maybe not. There’s an argument that Ama­zon is actually doing your local community a favour by competing so strongly with local bookstores. [LG]
• If you want to improve your writing, stop reading ‘rules’ and other such bumf. Instead you need ‘tools’, and here’s Roy Peter Clark’s fifty writ­ing tools to improve your writ­ing (Clark is the VP of The Poynter Institute). [LG]
• How did it all begin, how did we get here, and how will it all end? That’s what Ethan Siegel answers in his won­der­fully acces­si­ble and enlight­en­ing com­plete his­tory of the uni­verse (with pictures!). [LG]
• Curiosity, relinquishment, simplicity, precision and The Void: five of Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s twelve virtues of ratio­nal­ity. [LG]
• 1.4 cigarettes, 0.5 litres of wine, 2 days living in New York: these are all equivalent to 1 micromort. ‘Micromort’, you say? Yes: an under­stand­able scale and unit of risk, a micro­mort is equivalent to a one-in-a-million probability of death. Check out the entire list. [LG]

Guest Posts

Finally, this year I’m extremely grateful to two friends for taking over Lone Gunman during a vacation. Their posts were excellent, and I recommend you go back and review them:

• david (b) hayes wrote a wonderful series called How to Internet. Check out David’s series of posts.
• Andrew Smith published three posts on entirely different topics: storytelling, foreclosure and your career. Check out Andrew’s posts, too.

Thanks!