Author: William Gallagher

Weekend read (quite literally)

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The Atlantic on the origins of the weekend and of the purely historical reasons we have five-day weeks.

Do we? Only five?

Plus the ways you may and some are changing things:

If it’s man-made, can’t man unmake it? For all the talk of how freeing it’d be to shave a day or two off the five-day workweek, little attention has been paid to where the weekly calendar came from. Understanding the sometimes arbitrary origins of the modern workweek might inform the movement to shorten it.

Where the Five-Day Work Week Came From – Philip Sopher, The Atlantic (21 August 2014)

It’s not just me – the phantom phone vibration

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Countless times I will feel my iPhone vibrate with an alert or a message and I will get it out of my pocket – only to find nothing. No message. No notification. Nothing.

Up to now I have suspected that I am psychotic or that someone at Apple is gaslighting me. Granted, these are extreme possibilities.

But they’re better than the idea of my very soul so aching for human contact that I am creating my own vibrations by telekenesis. Which I’ve also wondered.

I sound like I’ve got the answer to why it happens but really I’ve only got reassurance that it happens to you too.

In 2010, a team of researchers from Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts asked 232 of their colleagues to answer a questionnaire about phantom vibrations from their cell phone (or, more correctly, from the area where their cell phones usually are). Of the 176 who responded, 115 — 69% — stated that yes, they experienced the disconcerting fake alerts like the type described above. The researcher’s plain-as-day conclusion: “Phantom vibration syndrome is common among those who use electronic devices.”

Feeling the buzz: where do phantom phone vibrations come from? – Dan Lewis, Boing Boing (22 August 2014)

Phew.

The article does go on to suggest reasons and answers and possibilities but I’m just happy to not be alone in this profound manifestation of a longing and a yearning that rests within my soul, like.

What causes it? There are a lot of theories. Discovery News suggested that “[i]t could be because cell phones produce electrical signals that transmit the feeling of vibration directly to a person’s nerves or simply because of the mental anticipation of alerts.” Mental Floss explains how the first of the two theories would work, likening it to “a physical stimulation similar to what happens when your phone is near a speaker and you hear that weird buzzing sound as it does a ‘hand shake’ with a cell tower and gives off some electromagnetic interference.” And the anticipation aspect is not dissimilar from any other sort of psychological conditioning — we are so used to our phones vibrating that our brains make it feel like it is happening when we “want,” not when it actually does.

One (I Mean Six) Better Alternatives to Coffee

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Guess which of these appeals to me most. If you’re needing a productivity or energy boost, do you:

a) work out at a gym
b) eat chocolate

If you chose c) Drink Tea then I knew I liked you.

Productivity blog Procrastinate Away argues that you should have green tea and I turn my face against them for that. Real tea, please. Is there a Campaign for Real Tea? Strictly speaking I would like a Campaign for Real Yorkshire Tea in a Teabag No Sugar and Just a Little Milk.

Excuse me while I go register the website www.cfrytiatnsajalm.com.

It’s not that I disagree with Procrastinate Away’s reasoning, they’ve just transgressed my religion, so.

Read why they say gym and chocolate and green tea and three more things – including one surprise about temperature – are so much better than coffee.

Apple’s reversible cable: why anyone cares

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I’m still not saying I care, but I have wondered. Hang on, let me back up a bit. Previously on Cable Watch… For the past week or so, I keep reading news reports saying Apple is about to release a USB cable that you can plug in no matter which way up you have it. Excitement just doesn’t cover it.

But, grief, how the reports keep coming. You’ll be able to plug it in this way or that way. Gosh.

So I liked it when the latest such report begins:

Leaving aside the fact that Apple-related rumors are a dime a dozen and tend to be about as reliable as horse-racing tips, you may wonder what all the hubbub is about. Sure, not having to “find the right way” to insert a USB cable is convenient, but it seems hardly worth so much press. So what’s the big deal?

Details that count: Apple’s obsession with reversible cable connectors – Marco Tabini, Macworld (22 August 2014)

The full piece then examines how such a new cable would actually fit in with an element of Apple’s longstanding design ethos. I’d say that I refuse to get excited but that’s implying I need any effort to stay fully and entirely blasé about the whole thing. Nonetheless, I enjoyed Tabini’s take on the whole deal.

Where the @ symbol came from – and USB, Power, Sleep, all that

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Readymag has what ought to be an irritating slideshow style feature about where various familiar computer symbols have come from. The @ is one, so is Bluetooth, so are ones you might not be able to picture but would recognise immediately: USB, Power, Sleep, something else.

