Newly Ancient (Links)

Smart People Cause Problems

2009-10-14T14:53:52-04:00

If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence...

That sentence, paraphrased: smart people started working on Wall Street. For most of its existence, Wall Street was mundane, run by Ivy League jocks with old money. It wasn't run by idiots, but it also wasn't run by geniuses. Then, with the rise in college costs and Wall Street income, truly smart people started showing up—the kind of people who would otherwise be doing precedent-setting legal work or breakthrough physics research. These geniuses weren't content with the easy wealth old Wall Street afforded—they wanted to experiment, they wanted to use their tremendous brainpower. And if they made boatloads of money in the process, that was just an added bonus.

The problem came when all that complicated math started collapsing under the weight of excessive greed and ignorant bosses.¹ An already complex global financial system become a tangled web of math which eventually unraveled. Some things, particularly economic and physical infrastructures, are best run by conservatively intelligent people who won't experiment. I don't want a genius doing my plumbing and I don't want one doing my taxes.

This excellent Op-Ed from the New York Times was recommended by John Gruber.

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Billions & Billions

2009-09-30T20:36:13-04:00

Every day, the news media confronts us with enormous budgets: $3,000,000,000,000 for the Iraq war, $2,800,000,000,000 for the financial recovery, $16,000,000,000 for Facebook. Except they're usually reported with the ambiguous numerical categories of trillion and billion. When your daily budget is a dollar, $10 billion and $10 trillion both look astronomically large—but difficult to compare. While I think listing out zeroes is helpful, despite the added space required (Hey, everything is online now anyways!), visualizations can make that comparison even easier. David McCandless has put together a good visualization of various world budgets. Though I would disagree about some of the categorizations, since government stimulus money is not actually lost, the boxes themselves are relatively useful.

Right: Visualization of budgets and other big numbers.

(Via John Gruber)

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Memorization Spacing

2009-09-07T04:49:12-04:00

Jack Cheng elaborates on a learning method developed by Paul Pimsleur for memorizing language vocabulary:

[Pimsleur] observed that the first time you learned a new word, you’d forget it almost immediately. But if you reviewed it again as you were about to forget it, each subsequent review would exponentially increase the staying power of the word. To put it another way, if you could only remember the word for 5 seconds at first, reviewing it after those five seconds would boost your retention time to 25 seconds, then 2 minutes, 10 minutes, and so on. At this rate, the tenth review wouldn’t have to take place until about four months after the first.

I've been employing a similar method for building my vocabulary (in preparation for the unavoidable SAT). Essentially, whenever I run across an unfamiliar word, I note it as an alarm in iCal set to go off 5 minutes later. Once prompted, I try to recall the word (and look it up if I forgot), then change the alarm to go off in 10 minutes, gradually increasing until it's up to a year. Right now, I'm working on writing some software to automate this process, including the ability to add words from my iPhone.

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La Premiere

2009-09-05T14:22:28-04:00

La Premiere is an excellent short film chronicling the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers, whose last name appropriately translates from French as light. Watching it was delightful way to spend twenty minutes.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

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The Paradox of Craigslist

2009-08-29T17:48:06-04:00

Wired has published an in-depth article about Craigslist that exposes the peculiar personality of the site, and its founder. I have never been a fan of Craigslist—its usability is terrible. The Craiglist management has a somewhat hypocritical stance. Supposedly, the site is simple because business growth isn't a priority; it's all about the users. Yet those same users (or potential ones) complain about how backwards the site is, with extremely poor technology running it. Worst yet, Craigslist actively discourages innovation by not offering any kind of API to external clients. Hopefully, just as newspaper classifieds were defated by newer media, Craiglist will eventually fall to companies willing to innovate.

(Via Merlin Mann)

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Musical Sorting Algorithms

2009-08-21T11:13:33-04:00

Sorting algorithms (like Quicksort) are frequently represented visually, but they can also be represented musically. Through guitars and drums, a UCLA grad student has created auditory demonstrations of sorting algorithms. Showing what sorting algorithms sound like would be an excellent opener for a lesson. These demonstrations connect an abstract concept to something we can hear, making it far easier to grasp.

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Murinoids, Cretins & Boodles

2009-08-15T23:59:22-04:00

Are you a boodle? (That would be a stupid noodle.) Perhaps prothodaw more fittingly describes you as a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank. The Oxford English Dictionary contains many of these amusing archaic definitions, including murinoid: resembling the mouse or its allies. Sadly, with the online revision begun in 2000, these definitions are going the way of the Dodo. In a recent column for the New York Times, Ammon Shea morns their loss and highlights some of the more humorous specimens. An excellent read for a lazy weekend.

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iPhone Customer Satisfaction

2009-08-14T15:13:19-04:00

A survey by RBC Capital and ChangeWave Research found that 99% of iPhone 3GS customers are satisfied with their phone. Of them, 82% are very satisfied. These numbers are simply astounding; only 1% of iPhone 3GS are dissatisfied. This shows just what kind of force Palm and Android are up against. Palm's numbers—with 45% very satisfied with their Pre—are excellent, but pale in comparison to Apple's astronomical customer satisfaction.

(Via Daring Fireball)

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Language Shapes Thought

2009-08-11T14:55:44-04:00

George Orwell posited that thought could be controlled and manipulated through the language we speak (in his case, Newspeak). Many other philosophers and scientists have pondered this question, while most politicians simply accept it as fact and use it to their advantage. However, there has been a disturbing lack of empirical evidence for this phenomena. A psychologist at Stanford has conducted a study showing that the gender of nouns in a language influence our perceptions of that noun. The French, who use the masculine pont for bridges, generally highlight their elements of power and strength, while Germans (who use the feminine Brücke) describe bridges as elegant and airy. You can see the bridge for yourself at NPR and see which set of adjectives matches your perceptions. Does this make English more neutral and accurate, since it largely lacks gender?

Via the excellent linguistic twit ThatWhichMatter.

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Health Care Chart Design

2009-08-11T14:29:54-04:00

In response to a horrendous chart by John Boehner, Robert Palmer released a well-designed visual aid to the Democrat's health care proposal. At its best, information design can help the general public to understand a complicated issue. At its worst, as demonstrated by the House Minority Leader, information design becomes a tool for obfuscation and political maneuvering rather than education. Instead of muddying the waters with absurd "death panel" claims and confusing charts, Republicans should commit to an honest debate about policy and ideology. Of course, that'll never happen: they'd lose.

(Via idsgn)

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