Lone Gunman

It’s been a quiet year on Lone Gun­man with only 76 posts pub­lished over the last 366 days: but the response has been as great as ever.

This year is a spe­cial one for Lone Gun­man as it was four years ago today–during the last leap day–that the first post was pub­lished. It’s been a great expe­ri­ence and the site has evolved a lot, as you can see if you take a look through my pre­vi­ous ‘in review’ posts (Year One, Year Two, Year Three).

And so the pass­ing of another year can mean only one thing… Lone Gun­man is four, and this is Year Four in Review; a com­pi­la­tion of the best things I’ve read on the Inter­net over the last twelve months.

Visu­al­i­sa­tion of the 50 most fre­quently used key­words on Lone Gun­man in year four.

Items def­i­nitely not to miss are high­lighted (prob­a­bly not through an RSS feed reader). [LG] denotes my orig­i­nal post.

First, the three most read and shared posts from the past year: Food-Based Body Clock the Key to Jet Lag, Inven­tive Ways to Con­trol Trolls and Opti­mal Caf­feine Con­sump­tion.

Rela­tion­ships

• A favourite of mine from this past year was when David Hayes (you’ll hear more from him later) shed light on the advan­tages of Internet-originating rela­tion­ships and how friend­ship cre­ation has evolved. [LG]
• It’s no sur­prise to most of you that I’m an intro­vert of sorts. This year’s addi­tion to the ‘intro­ver­sion’ tag is Carl King’s list of myths about intro­verts. [LG]
• On a larger scale, we delve into the research around Mal­colm Gladwell’s Tip­ping Point the­ory and dis­cover that ‘six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion’ is cor­rect, but there is no evi­dence for super-connected ‘trend gate­keep­ers’ (such as Gladwell’s ‘Con­nec­tors’). [LG]
• From soci­ety to the work­place, and I look at the win­ner of the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for Man­age­ment: beat­ing the Peter Prin­ci­ple by pro­mot­ing at ran­dom. [LG]
• Von­negut describes, like only he can, the nar­ra­tive arcs in our sto­ries and lives. Derek Sivers goes into more detail, explain­ing that this is why we cre­ate unnec­es­sary and non-existent dra­mas in our lives. [LG]
• Finally, one that I can’t believe I’ve not posted about before: David Fos­ter Wallace’s 2005 com­mence­ment address at Kenyon Col­lege. [LG]

Negotiation/Persuasion

• A mix between this cat­e­gory and the one above, I was fas­ci­nated by the devi­ous secret ways to effec­tively con­trol trolls and other abu­sive users on online communi­ties (i.e. the hell­ban, slow­ban, and error­ban). [LG]
• Moti­va­tion, Abil­ity and Trig­ger are the three ele­ments that are nec­es­sary to change a person’s behav­iour, accord­ing to BJ Fogg’s behav­iour grid that explains the fif­teen ways that behav­iour can be changed. [LG]
• I loved the story behind Syd­ney Frank’s marketing/branding strat­egy for Grey Goose vodka. The key? Nar­ra­tive sells. [LG]
• Nego­ti­at­ing? We already know the opti­mal start­ing prices for nego­ti­a­tions and auc­tions, but this year a researcher from that study goes into detail on nego­ti­a­tion tac­tics and the rea­sons why you should make the first offer. [LG]
• Com­mon wis­dom would sug­gest that the more cer­tain a per­son is on a sub­ject, the more per­sua­sive and cred­i­ble we per­ceive them to be. The oppo­site is some­times true: for experts, uncer­tainty has a pos­i­tive impact on per­sua­sive­ness and cred­i­bil­ity. [LG]
• Infomer­cial mas­ter Tim Hawthorne, in an inter­view on Mix­ergy, let us in on the many infomer­cial sales tech­niques that his data show are the most per­sua­sive. [LG]

The Brain, Our Senses

• Let’s start at the begin­ning with this fas­ci­nat­ing evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory of the brain. [LG]
• And now some­thing very mod­ern on the evo­lu­tion­ary scale: the neu­ro­science per­spec­tive on what’s hap­pen­ing when we read. [LG]
• Two pho­tons on the retina? Three mol­e­cules up your nose? Almost hear­ing Brown­ian motion? It blew my mind when I dis­cov­ered how sen­si­tive and amaz­ing our senses really are. [LG]
• The brain, our senses, and a bit of psy­chol­ogy are all involved in a short extract from the book Art and the Senses that sum­marises the var­i­ous ways that our taste per­cep­tion can be altered by our other senses. [LG]
• The foods we eat every day has an effect on our brain (of course), and here’s a won­der­ful arti­cle where the author of Your Brain on Food briefly describes how some of the chem­i­cals present in ‘drugs’ such as choco­late, bananas, alco­hol and nut­meg affect us (with a bit of space travel included, just for fun). [LG]

