Lone Gunman

Does brib­ing your way into a busy restau­rant work as well as it seems to in movies? Is it even pos­si­ble? Bruce Feiler decided to find out by vis­it­ing some of New York’s most over­booked restau­rants with noth­ing more than a pock­et­ful of money (i.e. no reser­va­tions). His results were not quite as expected, find­ing that brib­ing hosts in order to get seated at upscale restau­rants is absolutely pos­si­ble and works more often than you may think.

Feiler’s adven­tures, detailed in an arti­cle for Gourmet, act as a more exhaus­tive guide than the Chow arti­cle on restau­rant brib­ing, but the con­clu­sion is the same: $15–30 per per­son, passed to the right per­son, can to get you into most restau­rants with­out a reser­va­tion (or help you skip a long wait­ing list) — but be pre­pared to get turned away and even occa­sion­ally get burned.

What else did Feiler learn from his exper­i­ment? Here are his “ten tips on tip­ping” (read: bribing):

1. Go.You’d be sur­prised what you can get just by show­ing up.
2. Dress appro­pri­ately. Your chances improve con­sid­er­ably if you look like you belong.
3. Don’t feel ashamed. They don’t. You shouldn’t.
4. Have the money ready. Pre­folded, in thirds or fourths, with the amount showing.
5. Iden­tify the per­son who’s in charge, even if you have to ask.
6. Iso­late the per­son in charge. Ask to speak with that per­son, if necessary.
7. Look the per­son in the eye when you slip him the money. Don’t look at the money.
8. Be spe­cific about what you want. “Do you have a bet­ter table?” “Can you speed up my wait?” A good fall­back: “This is a really impor­tant night for me.”
9. Tip the maître d’ on the way out if he turned down the money but still gave you a table.
10. Ask for the maître d’s card as you’re leav­ing. You are now one of his best customers.

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!

We should not hold Ama­zon in con­tempt for pres­sur­ing local inde­pen­dent book­stores to the brink of clo­sure and instead should embrace the com­pany for tak­ing advan­tage of inef­fi­cien­cies, fur­ther­ing a read­ing cul­ture, and–believe it or not–helping us ‘buy local’ more effectively.

In response to Richard Russo’s recent New York Times arti­cle berat­ing a recent not-so-well-considered Ama­zon pro­mo­tion, Farhad Man­joo takes a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the Ama­zon vs. independent book­stores debate, this time com­ing down firmly in the Ama­zon camp.

I get that some peo­ple like book­stores, and they’re will­ing to pay extra to shop there. They find brows­ing through phys­i­cal books to be a med­i­ta­tive expe­ri­ence, and they enjoy some of the ancil­lary ben­e­fits of phys­i­cal­ity (authors’ read­ings, unlim­ited mag­a­zine brows­ing, in-store cof­fee shops, the warm couches that you can curl into on a cold day). And that’s fine: In the same way that I some­times wan­der into Whole Foods for the lux­u­ri­ous expe­ri­ence of buy­ing fancy food, I don’t begrudge book­store devo­tees spend­ing extra to get an expe­ri­ence they fancy.What ran­kles me, though, is the hec­tor­ing atti­tude of book­store cultists […] when they argue that read­ers who spurn indies are aban­don­ing some kind of “local” lit­er­ary cul­ture. There is lit­tle that’s “local” about most local book­stores. Unlike a farm­ers’ mar­ket, which con­nects you with the peo­ple who are sea­son­ally and sus­tain­ably tend­ing crops within dri­ving dis­tance of your house, an inde­pen­dent bookstore’s shelves don’t have much to do with your com­mu­nity. Sure, every local book­store pro­motes local authors, but its bread and but­ter is the same stuff that Ama­zon sells—mass-manufactured goods whose intel­lec­tual prop­erty was pro­duced by one of the major pub­lish­ing houses in Manhattan. […]

Wait, but what about the book­stores’ own­ers and employees—aren’t they ben­e­fit­ting from your deci­sion to buy local? Sure, but inso­far as they’re doing it inef­fi­ciently (and their prices sug­gest they are), you could argue that they’re ben­e­fit­ing at the expense of some­one else in the econ­omy. After all, if you’re spend­ing extra on books at your local indie, you’ve got less money to spend on every­thing else—including on authen­ti­cally local cul­tural expe­ri­ences. With the money you saved by buy­ing books at Ama­zon, you could have gone to see a few pro­duc­tions at your local the­ater com­pany, vis­ited your city’s museum, pur­chased some locally crafted fur­ni­ture, or spent more money at your farm­ers’ mar­ket. Each of these is a cul­tural expe­ri­ence that’s cre­ated in your community.

