Physician that lost his surgical license (due to someone dying during an operation) who went on to perform over 4,000 lobotomies. He created a technique known as the icepick method which allowed for a lobotomy of the prefrontal lobe to be performed through the eye socket with minimal anesthesia. This allowed the operation to be performed at psychiatric hospitals rather than requiring facilities for surgery.

He also performed a lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s sister. At the insistence of her father to protect the political lives of John and Ted, she was given the surgery at the age of 23. Afterwards, she had the mental capacity of a two year old and lost the ability to walk. The Kennedy family covered it up and separated her from the family claiming she was “reclusive.”

An animated film from Studio Ghibli about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer that designed the famous Japanese ‘Zero’ fighter plane. One of the themes is the power of creation as passionate engineers (“engineers turn dreams into reality”) and the terrible consequences of their usage.

Using a standing desk improves job performance, work engagement, anxiety, and quality of life. Daily sitting time of people using standing desks is 83.28 minutes less per workday than those with traditional sitting desks.

Personally, I find standing desks help with concentration and being more present during meetings.

See also:

• Effectiveness of the Stand More AT (SMArT) Work intervention: cluster randomised controlled trial, a year long study from University of Leicester on the psychological health effects of standing desks

PQ

In Hollywood set design, you need to optimize in a way that optimizes for the most impact on screen–money spent off screen is effectively useless to the end result, the film.

This is a good analogy for product work. Product work is hard because it necessitates change and therefore can involve significant internal effort (off screen to continue the analogy) to produce the end result (on screen), even if it’s small.

See also:

• patio11’s blog post ‘What Working At Stripe Has Been Like’ which talks about working in hypergrowth and why ‘off screen’ effort/spend is natural and necessary.

Cubic feet per square meter is a measurement of how much air breathability and air resistance a fabric has. A higher CFM is more breathable, but less wind resistant and a lower CFM is less breathable and more air resistant. For example, a fleece typically has a very high CFM (200+), but usually does not block the wind. Similarly a windbreaker has a low CFM (3-5), but can feel like wearing a garbage bag under high exertion.

See also:

• This comment on r/Ultralight with a list of CFM ratings for many jackets

The point in which the lineage of any two people currently alive can be traced to the same common ancestor. This point is believed to be between 5300 and 2200 B.C. While family trees are believed to be exponential, in reality there is much more inbreeding in human history. This results in a much narrower family tree and, as a result, all humans are more closely related.

The most famous personal injury attorneys from New York due to non-stop advertising, Cellino & Barnes created a breakthrough business that was very successful (each partner was making $10MM per year at one point). They learned that most people don’t have money to hire a lawyer upfront so they charge a third of any monetary rewards from a settlement. They also realized that they need to stay top of mind for when an injury happens.

Advertising seems to fit so well is that 1) the avg person doesn’t know many lawyers 2) when you need one you need them immediately 3) advertising on TV constantly reinforces the association of their firm and ‘personal injury’ which improves recall at exactly the right moment.

Source: Cellino & Barnes Breakup

See also:

• Ads work via cultural imprinting

The Nova SDS011 sensor is an inexpensive ($30) air quality sensor that uses laser scattering to detect particles at 2.5 and 10 nanometers (PM2.5 and PM10 respectively). By taking the concentration of particles you can calculate the air quality index.

Air quality index is calculated from the value of a pollutant concentration (pm2.5, pm10) and a table representing quality based on a standard. Each country has their own guidelines. For example, India’s ‘Poor’ category is equivalent to ‘Unhealthy’ in the US. It’s also interesting that it’s framed as pollution on India and China, but it’s framed as a health concern in the US.

Example of calculating air quality index using python for pm2.5 with the EPA’s breakpoints:

PM25_CONCENTRATION = 70.0

# A lookup table of concentration high, low, index high, low, and label
PM25_CATEGORIES = [
    (0.0, 12.0, 0, 50, "good"),
    (12.1, 35.4, 51, 100, "moderate"),
    (35.5, 55.4, 101, 150, "unhealthy for sensitive groups"),
    (55.5, 150.4, 151, 200, "unhealthy"),
    (150.5, 250.4, 201, 300, "very unhealthy"),
    (250.5, 350.4, 301, 400, "hazardous"),
    (350.5, 500.4, 401, 500, "hazardous"),
]

# Find the breakpoints using the table
if PM25_CONCENTRATION > 500.4:
    category = PM25_CATEGORIES[-1]
else:
    category = None
    for c in PM25_CATEGORIES:
        low, high, *_ = c
        if PM25_CONCENTRATION >= low and PM25_CONCENTRATION <= high:
            category = c
            break

c_low, c_high, i_low, i_high, _ = category

aqi = ((i_high - i_low) / (c_high - c_low)) * (PM25_CONCENTRATION - c_low) + i_low
aqi = round(aqi)

print(f"The air quality index is {aqi}")

The air quality index is 158

The price of solar panels drops 20% for every time the quantity shipped doubles. This is similar to Moore’s Law for computing power and shows the increased efficiency as more experience is gained by an industry. This relies heavily on early buyers willing to buy at a premium thereby funding the future efficiency.