Food

• Fol­low­ing on from that last post, one of the most used ‘drugs’ is caf­feine. Isn’t it time you learn­t the opti­mal way of con­sum­ing caf­feine, the world’s most-used stim­u­lant? [LG]
• So we know the var­ied ways that food can influ­ence our bod­ies, but here’s a novel approach to a mod­ern prob­lem: recent research sug­gests that food can help us with avoid­ing jet lag (thanks to food-based cir­ca­dian rhythms). [LG]
• This past year saw the end of Mark Bittman’s won­der­ful NYT food col­umn, The Min­i­mal­ist. To round-up those thir­teen years, here’s a list of Mark Bittman’s favourite twenty-five recipes from his Min­i­mal­ist years. [LG]
• Another drug, but a bit more dan­ger­ous than caf­feine, is alco­hol, right? Well the jury’s def­i­nitely still out and the research is fas­ci­nat­ing but con­tra­dic­tory. The lat­est: abstain­ing from alco­hol appears to increase your risk of dying pre­ma­turely. [LG]
• And if you need another rea­son to get to the bar, it seems that alco­hol drinkers earn, on aver­age, 10% more than abstain­ers (pdf). Drink up! [LG]

Learn­ing

• Are the names Mono­type Cor­siva, Comic Sans Ital­i­cized or Haet­ten­schweiler enough to make you run for the hills? Maybe you should give them another chance, as long-term learn­ing and reten­tion improved when class­room mate­r­ial was set in a hard-to-read font. [LG]
• One to be aware of if you find your­self around infants and want to instil a good image: if you’re “unre­li­able” infants will quickly learn not to learn from you, opt­ing instead for adults that appear con­fi­dent and knowl­edge­able. [LG]
• And what about when the chil­dren are not around you, but in front of the TV? Go for Sesame Street over Tele­tub­bies: for a child’s cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment, the medium (TV/games/books) doesn’t mat­ter but the con­tent is cru­cial. [LG]
• Some­thing that’s worth remem­ber­ing and tak­ing the time to con­sider is the real­i­sa­tion that when we first encounter infor­ma­tion we believe it imme­di­ately and with­out thought, only to fully eval­u­ate its truth­ful­ness moments later pro­vided we are not dis­tracted. In other words: engi­neer a distraction-free envi­ron­ment when doing crit­i­cal tasks. [LG]

Design

• Think about the mean­ing behind a lot of the icons you see and use on a daily basis. If they’re well designed, they’ve found what Lukas Mathis, tak­ing his cue from the excel­lent Under­stand­ing Comics, calls the sweet spot between uni­ver­sal­ity and real­ism that allows for opti­mum recog­ni­tion. [LG]
• Nego­ti­a­tion, psy­chol­ogy and pro­gram­ming: three of the five most impor­tant non-designer skills that every designer should mas­ter. [LG]

Tech­nol­ogy

• Going for a coastal walk? Think about how you could esti­mate that dis­tance, because that’s undoubt­edly the best anal­ogy for explain­ing the dif­fi­culty in pro­vid­ing esti­mates for soft­ware projects. [LG]
• If you’ve got just one tweet, here’s how to com­press and encode the Mona Lisa (and other pieces of art) to fit within a 140 char­ac­ter text limit. [LG]

Other

• So Ama­zon is destroy­ing local book­stores and this is a Bad Thing, right? Maybe not. There’s an argu­ment that Ama­zon is actu­ally doing your local com­mu­nity a favour by com­pet­ing so strongly with local book­stores. [LG]
• If you want to improve your writ­ing, stop read­ing ‘rules’ and other such bumf. Instead you need ‘tools’, and here’s Roy Peter Clark’s fifty writ­ing tools to improve your writ­ing (Clark is the VP of The Poyn­ter Insti­tute). [LG]
• How did it all begin, how did we get here, and how will it all end? That’s what Ethan Siegel answers in his won­der­fully acces­si­ble and enlight­en­ing com­plete his­tory of the uni­verse (with pic­tures!). [LG]
• Curios­ity, relin­quish­ment, sim­plic­ity, pre­ci­sion and The Void: five of Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s twelve virtues of ratio­nal­ity. [LG]
• 1.4 cig­a­rettes, 0.5 litres of wine, 2 days liv­ing in New York: these are all equiv­a­lent to 1 micro­mort. ‘Micro­mort’, you say? Yes: an under­stand­able scale and unit of risk, a micro­mort is equiv­a­lent to a one-in-a-million prob­a­bil­ity of death. Check out the entire list. [LG]

