The General Theory of Not-Gardening A Major Contribution to Social Anthropology, Ontology, Moral Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Theory and Many Other Fields of Scientific Investigation Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not to garden without a theory is a shallow, unworthy way of life. A theory must be convincing and scientific. Yet to various [...]
A few days ago, I was reading a book about how ideas stick. What happened next shows just how sticky they can be. This is the passage from the book: A few years back, a group of hospital administrators asked the design firm IDEO to help improve the hospital’s workflow. The team at IDEO knew [...]
Richard Stallman is famous for his recursive acronym GNU – standing for GNU’s Not Unix. GNU is at the heart of the free software movement, leading Stallman even more famously to draw the distinction between free as in speech and free as in beer. It is the former which is central to his concept of [...]
Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist – is the splendid title of a new book due to be out in the UK in August. The author of Freakonomics has read an advance copy and pulls out an interesting paragraph: A good intuitive economist [...]
"The success of planning in conquering both intellectual and popular opinion is really rather remarkable, particularly if one bears in mind that the idea of planning … only surfaced in the second decade of [the last] century. For the previous hundred years it had been ‘liberty’ which had been emblazoned on the banners of the [...]
We tend to have two contradictory assumptions about new channels – particularly online channels. On one hand, they are the self-evident future, mores straightforward in every respect than the cumbersome, time-consuming and bureaucratic processes they will replace – and so wholly unsurprisingly, our customers will seize on the new opportunities just as soon as we [...]
A dreadful, but no doubt utterly normal support call to HP – posted with captions commenting on what is going on. It’s probably most depressing for being completely unsurprising. Call summary: proportion of call spent listening to hold music: 16% proportion spent talking to a computer: 15% proportion spent looking for and reading out serial [...]
Another one from Indexed. Now also, if very selectively, at the BBC. You saw it here first.
We attach a lot of importance (and social value) to invention and much less of either to the process by which inventions become part of daily life. Often, the real value is in the innovation although the value is ascribed to the invention – that’s essentially what patents do, and it is why patents are [...]
… don’t look at your wrist, unless you want to show your age. According to a survey from the unlikely source of a small US investment bank cited in the Guardian, only 10% of US teenagers wear a watch every day and two thirds never wear one at all. The implied argument is that telling the [...]