Lone Gunman

The author of Bit Lit­er­acy (one of the Startup Bibles) on the secrets of book pub­lish­ing that they wish they had known:

• The pub­lish­ers are not doing it for the love of books; they want some­thing that sells.
• If your book will sell, it doesn’t mat­ter what you’re writ­ing about.
• Your main job — prac­ti­cally your only job — is to explain very clearly why the book is going to sell.
• “Orig­i­nal” means “risky,” which means “it might not sell”.
• You write the book, you pro­mote the book — in other words, you cre­ate the prod­uct and sell it. The best way is if you have a fol­low­ing online — via a blog or newslet­ter — that you can sell the book to.
• Don’t write a book for the money.
• Dis­tri­b­u­tion is not the same as sales.

• The good news is that there are other options than find­ing a publisher.

Mind Hacks has brought to my atten­tion a num­ber of inter­est­ing mirror-related studies:

Mir­ror Agnosia

[…] a con­di­tion where peo­ple lose their sense of reflection.

In these cases, the patient still has intact knowl­edge about mir­rors, they can describe what they do and how they work, but they can’t seem to put it into practice.

For exam­ple, the patient stands in front of a mir­ror and the researcher holds a pen over the patient’s shoul­der and asks him to reach for it. Most peo­ple would reach back­wards, peo­ple with mir­ror agnosia reach for­wards and bang their hand into the glass.

Mirrored-Self Misiden­ti­fi­ca­tion

[…] a delu­sional vari­ant where patients look into the mir­ror, see them­selves, and believe it is another person.

How Big is Your Head?

[…] the mir­ror image of your head (as it appears to you) is exactly half its true size, irre­spec­tive of how far you are from the mir­ror, a fact that few peo­ple realise.

They also found that most peo­ple believe the mir­ror image of their own head will grow smaller as they move away from the mir­ror — it doesn’t it stays the same. Yet most par­tic­i­pants cor­rectly realised that if they watched the mir­ror image of another person’s head, it would get smaller as that other per­son moved away from the mir­ror. Finally, only a minor­ity of par­tic­i­pants realised that the size of the mir­ror image of another person’s head would get big­ger as they, the par­tic­i­pant, moved away from the mir­ror. Con­fused? Me too.

Me three.

This type of stuff absolutely fas­ci­nates me and is why I read—and highly recommend—Sacks’ The Man Who Mis­took His Wife for a Hat.

Mir­ror Agnosia and Mirrored-Self Misiden­ti­fi­ca­tion. How Big is Your Head?

A list of startup ideas Y Com­bi­na­tor would like to fund:

1. A cure for the dis­ease of which the RIAA is a symptom
2. Sim­pli­fied browsing
3. More vari­ants of CRM
4. Web Office apps
5. Online learn­ing
6. Tools for measurement
7. A form of search that depends on design
8. New pay­ment methods
9. A web-based Excel/database hybrid
10. A buffer against bad cus­tomer service
11. Hardware/software hybrids
12. Fix­ing email overload
13. Easy site builders for spe­cific markets

This is only part of the list, and the full page goes into much more depth.

[…] when you read the list, you get a pretty accu­rate com­pos­ite por­trait of a startup: a com­bi­na­tion of relent­less preda­tor upon the obso­lete and benev­o­lent solver of the world’s prob­lems. As ways of mak­ing money go, that’s pretty good. Star­tups are often ruth­less com­peti­tors, but they’re com­pet­ing in a game won by mak­ing what peo­ple want.

A huge library of inter­ac­tion design pat­terns; from accor­dion nav­i­ga­tion to vir­tual prod­uct display.

[This library is] a ref­er­ence or basic ‘toolkit’ you can use when design­ing user expe­ri­ences. It is no sub­sti­tute for cre­ative design, it sim­ply seeks to describe what we know and have learned about solu­tions you will find abun­dantly on the web and even beyond. Every ‘solu­tion’ described in these pat­terns may suc­ceed in one con­text but may also fail in another. The chal­lenge is to under­stand why and how it depends on ele­ments of the con­text of use. I give you my opin­ion here, but my opin­ion is also sub­ject to new insight

The Psy­chol­ogy of Mirrors

Sub­jects tested in a room with a mir­ror have been found to work harder, to be more help­ful and to be less inclined to cheat, [and] were com­par­a­tively less likely to judge oth­ers based on social stereo­types about, for exam­ple, sex, race or religion.

“When peo­ple are made to be self-aware, they are like­lier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Boden­hausen said. “A by-product of that aware­ness may be a shift away from act­ing on autopi­lot toward more desir­able ways of behav­ing.” Phys­i­cal self-reflection, in other words, encour­ages philo­soph­i­cal self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you can­not know or appre­ci­ate oth­ers until you know yourself.

via Mind Hacks