Guest Posts

Finally, this year I’m extremely grate­ful to two friends for tak­ing over Lone Gun­man dur­ing a vaca­tion. Their posts were excel­lent, and I rec­om­mend you go back and review them:

• david (b) hayes wrote a won­der­ful series called How to Inter­net. Check out David’s series of posts.
• Andrew Smith pub­lished three posts on entirely dif­fer­ent top­ics: sto­ry­telling, fore­clo­sure and your career. Check out Andrew’s posts, too.

Thanks!

The small sam­ple size of Stan­ley Milgram’s small world exper­i­ment means that the the­ory of ‘six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion’ and the con­clu­sion drawn from it–primarily, the Influential’s the­ory pop­u­larised by Mal­colm Glad­well in The Tip­ping Point–could be deeply flawed. That was the start­ing point for Dun­can Watts’ research that led him to say “the Tip­ping Point is toast”.

So to research how ideas and trends spread virally, Watts (who is author of Every­thing is Obvi­ous, prin­ci­pal research sci­en­tist at Yahoo! Research (he directs their Human Social Dynam­ics group), and found­ing direc­tor of Colum­bia University’s Col­lec­tive Dynam­ics Group) ran large-scale repro­duc­tions of the small world exper­i­ment and hun­dreds of com­puter sim­u­la­tions that brought for­ward two con­clu­sions: the six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion the­ory is cor­rect, but there is no evi­dence for super-connected ‘trend gate­keep­ers’ (such as Gladwell’s ‘Con­nec­tors’):

But Watts, for one, didn’t think the gate­keeper model was true. It cer­tainly didn’t match what he’d found study­ing net­works. So he decided to test it in the real world by remount­ing the Mil­gram exper­i­ment on a mas­sive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 peo­ple, then asked them to ferry mes­sages to 18 tar­gets world­wide. Sure enough, he found that Mil­gram was right: The aver­age length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he exam­ined these path­ways, he found that “hubs”–highly con­nected people–weren’t cru­cial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email mes­sages passed through one of these super­con­nec­tors. The rest of the mes­sages moved through soci­ety in much more demo­c­ra­tic paths, zip­ping from one weakly con­nected indi­vid­ual to another, until they arrived at the target. […]

[His com­puter sim­u­la­tion] results were deeply coun­ter­in­tu­itive. The exper­i­ment did pro­duce sev­eral hun­dred soci­ety­wide infec­tions. But in the large major­ity of cases, the cas­cade began with an aver­age Joe (although in cases where an Influ­en­tial touched off the trend, it spread much fur­ther). To stack the deck in favor of Influ­en­tials, Watts changed the sim­u­la­tion, mak­ing them 10 times more con­nected. Now they could infect 40 times more peo­ple than the aver­age cit­i­zen (and again, when they kicked off a cas­cade, it was sub­stan­tially larger). But the rank-and-file cit­i­zen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

I can’t help but find it some­what ironic that, writ­ten almost four years ago, this argu­ment hasn’t really gained much trac­tion and Gladwell’s ideas are still dis­cussed ad nau­seam.

The devel­op­ment of the human brain is intri­cately linked with almost every moment of our evo­lu­tion from sea-dwelling ani­mals to advanced, social pri­mates. That is the the over­whelm­ing theme from New Sci­en­tist’s brief his­tory of the brain.

The engag­ing arti­cle ends with a look at the con­tin­ued evo­lu­tion of the human brain (“the visual cor­tex has grown larger in peo­ple who migrated from Africa to north­ern lat­i­tudes, per­haps to help make up for the dim­mer light”), and this on why our brains have stopped growing:

So why didn’t our brains get ever big­ger? It may be because we reached a point at which the advan­tages of big­ger brains started to be out­weighed by the dan­gers of giv­ing birth to chil­dren with big heads. Or it might have been a case of dimin­ish­ing returns.

