News

Lying and excuses: our route to creativity

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The always excellent Brain Pickings has an actually delightful piece about a book called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School:

…celebrated children’s book author Davide Cali and French illustrator Benjamin Chaud weave a playful parable of this childhood tendency to come up with excuses so fantastical that they become charming stories in their own right — a crucible of creativity and a sandbox for the young mind to play with the building blocks of storytelling.

One morning, the little boy is late to school and when his teacher inquires about the reason for his tardiness, he proceeds to offer a litany of imaginative excuses. Giant ants ate his breakfast! Evil ninjas ambushed him on the way to the bus stop! A massive ape mistook the school bus for a banana! His uncle’s time machine misfired and sent him back to the dominion of dinosaurs!

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School: A Charming Catalog of Excuses and an Allegory for How Human Imagination Works – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (undated but 5 March 2015)

Go get your lunch and have a read of the full piece.

Not convinced: making Sundays better

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Didn’t we just do this with Mondays? Now we’re attacking Sundays which, I grant you, are usually in a a bit of shadow because of the following Monday. And also they are nearly as boring as Bank Holidays. But there are ways to make them better:

Do Sunday on Saturday. [T]ake care of buzz-killing chores, errands, and commitments on Saturday, when you’re naturally in a better mood. This… leaves you open for ‘moments of unencumbered joy’ on Sunday when your psyche is in need of them most.

Become a forward thinker. [End] your workweek with a plan… Create a Monday-specific to-do list, line up necessary files, and tag e-mails that require attention.

How to Make Sundays Suck Less – Allison Stadd, 99U (5 March 2015)

Notice that citation is for 99U, not Real Simple. This is partly because I found it first on 99U but also because for once Real Simple is a sort-of real magazine: you go through it like someone has scanned each page of a print title. It’s good, it’s interesting, it’s just hard to link to a specific line of text.

So do go read the full 99U feature but then click through to Real Simple, would you?

IdeasTap closing down

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I wasn’t the very greatest of fans of IdeasTap but it’s still sad to see it go. The CEO has the details:

Today, I am the bearer of sad news. On the 2nd of June 2015, IdeasTap will shut its doors. It is a painful day for me, and for the whole IdeasTap team.

Over the last six years we have worked hard to make IdeasTap what it is today, and I am enormously proud of what we and our members have achieved together. Ultimately, however, we simply do not have the funding to continue – although we will honour all existing commitments to our members, partners, funders and suppliers.
I set up IdeasTap in 2008 amid the fast-growing global financial crisis. My trustees and I could see the impact it was going to have on young people leaving education and, in particular, we were concerned about those entering the arts and creative industries.

We wanted to do something about it, and IdeasTap was our response: funding for creative projects, unique industry opportunities, training, advice, online and offline networking, job listings and more – all for free.

The end of an era

Read the full piece for more of IdeasTaps’ history, how it failed and also a little about what’s happening next.

Jony Ive interview

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The Financial Times has an interesting interview and profile of Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple, the company that today announced details of its Watch. Ive is credited with the Watch and, says the FT, with getting Apple to its current incredible financial worth:

In great part, that valuation rests on the shoulders of a 48-year-old Englishman. Yet as he lopes towards me down the corridor, in his comfortable suede shoes, bright-blue trousers and baggy, long-sleeved yellow top, his kindly features creased up in a welcoming grin, those broad shoulders seem remarkably unbowed.

Ive is arguably the most influential designer in the world, and yet he does that slightly disingenuous self-effacement thing characteristic of confident people who say they are just part of a team. There is a gentleness about him. He talks quietly and articulately in an accent unaffected by two decades in America. Even when he describes those who copy Apple as little better than thieves, it is with a smile and softness of tone that suggests he would far rather the unpleasant subject had never been brought up.

The man behind the Apple Watch – Nick Foulkes, Financial Times (6 March 2015

Read the full piece.

UK pricing for Apple Watch

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Let’s cut to it. The one you’re going to get is the cheapest. Except the Apple Watch comes in two sizes: 38mm and 42mm. For once the smaller device is the cheaper – doesn’t it cost more to squeeze components down? – and that will cost you £299.

The 42mm one will cost you £339.

This price level is called the Apple Watch Sport and I am not a sporting kinda guy but I will pretend I am as the next level up is a big step. Oddly, the next one is just called the Apple Watch: there’s no qualifier, no extra word in the name. It has the same two sizes and the smaller is £479.

Then there’s the Apple Watch Edition, the gold one. That starts from £8,000.

Told you that you’re going to get the cheapest. I have zero problems with this in terms of the watch: I neither want nor can afford to spend £8,000 on a watch. But the standard straps on the cheapest one do look cheap. I don’t have zero problems with that, I have something just above zero. It’s just that I think they might be uncomfortable: they look uncomfortable.

Still, whatever watch you buy, you can buy other straps, they’re just ranging from doable to silly money.

Nonetheless, they had me since last year.

Read more about the Apple Watch including all the UK pricing details on the official site. You’ve got up to 24 April to save.

Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac Preview

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Quick version: it looks good, mostly – no, wait, here’s how I summed it up for MacNN:

Testing this new beta is, actually, slightly weird: the Mac versions of Word and Excel now look like the iPad versions. That’s mostly true when you first start them up and they present a dialog box with New and Open options, plus templates. Choose one and go into it to edit the document, and the resemblance fades a little.

One thing that made the iOS version of Office a pleasure to use was that it was pared back, that some of Microsoft Office’s more esoteric features were removed. That even makes the Ribbon toolbar more useful, and this new Mac version also tries to balance features with a more minimalist look. We’ll have to see what it’s like after weeks and months of intense use, but at first blush it feels better than it was.

There are points where items seem a bit oversized: certain icons in the Ribbon feel excessive, and intro text as you set up the applications feels loud. That’s not a bad summary of the entire experience of using Microsoft Office 2016; it mostly looks better, Word feels good to write in, Excel feels powerful.

Hands On: Microsoft Office 2016 Preview (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (6 March 2015)

If you’ve got a Mac and some time to kill, go get the Office 2016 preview here. It’s entirely free while it’s in beta and the best way to find out about anything is to use it. Do remember that it’s a beta, though: it’s not complete and it is always possible that you’ll lose work. So don’t do anything important in it.

Also, you could read the rest of my MacNN piece.

Your smartphone is making you thick

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Our smartphones help us find a phone number quickly, provide us with instant directions and recommend restaurants, but new research indicates that this convenience at our fingertips is making it easy for us to avoid thinking for ourselves.

The study, from researchers at the University of Waterloo and published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that smartphone users who are intuitive thinkers — more prone to relying on gut feelings and instincts when making decisions — frequently use their device’s search engine rather than their own brainpower. Smartphones allow them to be even lazier than they would otherwise be.

“They may look up information that they actually know or could easily learn, but are unwilling to make the effort to actually think about it,” said Gordon Pennycook, co-lead author of the study, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo.

In contrast, analytical thinkers second-guess themselves and analyze a problem in a more logical sort of way. Highly intelligent people are more analytical and less intuitive when solving problems.

Reliance on smartphones linked to lazy thinking — ScienceDaily (5 March 2015)

Read the full piece on your iPhone.