Lorks: people are sailing off with Indonesian islands. 24 since 2005. And who knew that the Child of Krakatoa is rising at 1cm each day?
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Sandbox WordPress theme
Nicely simple WordPress theme for use as a base for a more sophisticated look. Used on Lords of the Blog.
Making decisions and meetings work
Lots of good stuff in this McK Quarterly interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein and interviews on strategic decision making.
- The premortem: we’re in the future looking back, why did this project fail so badly?
- Avoid correlation errors: get people to vote on an issue before the meeting starts. Or maybe use the balance sheet approach.There is lots more detail on avoiding bias.
- Check that information is coming from multiple sources, not the same repackaged.
- Force choices: try three people for a new job, use a portfolio approach for projects
Single double summer time
Egads. I thought the whole point was to get rid of the clocks going back and forth (and standardise on Summer Time), not to just shunt it forward an hour. And what a name! I doubt I could sell single double cream and get away with it. To be fair, the benefits are the main thing, rather than any inconvenience in changing clocks, and I think the name is single / double summer time, which makes more sense.
Zoophiles
Zoophiles Make Scientists Rethink Human Sexuality is a fascinating read. You’ll learn what a plethysmograph is, for a start. And after you’ve got over your inbuilt “yuk” you might think seriously if there is a genuine sexual orientation in there.
Gridworks
Freebase Gridworks would have been amazingly useful at Datamonitor. Really user-friendly ways of cleaning up large quantities of grid-shaped data.
Romantic horror films
A timely reminder that the Twitter comedy hashtags are so derivative of excellent work with years and years of history: FARKers nail this photoshop contest.
Unfortunate byline
Thanks to Ben for pointing out this cracking byline in the Times article Vienna Boys’ Choir caught up in sex abuse scandals.
Is this nominative determinism by proxy? It will be the first hit on Google for it, so maybe I have invented something. Huzzah
Organise your desktop
Ben asks me to post this cracking desktop wallpaper.
There’s a blank one, should you wish to try it yourself.
Go Nutt, go!
“Hand out mephedrone in nightclubs“ is how Nutt’s most recent intervention has been presented. That’s not quite what he said. Onwards, legalisation.