Twice recently I’ve seen two high-profile blogs write about weight loss techniques which I have seen refuted by professionals. Number one: targeted weight loss, the idea that certain exercises will remove fat from only certain parts of your body, which is just false. Number two: low-carb diets, which I thought had been shown to create long term health risks.
I hate seeing the same bad ideas being brought out again and again after they have been debunked. It reminds me of crop circles, which were revealed to be hoaxes years ago and yet continue to be talked about with awe.
At times, I’m sure these things are caused by a disagreement between experts, in this case health professionals, but also they can be caused by not being rigorous enough in our research. The idea of 8 glasses of water a day is another one. I’ve heard doctors give this advice, with no idea of where it originates.
The internet makes these problems worse. A good meme travels fast irrespective of how true it is. That’s what makes Wikipedia’s [citation needed] tag so important. But this is also a matter of personal responsibility. I hear friends criticise Wikipedia almost daily as unreliable, but the facts we find there should be easy to verify. We’re putting our intellectual eggs into one basket.
There are two sides to this and one fairly easy rule of thumb to remember: if you’re repeating someone’s idea, or if you come across a new idea, ask yourself “where does this come from?” and stop taking things on face value.
Tags:crop circles·weight loss·wikipedia
July 8th, 2008 · design
Tags:design·icons·Japanese
July 7th, 2008 · learning
Starting something new can feel daunting, but most problems of learning are knowledge problems. We feel unconfident because of the unfamiliar, because of what we do not know.
If you’re worried about something you don’t know anything about, learn about it.
If you can’t learn about it, it’s probably not worth worrying about.
Tags:knowledge·learning
Here’s a great post from Jon Tan about how to style paragraphs.
Tags:paragraphs·typography
You can always beat the big guy. If you’re starting out in a business, there are always some people, some companies that are big names, and it looks like they’ve got all the bases covered. But you have two big advantages.
First of all, when you’re small, you’re agile. You can change quicker than the big company. When an organisation grows it has a lot invested in its existence, and risks start to look less enticing. So it starts to play safe, it relies on what has worked in the past, it gets choked up in its own bureaucracy.
Secondly, you’ve got creativity. There will always be the new. Creativity is about difference, newness or even just rearranging. Maybe Google dominates search, but what if search changes? Auction sites might find it hard to supplant eBay, but how about changing the nature of online auctions?
I’m not giving you solutions, because the answers are far from easy. But a solution is always possible.
Tags:agile·business·creativity·ebay·google·startups
July 2nd, 2008 · goals
Money is boring. When you ask people what they dream about, what they really want, they might tell you that they’d love to win the lottery. That’s no kind of answer. If that’s your answer, you haven’t really thought about want you want.
In fact, this might not be about possession at all. Why are we thinking about things we can get? What about things we can do? Things we can be? These are more important questions. And it’s easier to become someone. Most of the time, all it takes is a decision.
Tags:ambition·goals·lottery·money
I’ve given it a little while to sink in, but I have to say I like it.
There seems to have been a lot of negative reaction to this, which might seem a small issue, but it’s always strange when a well-established company changes some part of its branding. It reminds me of the changes Apple made to their logo, from the rainbow apple to the glossy white.
In both cases, there is something I like about the original, something comforting, perhaps nostalgic. But this is a warning signal: I never like to make decisions based on nostalgia. There is something in our minds resistant to change and it fights to keep the familiar, even when the new is better. For this reason, when you make a change to anything, you shouldn’t expect a wholly favourable reaction.
I think in a few years this new look will be firmly entrenched and seem completely natural.
Tags:apple·change·favicon·google·logo·nostalgia
June 27th, 2008 · SEO
When you look for something on Google, it returns ten results on the first page. For the majority of people, this is all they ever see. They pick one and they move on.
For most search terms, there are millions of results, but most of them are never seen. This is a good thing. We can’t handle too much choice. By limiting what we see, Google has made their search engine much more pleasant for our minds. The abstract notion of trillions of web pages hangs in the back of our minds, but in front of our eyes lie ten simple alternatives, ten short lines of text.
This is good for the searcher, but less useful for the potential searchee. That is why, for so long as this remains the case, SEOs will fret over those top ten spaces.
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When you’re creating something new, something from scratch, it’s sometimes hard to know what direction to go in. I’m definitely the kind of guy who gets stuck for half a day choosing a font for three lines of text. Should that be italic or bold? And so on.
But there are things that I find myself saying (not always aloud) to keep myself from being mediocre. The next time you seem to have everything in place but don’t feel satisfied, try one of these:
- It would be amazing if…
- What is one step beyond the norm? What is ten steps beyond?
- What is the opposite of what everybody else is doing?
- What will make people stop and think?
- What can I take away? What is barely sufficient?
- Where can I exaggerate? How big can I make the focus before it becomes ridiculous?
- What if it was ridiculous?
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June 25th, 2008 · design
Here’s a company that makes things extraordinary. From striking package design to having a bold and inspiring philosophy.
The result is a lot of admiring fans whose lives and adventures have become linked with what, on the face of it, is only a cup of tea.
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