Our brains are pretty hun­gry, burn­ing 20 per cent of our food at a rate of about 15 watts, and any fur­ther improve­ments would be increas­ingly demanding. […]

One way to speed up our brain, for instance, would be to evolve neu­rons that can fire more times per sec­ond. But to sup­port a 10-fold increase in the “clock speed” of our neu­rons, our brain would need to burn energy at the same rate as Usain Bolt’s legs dur­ing a 100-metre sprint. The 10,000-calorie-a-day diet of Olympic swim­mer Michael Phelps would pale in comparison.

Not only did the growth in the size of our brains cease around 200,000 years ago, in the past 10,000 to 15,000 years the aver­age size of the human brain com­pared with our body has shrunk by 3 or 4 per cent. Some see this as no cause for con­cern. Size, after all, isn’t every­thing, and it’s per­fectly pos­si­ble that the brain has sim­ply evolved to make bet­ter use of less grey and white mat­ter. That would seem to fit with some genetic stud­ies, which sug­gest that our brain’s wiring is more effi­cient now than it was in the past.

Oth­ers, how­ever, think this shrink­age is a sign of a slight decline in our gen­eral men­tal abilities.

via @mocost

As neu­ro­sci­en­tist Bradley Voytek points out, “we’re used to think­ing of our senses as being pretty shite”, and this is mostly thanks to the plethora of ani­mals that can see, hear, smell and taste far bet­ter than we can. “We can’t see as well as eagles, we can’t hear as well as bats, and we can’t smell as well as dogs”, he con­cludes… and that seems to be the con­sen­sus on every nature doc­u­men­tary I’ve ever watched.

How­ever our brain is a mag­nif­i­cent con­struc­tion (and our senses are equally as won­drous), and so Voytek tries to reverse this idea by explain­ing just how sen­si­tive and amaz­ing our senses really are:

It turns out that humans can, in fact, detect as few as 2 pho­tons enter­ing the retina. Two. As in, one-plus-one. It is often said that, under ideal con­di­tions, a young, healthy per­son can see a can­dle flame from 30 miles away. That’s like being able to see a can­dle in Times Square from Stam­ford, Con­necti­cut. Or see­ing a can­dle in Can­dle­stick Park from Napa Valley.*

Sim­i­larly, it appears that the lim­its to our thresh­old of hear­ing may actu­ally be Brown­ian motion. That means that we can almost hear the ran­dom move­ments of atoms.

We can also smell as few as 30 mol­e­cules of cer­tain substances. […]

These facts sug­gest that we all have some level of what we’d nor­mally think of as “super human” sen­sory abil­i­ties already.

But what the hell? If I can sup­pos­edly see a can­dle from 30 miles away, why do I still crack my frakkin’ shin on the cof­fee table when it’s only slightly dark in my liv­ing room?

It may not sur­prise you to hear that the answer to that ques­tion is atten­tion.

* For the Euro­peans among you, that’s more than a fifth longer than the Chan­nel Tun­nel’s under­wa­ter sec­tion (or Hyde Park to Stansted Air­port for the Londoners).

A recent red­dit thread about ques­tion­able jobs revealed an real-estate worker will­ing to talk about his expe­ri­ences fore­clos­ing on homes. He expanded his expe­ri­ences into a longer post that is elo­quent, emo­tion­ally charged and reveal­ing about the last­ing impact of the global finan­cial crisis.

[T]hey can get angry and defen­sive, tell me that they were never fore­closed on, tell me that I am tres­pass­ing and owe them $5,000 in “land use fees” for “using” their prop­erty as I walk to the front door. They threaten to sue, they threaten to call the cops, they say I should look under my car before I start it from now on. They send let­ters writ­ten in var­i­ous forms of Eng­lish — one time scribed in crayon — detail­ing their rights and how I am vio­lat­ing some mar­itime treaty from the 1700s. In my trav­els I have learned that if you copy­right your name you can’t be named in any kind of legal action, if you never write down your ZIP code then you aren’t a res­i­dent of the United States and that if I tell some­body that their lender is offer­ing them money to vacate while leav­ing the stair­case (yes, these get stolen) and dri­ve­way (yes, these get stolen) in place then I am guilty of slave trad­ing under some United Nations some­thing or other.

Why my job is to watch dreams die (via the excel­lent NPR Planet Money blog)