This can be applied more broadly to any emerging technology. If Swanson’s Law holds, increasing the amount of early buyers will accelerate the industry towards lower, more accessible prices. For example, in the case of climate change, buying early carbon capture technologies at scale could accelerate progress in reducing overall greenhouse emissions.

The user’s evaluation of the quality of a product is not separate from the aesthetics. This is especially important for products that are not observable by the user e.g. software or infrastructure. They can’t physically inspect the quality and rely on other signals as a proxy—the website, UX, documentation, etc. This isn’t strictly logical (you can simultaneously have a beautiful website and a terrible product), but an important factor nonetheless.

The idea that, as a result of mass surveillance, data collection and social media are leading to behavioral changes. People are filtering more of what they say and are less likely to engage with novel ideas or be wrong for fear of negative effects (everything from getting a job to a loan or even proper health care).

The solution argued by https://www.socialcooling.com is privacy since privacy is the right to be imperfect.

However this doesn’t fully explain what we actually see today—an acceleration of extreme ideas and fringe groups. Either people are not aware of the consequences or don’t care. The opposite might be true—it’s actually social heating and people are becoming more extreme as a result of the loss of privacy.

If everything is public or under surveillance, actions could have negative externalities. This puts more pressure on people to be perfect and project the values of the in-group. Privacy is a solution by providing space free from judgement individually or as small groups to explore ideas and take certain actions without fear of judgment.

See also:

• Social cooling

Using one’s natural tendency to procrastinate in a way that’s productive. Assuming the highest priority item on a todo list is the least likely to get done, then the items below it are much more appealing to do as a means of procrastinating. Therefore, being thoughtful about what is the highest priority item (it must not actually be that important) is a way of stimulating productivity of everything else. If the top priority task actually does become important and needs to get done then find an item that is higher priority.

Read the original description from John Perry

Neglected UX is when parts of the user experience are not quite broken, but subtly incongruous. For example, there might be elements using slightly different styles or UI patterns that are out of sync with the product.

The neglected UX within an app tends to add up over time (UX entropy) before it is noticeable enough to become a high priority. Addressing the issues with neglected UX tends to take a lot of time and is rarely apparent to others.

Famed animated film studio that created such popular films as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and much more. Their films are often characterized by a magical or surreal nature and detailed, hand-drawn scenes that are visually stunning.

Most people associate the creative force behind the feature films with directors/producers/writers Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki, and Isao Takahata. This is a good example of a cornered resource from the business strategy book 7 Powers. The absence of these people on the resulting work is easily recognized by fans of the films.

A book about business strategy by Hamilton Helmer which outlines seven ‘powers’ that are the cause of successful companies. Usually you see a few of these elements working in concert. For example Pixar exhibits process power (developing computer generated films) and a cornered resource (writers, directors, and Steve Jobs).

The seven powers are:

• Economies of scale
• Network effects
• Counter positioning
• Switching costs
• Process power
• Branding
• Cornered resource

Technology companies that are small and private, writing software on their own terms. They don’t operate in big markets, don’t take money from VCs, and intend to stay small and independent. The primary examples are Pinboard (bookmarking service), Tarsnap (encrypted backups), Sqlite (database), and Sublime Text (text editor).

See also:

• Blog post about small tech

Change is difficult for people. Solving product problems requires change. The default behavior is resistance to change. This is what makes working on products so difficult, even more for mature products. Successful product work not only requires finding the right problem and implementing the right solution, but also pushing against status quo preserving behavior from within your organization and users.

When AI comes about it will be colored by the creators. Data used to train and techniques for replicating traits we associate with intelligence will encode the culture and philosophy into the AI. In that way, we will likely have an “American AI” that is significantly different to AI created elsewhere in the world.

Listen to Genevieve Bell discussing the fourth industrial revolution (AI) on the Long Now podcast.

See also:

• Recent technological advancement is in simulation

The scripts used to embed media such as tweets and YouTube videos include a full complement of ad tracking and third-party cookies which are used to follow visitors around the internet to serve them ads and collect more data.

Privacy conscious website owners can use a tool like Blacklight to verify whether or not they are unwittingly contributing to intrusive ad tracking.

Blacklight is a tool from The Markup that inspects websites for ad trackers, third party cookies, session recording, keylogging, and other privacy compromising technology. It reveals the pervasiveness of these techniques and gives privacy conscious users a way to understand, in plain language, in they will be tracked and by whom.

You don’t understand a distributed computing problem until you get it to fit on a single machine first.

Speeding up computing can be thought of as three different approaches: high (vertically scaling e.g. more RAM and faster CPU/storage), wide (distributed work), and deep (refactoring).

I saw this happen at work where an engineer rewrote a Spark job distributed over many machines to a single large machine calculating the same output using Unix commands and pipes faster than the distributed version.

Read the source comment on HN