A Piece of Cake

Interesting article in Wired on willpower:

The reason our resolutions end in such dismal fashion returns us to the single most important fact about human willpower — it’s incredibly feeble. Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University. He recruited several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then, they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Shiv, is that all those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.

"Still, in spite of this dedicated activism, the Obama administration seems blind and deaf to the ongoing genocide in Sudan. In Mohamed’s words, “It is morally wrong to keep millions of Darfuris in the IDP camps for almost a decade, Nuba Mountain people trapped in the caves, Blue Nile people refugees in another country (Ethiopia) away from their homes. We see clearly this administration has made its choice. Yet history is taking notice."

Act for Sudan Co-Founder Susan Morgan in The Huffington Post - “U.S. Sudan Policy Is Killing Us”

http://www.wordnik.com →

New favorite: Wordnik. Well executed. Beautiful layouts. See myself using this a lot.

Many of us won’t be lucky enough to find that one career which reflects and aligns with our passions and interests 100% perfectly, but Jobs’ message here isn’t really about the traditional day job. One of my philosophy professors told his class once: “Procrastination is the denial of the urgency of death.” Spot-on. Whether you heed this inside or outside of your formal this-is-what-pays-my-bills career, remember the most important lesson from Steve Jobs’ speech: you can get hit by a bus or commonplace tragedy or swift disease at any moment; there is no reason not to venture everything right now.

Do the Work

Came across this gem on Ask MetaFilter:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A,” forty pounds a “B,” and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A.”

Well, [along] came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Let Facts be submitted to a candid world. →

Great Metafilter thread on the Declaration of Independence.

Hell yes, America.

That is all.

Quora: "What are the best metrics for measuring user engagement?" →

Good thread. In particular, like Joel Lewenstein’s argument for prioritizing visitor recency.

Cutting U.S. Funding for International Family Planning →

23,000 more children losing their mothers; 600,000 more unsafe abortions; increased maternal mortality. Someone should ask House Republicans why they think all of this amounts to an acceptable cut.

“Working Backwards”

Wonderful product development idea from Amazon (as described by Ian McAllister): write your ideal press release (make sure to be precise) for your product and service, and then work backwards to make the actual stuff match the press release description to the fullest extent possible.

I can see why this would work better than drafting a functional spec. Writing a press release forces you to think about your customer, and how you would pitch that customer. Even if you’re working in a small team, this method seems like a good way to ensure that your marketing, engineering, and feature development pathways are all in sync.