That said, occa­sion­ally I like to pay a ‘pre­mium’ and buy books from local stores, but not for any of the rea­sons men­tioned above. Rather, I hope for that bit of lit­er­ary serendip­ity and hap­haz­ard dis­cov­ery that only seems to hap­pen in local independents.

Writ­ing by enumeration–writing a ‘list of n things’–restricts you to a struc­ture that is eas­ier to pro­duce and is eas­ier for read­ers to fol­low and com­pre­hend, but lim­its free thought. That’s one of many points that Paul Gra­ham makes in an essay dis­cussing the mer­its and dis­ad­van­tages of writ­ing enu­mer­ated lists.

One obvi­ous neg­a­tive that Gra­ham points out is that, in most sit­u­a­tions, lists of n things are used by lazy writ­ers not even attempt­ing to stretch them­selves, or read by read­ers who don’t fully trust the author to pro­duce an appealing-enough short-form essay. And of course, there’s the sound advice to almost always avoid lists with ‘the’ before the num­ber, as a list is rarely exhaus­tive and instead you’re likely being fooled into believ­ing it is (read: linkbait).

Because the list of n things is the eas­i­est essay form, it should be a good one for begin­ning writ­ers. And in fact it is what most begin­ning writ­ers are taught. The clas­sic 5 para­graph essay is really a list of n things for n = 3. But the stu­dents writ­ing them don’t real­ize they’re using the same struc­ture as the arti­cles they read in Cos­mopoli­tan. They’re not allowed to include the num­bers, and they’re expected to spackle over the gaps with gra­tu­itous tran­si­tions (“Fur­ther­more…”) and cap the thing at either end with intro­duc­tory and con­clud­ing para­graphs so it will look super­fi­cially like a real essay. […]

Another advan­tage of admit­ting to begin­ning writ­ers that the 5 para­graph essay is really a list of n things is that we can warn them about this. It only lets you expe­ri­ence the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of essay writ­ing on a small scale: in thoughts of a sen­tence or two. And it’s par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous that the 5 para­graph essay buries the list of n things within some­thing that looks like a more sophis­ti­cated type of essay. If you don’t know you’re using this form, you don’t know you need to escape it.

As a pur­veyor of fine hyper­links since 2008, I also feel that post­ing (to) a list of n things is also, in most sit­u­a­tions, lazy link-blogging. How­ever there are always some that will make the cut and get posted, and Graham’s essay helps one see why they might have been espe­cially appealing.

Among the many valid responses to the Quora ques­tion of why soft­ware devel­op­ment task esti­ma­tions are often off by a fac­tor of 2–3, Michael Wolfe, CEO of Pipewise, describes exactly why this is with­out once men­tion­ing ‘soft­ware’ or ‘project’.

Instead, Wolfe elo­quently pro­vides undoubt­edly the best anal­ogy I’ve ever heard for explain­ing the dif­fi­culty in pro­vid­ing esti­mates for soft­ware projects: a cou­ple of friends plan­ning a coastal hike from San Fran­cisco to Los Ange­les and start­ing their journey.

Their friends are wait­ing in LA, phone calls have already been made push­ing the date back…

Man, this is slow going! Sand, water, stairs, creeks, angry sea lions! We are walk­ing at most 2 miles per hour, half as fast as we wanted. We can either start walk­ing 20 hours per day, or we can push our friends out another week. OK, let’s split the dif­fer­ence: we’ll walk 12 hours per day and push our friends out til the fol­low­ing week­end. We call them and delay din­ner until the fol­low­ing Sun­day. They are a lit­tle peeved but say OK, we’ll see you then. […]

We get up the next morn­ing, ban­dage up our feet and get going. We turn a cor­ner. Shit! What’s this?

God­damn map doesn’t show this shit!. We have to walk 3 miles inland, around some fenced-off, federally-protected land, get lost twice, then make it back to the coast around noon. Most of the day gone for one mile of progress. OK, we are *not* call­ing our friends to push back again. We walk until mid­night to try to catch up and get back on schedule.

Of course, this isn’t exactly a new anal­ogy: it’s apply­ing the ideas behind Benoît Mandelbrot’s paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain?, pub­lished back in 1967, to soft­ware esti­ma­tion. Still, it works perfectly.

If you like Wolfe’s writ­ing style and want to read more, he runs a blog called Dear Founder.

Update: And of course, there’s always O.P.C.