Lone Gunman

I’m usu­ally quite scep­ti­cal about sim­i­lar lists, but The Inde­pen­dent’s 20 Things Every­one Needs to Know struck me as actu­ally use­ful as each list item is authored by a pro­fes­sional who works in that field.

And when you’ve got an arti­cle co-authored by the likes of Don­ald Trump, Jen­nifer Capriati and Larry King, how can you pos­si­bly resist?

1. How to change a tyre
2. How to sleep
3. How to build a fire
4. How to shine shoes
5. How to make a Martini
6. How to apply lipstick
7. How to negotiate
8. How to scram­ble eggs
9. How to hang a picture
10. How to ask for a rise or promotion
11. How to use chopsticks
12. How to iron a shirt
13. How to shave
14. How to hit a ten­nis ball
15. How to listen
16. How to ask some­one out
17. How to learn a for­eign language
18. How to shake hands
19. How to buy a diamond
20. How to con­duct a back­ground investigation

This inter­view between Tim Fer­riss and Derek Sivers—the entre­pre­neur who founded CD Baby—concentrates on The 4-Hour Work­week and pro­vides a good recap and overview of the con­cepts. The fol­low­ing quote, how­ever, feels more rel­e­vant to me now as it was when I orig­i­nally read the book:

To learn any­thing quickly, I approach peo­ple who did it cor­rectly and say, “I have an idea, but I don’t know any­thing, so can I buy you a beer and pick your brain? I’m really ambi­tious but kind of igno­rant.” Whether it’s lan­guage learn­ing or tango or kick­box­ing. That’s how I did all of it. That’s how I iden­ti­fied the rules of engage­ments, so I could decon­struct them.

Vot­ing Amer­ica con­sists of a series of ani­mated and inter­ac­tive maps (with com­men­tary) visu­al­is­ing how Amer­i­cans have used their votes since 1840.

Vot­ing Amer­ica exam­ines the evo­lu­tion of pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics in the United States across the span of Amer­i­can his­tory. The project offers a wide spec­trum of cin­e­matic visu­al­iza­tions of how Amer­i­cans voted in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion at the county level, from the begin­ning of the Amer­i­can party sys­tem though the mod­ern day. Here you can see his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments in Amer­i­can vot­ing pat­terns as they moved across the land­scape of the United States.

via MeFi

This list of band names that make online searches nigh-on impos­si­ble reminds me of McSweeney’s list of inaudi­ble email addresses (via Link Banana).

• !!!
• A
• The And
• The The
• The Music

Can the placebo effect work with exer­cise and fit­ness? Two Har­vard psy­chol­o­gists decided to find out, and the results were startling.

84 maids at seven care­fully matched hotels [were quizzed on] how much exer­cise they got. Fully a third of the women said they got no exer­cise at all, while two-thirds said they did not work out reg­u­larly. Langer and Crum took sev­eral mea­sures of the women’s basic fit­ness lev­els, which indi­cated that they, indeed, had the poor health of basi­cally seden­tary peo­ple. Then just over half the women were told an unfa­mil­iar truth: clean­ing 15 rooms daily — push­ing recal­ci­trant vac­uum clean­ers, scrub­bing tubs, pulling sheets — con­sti­tutes more than enough activ­ity to meet the sur­geon general’s rec­om­men­da­tion of a half-hour of phys­i­cal activ­ity daily. [The] con­trol group was left in the dark.

A month later, Langer and Crum checked back with the women to find, as they reported in the Feb­ru­ary issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, remark­able results. The aver­age study-group maid had lost 2 pounds, while her sys­tolic blood pres­sure had dropped by 10 points; by all mea­sures the 44 women “were sig­nif­i­cantly health­ier.” Yet there were no reported changes in behav­ior, only in mind-set.

The accom­pa­ny­ing graphic high­lights the find­ings, and the story was also cov­ered by Ben Goldacre in his Guardian col­umn, Bad Sci­ence.

via MeFi