If you’re thinking anyway, think big

From What Logos Do and How They Do It

I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven’t succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

- Peaches Geldof

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

Cookie Monster searches deep within himself and asks: is me really monster?

(Somewhat unrelated, but me really want to write whole Statistics assignment in style of Cookie Monster now: “Me run analysis. Me look at graph and say sample not normal. Me know it because of skew. Me hurt inside.”)

You only have to look at Michael Jackson to realise it’s probably best to live with what you’ve got.

Who doesn’t have a belly button?

Curtis, the director of the Hygiene Centre at the University of London, a co-founder of the Global Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, and all-round hand-washing aficionado, has not collated the final results yet. But even the most disgusting electronic message she could think of, “Soap it off or eat it later”, has failed to elicit a scrum for the soap. “I think what we need to do next is put up a poster with a big photo of poo on it,” she sighs.

Just in case anyone needed any further encouragement (!) to wash their hands:

Absentee numbers have plummeted at one school, George Watson’s College, in Edinburgh after it introduced mandatory hospital-style handwashing for all its pupils in January.

I do have to admit to having previously thought that the computer labs at uni could do with a decontamination chamber at the door. I’m not bothered by dirt in the slightest, but germs are another matter altogether given my complete lack of anything approaching a functioning immune system, and you only need to look at the state of the monitors to deduce the state of the keyboards. Maybe I’ll just borrow that poo poster…

This idea — that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice — surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

This extract from Malcolm Gladwell’s next book, Outliers investigates what it takes to become the best. In short, it appears to be talent, drive, time, practice — and a massive amount of luck.

The previous evening, my wife had presented me with one of her quarterly assessments of my progress as a human being, and the results were, as they so often are, disappointing.

Tim Dowling makes me read his whole column out loud, Saturday after Saturday. I suspect his wife may be the most amazing/terrifying human being known to mankind.

“The way people work and the way people communicate, openness and velocity and nimbleness and focus are much more valuable and I think that’s a very big shift.”

— Sam Schillace runs Google Docs and talks rubbish.