February 2012
15 posts
Risk as feelings thesis →
Stanford economist George Loewenstein on how the brain makes decisions and something called the Risk as Feelings thesis:
He argued we overreact emotionally to new risks (which are often low-probability events), and underreact to those risks that are familiar (although these events are more likely to occur). So, as Loewenstein explains, “this is why people seemed to initially overreact to the risk...
For spontaneity's space →
Jonah Lehrer on the value of hurling people together told through a story of MIT’s Building 20 [referred to by MIT people as “the magic incubator”]:
The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right — enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways — the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions...
“To be a writer I think you’re kind of constitutionally disposed toward optimism.”
– Malcolm Gladwell cf. The Optimism Bias, or Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
The discipline of making →
The difference between making and meeting:
If you’re rushing to make a train, you have to be there before the last moment. Five seconds too late is too late. The cost of error is absolute.
If you’re hurrying to meet a train, though, there’s a soft deadline. Five seconds is no big deal. Thirty seconds might be annoying, particularly for someone returning from a long journey....
The love list
We are our own best advisors. Often, the best discovery of myself, then, comes from a serendipitous archeology of my own writing.
Today, as I consider love, I did some excavation on my writing to discover what I’ve loved.
The list:
Pronouns. Editing. Being edited. Pencils. Experiments. Superlatives. Gravitation. Almost happiness. Not being sure. Saying no. Illogical resolutions. Boobs....
The genesis of browser names →
Martin Beeby on the origin of popular browser names. On my browser of choice:
While there was a codename vote early in Chrome’s development, none were finally chosen (I’d love to know what they were). Instead, it’s said by Glen Murphy that they chose Chrome because one of the design leads liked fast cars. They then ended up sticking with the codename for the final project launch because 1. they’d...
Linguistic relativity →
How language affects economic behavior has been hotly discussed of late, primarily due to an unpublished paper from Yale economist Keith Chen on the same:
Chen […] thinks that if your language has clear grammatical future tense marking […], then you and your fellow native speakers have a dramatically increased likelihood of exhibiting high rates of obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor...
Odes to iPads →
iPad poetic practicum:
I prefer to fall asleep while reading, an excellent way to avoid those nocturnal thoughts that can suddenly jerk you into wretched wakefulness. On chilly nights, I love to pull the covers over everything but my head and read a book propped up against a pillow until I drift off.
You can only do that with the light on, of course, which means that I’d either wake up at 4 am...
Teammates →
Somewhere among E.B. White and Adam Gopnik there is Cord Jefferson:
I’ve never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I’d wake up in my 10 by 10 room, its window looking out over my building’s rusted trashcans, and somehow think I’d achieved another great victory. …. Eventually my fellow New...
In commons →
Chris Mizes on the seemingly quiet dredge as co-creation between the natural and its urban counterpart:
[T]his massive assemblage of global weather patterns, regional tourism, lunar gravitational forces, transportation infrastructures, urban escapism, geologic displacement, and ocean-floor ecosystems, the dredge becomes only a single point, a transient infrastructure of human desire. The dredge...
Weathering weather derivatives →
Reportedly, “weather derivatives” are not only a thing, but a growing market:
Financial contracts based on the weather have been around since at least the late 1990s. The contracts, many of which trade like stocks, are typically pegged to such things as rainfall and temperatures. But in the past few years, contracts specifically tied to snowfall have started to take off in popularity....
10 ways to be invisible, or rules for making →
Elmore Leonard with rules to remain invisible when writing a book that help show rather than tell. Number 10 and the unofficial number 11:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating...
“Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives,...”
– Brian Lam, The Wirecutter. cf. Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of...
The hill approach →
Seth Godin on the hill approach to career development:
Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it...