Lone Gunman

Here’s a great check­list for when you’re devel­op­ing and launch­ing a new web­site, as pro­duced by Dan Zam­bonini of Box UK. Top­ics cov­ered include:

• Pre-Launch
  • Con­tent and Style
  • Stan­dards and Validation
  • Search Engine Vis­i­bil­ity, SEO and Metrics
  • Func­tional Testing
  • Security/Risk
  • Per­for­mance
  • Fin­ish­ing Touches
• Post-Launch
  • Mar­ket­ing
  • Ongo­ing

via @zambonini

These two sto­ries have had a pow­er­ful effect on me:

Why econ­o­mist Alex Tabar­rok (of Mar­ginal Rev­o­lu­tion) decided to travel to Machu Pic­chu spon­ta­neously:

At lunch with Bryan and Tyler last week the ques­tion arose as to what we would do dif­fer­ently if we were immor­tal.  […]  I answered that I would travel more.

Later the ques­tion was asked, what would you do dif­fer­ently if you found out you had only a short time to live.  I answered again that I would travel more.  […] I real­ized there was a prob­lem.  Given that I would travel more if I was to live either less or more the prob­a­bil­ity that I was at just that level of mor­tal­ity that I should not be trav­el­ing now must be van­ish­ingly small.

I leave for a solo trek to Machu Pic­chu July 25.

Why Ben Cor­man (of Rudius Media) is stay­ing in Panama longer than ini­tially antic­i­pated:

I don’t know why I’m doing this. Cer­tainly not because it’s easy. We run out of every­thing here. […] And now it’s rained for five days straight. […] Par­adise is start­ing to feel like a prison cell.

But given the chance to spend three months liv­ing in Panama, how could I say no? I’d spend the rest of my life won­der­ing what I’d missed.

[…] If you’re the kind of per­son who feels uncom­fort­able in busi­ness casual and spends every sec­ond of sit­ting behind a desk wish­ing, des­per­ately for some­thing, any­thing else, then there really isn’t a choice. Some peo­ple make it work. Some peo­ple can find the happy medium between who they are dur­ing their work week and who they are out­side of it. I’d prob­a­bly be a hap­pier per­son if I’d found that bal­ance but in 31 years, it’s eluded me every step of the way. Instead of buck­ling down and doing what­ever I’m sup­posed to be, I’m always run­ning off to do what­ever I want.

And so I guess that’s why I’m here. In the end I didn’t really have a choice.

The appre­ci­a­tion of art is not cul­tur­ally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dut­ton as elab­o­rated in his lat­est book, The Art Instinct. In a gen­er­ally pos­i­tive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many lim­i­ta­tions of Dutton’s con­jec­ture as well as sum­ma­riz­ing it’s main points:

Draw­ing on Charles Darwin’s sec­ond great book, The Descent of Man, and Selec­tion in Rela­tion to Sex, Dut­ton argues that art, like broad shoul­ders in a man and a nar­row waist in a woman, facil­i­tates seduc­tion. We tell sto­ries, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pic­tures in order to find a mate and, hav­ing found one, pro­duce chil­dren. We value art because, Dut­ton claims, it may be made of rare and valu­able mate­ri­als and require much skill to pro­duce. Peo­ple value wealth and skill in choos­ing a mate. We can add to Dutton’s argu­ment the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pic­tures of women who had been rated by adults as either attrac­tive or unat­trac­tive, the babies looked much longer at the attrac­tive ones.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily

By com­par­ing cus­tomers’ usage to that of oth­ers in the neigh­bour­hood, util­ity com­pa­nies are start­ing to reduce their energy con­sump­tion. This, from an exper­i­ment con­ducted by Robert Cial­dini, author of Influ­ence:

In a 2004 exper­i­ment, he and a col­league left dif­fer­ent mes­sages on door­knobs in a middle-class neigh­bor­hood north of San Diego. One type urged the res­i­dents to con­serve energy to save the earth for future gen­er­a­tions; another empha­sized finan­cial sav­ings. But the only kind of mes­sage to have any sig­nif­i­cant effect […] was one that said neigh­bors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

You can see how effec­tive this is just by look­ing at the graphic used to head the Times’ arti­cle. This has now got me won­der­ing how this could be used with recycling.

via Mind Hacks

Jeff Jarvis agrees with teacher Mark Pullen’s opin­ion that the edu­ca­tion sys­tem should be mod­i­fied to pro­duce port­fo­lios instead of, or in addi­tion to, qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

Per­haps we need to sep­a­rate youth from edu­ca­tion. Edu­ca­tion lasts for­ever. […] What if we told stu­dents that, like Google engi­neers, they should take one day a week or one course a term or one year in col­lege to cre­ate some­thing: a com­pany, a book, a song, a sculp­ture, an inven­tion? School could act as an incu­ba­tor, advis­ing, push­ing, and nur­tur­ing their ideas and effort. What would come of it? Great things and mediocre things. But it would force stu­dents to take greater respon­si­bil­ity for what they do and to break out of the strait­jacket of uni­for­mity. It would make them ask ques­tions before they are told answers. It could reveal to them their own tal­ents and needs. The skep­tic will say that not every stu­dent is respon­si­ble enough or a self-starter. Per­haps. But how will we know stu­dents’ capa­bil­i­ties unless we put them in the posi­tion to try? And why struc­ture edu­ca­tion for every­one around the low­est denom­i­na­tor of the few?