- How to start writing
- “Like a flea market or garage sale, let ideas feel cheap, light and easy to throw around. If you can do that, new work will get off the ground almost on its own.”
- The most underappreciated fact about gender: the ratio of our male to female ancestors.
- “While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.”
- Raymond Loewy
- Designer of the Coca Cola bottle, Air Force One, Lucky Strike, Greyhound Bus, Pennsylvania S-1 Locomotive, Exxon and Shell logos, NASA interiors for Sky Lab, and the Avanti, the only automobile to be exhibited in the Louvre.
- Typography in “House of Leaves”
- “The text of the book is arranged on the pages in such a way that the method of reading the words sometimes mimics the feelings of the characters or the situations in the novel. While characters are navigating claustrophobic labyrinthine sections of the house’s interior, the text is densely, confusingly packed into small corners of each page; later, while when a character is running desperately from an unseen enemy, there are only a few words on each page for almost 25 pages, causing the reader’s pace to quicken as he flips page after page to learn what will happen next.” [tx NM]
- iPhone Calculator and Braun ET66 similarities
- “Yet another great design tidbit that makes me love my iPhone more and more every day. The GUI is a definitive tribute to Dieter Rams and Lubs Dietrich circa 1977 ET44 and ET66 calculators by Braun.”
- Rich Text Editor vs. Safari 2
- “Dav Glass of the YUI team was in charge of building the new Rich Text Editor that was just released, and has documented part of the journey which includes how he managed to get this puppy working on Safari 2.”
- Videos that can change your organization
- “Stories are what change people’s lives, and video is a great way to deliver stories. The web is now exploding with free videos (you knew that) and many of them are powerful enough to make a difference (it’s not all salacious teen stuff). Here are a few to get you started.”
- HTML Entity Character Lookup
- “Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters. This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks, e.g. like an < or the letter c.”
Chad
on 24 Aug 07Regarding HTML entity characters, I’ve always liked Garrett Murray’s simple table of special characters:
http://graveyard.maniacalrage.net/etc/special/
Chris Woods
on 24 Aug 07CharacterPal from Taco Widgets is the best HTML entity utility I have come across. Plus you get a full Apple keyboard character reference as well.
http://tacowidgets.com/widgets/characterpal/
huphtur
on 24 Aug 07Another awesome XHTML Character Entity Reference:
http://digitalmediaminute.com/reference/entity/
Jan
on 24 Aug 07TextMate → cmd-& → 4
RF
on 24 Aug 07Ditto on writing. The digital photography approach to writing - type out everything that comes to mind, then throw out all but the good bits - is all kinds of handy.
Generally, thinking “what’s something useful to say?” rather than “what sounds good here?” helps—e.g., you can imagine you’re talking with a friend rather than writing an essay. And reading and rereading what other people have said on the topic tends to break you out of your own little world.
And people’s clever ideas don’t usually come while they’re talking or writing. I think what makes clever-seeming people seem clever is that they have a bunch of stuff stored up; thinking, writing stuff down, and generally reading and reflecting all the time (not just when you’re supposed to be writing) all helps.
Finally, you don’t need to be too attached to Writing with a capital W. Books, structured essays, and Slate articles are fine and good, but so are 100-word quickie blog posts, sections of Wikipedia articles, and the top few paragraphs of news stories. The world shares your attention deficit disorder, and spends more time scanning and reading short stuff than long essays. Least I do. (For instance, I haven’t read Scott’s essay :p )
And stay optimistic.
Glad to hear YUI has a rich text editor, too.
Mike
on 24 Aug 07@videos: it seems a bit odd that the #1 video is “All Marketers are Liars” – Seth Godin speaks at Google. Odd until you realize that the site linked to is ran by Seth Godin. No hapless self-promotion there.
Michael
on 24 Aug 07Uh, don’t all calculators look like that?
Jake
on 24 Aug 07The ipod calculator is such a ripoff on a watch I designed a few years ago…doesn’t apple know that the iphone is a blank slate?
Mike
on 25 Aug 07Articles and tips on writing are always appreciated. The best tip I ever got was: “write first, edit later”.
Out of curiosity, is Sunspots written over the course of a week then complied on one day? I’d like to see a, “How Sunspots is created” post.
ML
on 27 Aug 07Out of curiosity, is Sunspots written over the course of a week then complied on one day?
Yes.
I’d like to see a, “How Sunspots is created” post.
Pretty basic, just a collecion of interesting links we spot and/or discuss during the week. Readers sometimes submit ideas too.
ChrisFizik
on 27 Aug 07yeah, no kidding ….. stop giving Apple credit for not doing anything … they’ve just decided not to put any crazy design thought into a simple calculator interface where they don’t have to …... the only credit they deserve there is for realizing nothing had to be done
giles bowkett
on 27 Aug 07On the topic of that women/men ratio in ancestors thing, read some interesting research. The question of “who’s smarter, men or women?” was addressed with statistical analysis of IQ scores and not surprisingly researchers found that the average was the same for both groups. But what they also found was that the range was different. Women tended to cluster at the median, while men clustered at the extremes. That is to say, women were more likely to be of average intelligence and men were more likely to be either notably smart or notably stupid. The theory in the book where I read this was that evolution favors the survival of women but also needs a diverse range of intelligence levels, so it takes its chances on men and plays it safe with women.
It’s apocrypal, since I don’t remember the source, but interesting. The question is if more men are reproducing today than used to, will more evolutionary experiments survive?
Phil
on 28 Aug 07“Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.”
So, in other words, certain men were at least twice as successful mating than their loser counter parts. It’s high school all over again!
This discussion is closed.