It is a slideshow, you do have to tap through when really they could’ve done all this on one page, thank you very much, but it isn’t annoying because it looks so good. It’s just really gorgeously done. Take a look for yourself.

But when you have, go buy a copy of the book Shady Characters (UK edition, US edition), okay? That’s got a much fuller piece about the @ symbol plus very many more like the & and % that we know from real life instead of computers.

Ewww. That person on your conference call is probably also on the loo

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At the same time. I suppose you should count yourself lucky if he or she has at least muted the call first.

I don’t run any conference calls, I don’t think, but I take part in enough of them and I have been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Not that. It’s not like that. I have had a habit of writing something while on the call and, believe it or not, the vibration of my typing has somehow got through to the others. Busted, I believe is the phrase.

But I haven’t gone to the loo during one. I haven’t muted any. (I was once on the loo when Tony Robinson phoned me back about a Radio Times article but I shuffled to my office so fast that nobody ever found out.)

Apparently, though, I’m less than common in all this:

More than 60 percent of Intercall’s respondents admitted to doing other work or sending an email while on a conference call. More than half the people on the line are eating (hopefully on mute). Just under half are in the bathroom (hopefully on mute!). One in five are shopping. One in 11 are exercising. Six percent are taking another call. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about looking up Clayton Kershaw’s ERA+.

The academic literature doesn’t say that meetings are intrinsically pointless. After all, that conclusion wouldn’t make any sense. There are some questions that require input from entire teams, or from individuals from multiple divisions, and it would be absurd to call for dozens of one-on-one meetings rather than call a single get-together.

Study: Nobody is Paying Attention on Your Conference Call – Derek Thompson, The Atlantic (21 August 2014)

Paper not better than ebook for reading, except…

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I love ’em both, paper and ebooks. But it has been said and I have wondered whether I retain more from things I read on paper than on screens. Maybe so, but if it’s true, it looks like that may be more down to me than to the technology – except in one key respect.

Time.

A new study which found that readers using a Kindle were “significantly” worse than paperback readers at recalling when events occurred in a mystery story is part of major new Europe-wide research looking at the impact of digitisation on the reading experience.

The study, presented in Italy at a conference last month and set to be published as a paper, gave 50 readers the same short story by Elizabeth George to read. Half read the 28-page story on a Kindle, and half in a paperback, with readers then tested on aspects of the story including objects, characters and settings.

Anne Mangen of Norway’s Stavanger University, a lead researcher on the study, thought academics might “find differences in the immersion facilitated by the device, in emotional responses” to the story. Her predictions were based on an earlier study comparing reading an upsetting short story on paper and on iPad. “In this study, we found that paper readers did report higher on measures having to do with empathy and transportation and immersion, and narrative coherence, than iPad readers,” said Mangen.

But instead, the performance was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story. “The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, ie, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order.”

Readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper, study finds – Alison Flood, The Guardian (19 August 2014)

‘Course, I only read the full piece on my iPad so maybe it really says something completely different.

Pardon? Breakfast isn’t the most important meal of the day?

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But it’s when you break your fast. It’s the one when you eat after the longest gap since your previous meal. If food is fuel, that is when the tank is at its emptiest. Yet:

That’s reasonable, sure, if apathetic. Nutrition science as a field has in recent years been bisected over the importance of breakfast. The research speaks with more nuance than the lay breakfast pusher. But the new studies land a weight of evidence thoroughly outside the realm of “most important meal.”

In one study, 300 people ate or skipped breakfast and showed no subsequent difference in their weight gained or lost. Researcher Emily Dhurandhar said the findings suggest that breakfast “may be just another meal” and admitted to a history Breakfast-Police allegiance, conceding “I guess I won’t nag my husband to eat breakfast anymore.”

Breakfast Downgraded From ‘Most Important Meal of the Day’ to ‘Meal’ – James Hamblin, The Atlantic (22 August 2014)

Mind you, I do lurch to my desk with just a mug of tea at 5am. I’ll make breakfast for us around 8am. But sometimes I am actually in pain from hunger by then, I just don’t notice for a long time.

Read the full piece for just how split the vote on this is but also with reasons why you might want to skip breakfast. Just do it on your own recognisance, okay? No blaming me.

Okay, a third good way to learn something

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Watch a video. Maybe I should’ve looked for this last week when I started the new book, but.

Here’s a full Screencast Online tutorial for Scrivener: take a look at the opening to see just what this software does, then stick around for the rest before doubtlessly ending up buying it.

And then do take a look at the Screencasts Online site: for a regular subscription fee, you get to see myriad tutorial videos that are particularly well made.