I’ve been listening to Daughter a lot recently. The song-writing and production on The Wild Youth EP, is incredible. Youth is outstanding.

Interesting TED talk from Dan Ariely, backed with some intriguing experiments. His book, Predictably Irrational, is well worth reading.

BBC London recently reported that Transport for London may soon disallow cash fares on London buses. For the obligatory vox pops section of the report, the BBC appeared to be in Croydon, asking punters what they thought. In typical fashion, the producers/editors picked these insightful words from one commuter:

It’s not really good news for people who want to pay by cash

Are London buses set to be cashless? at ~00.25

This instantly made me think of Charlie Brooker’s How to Report the News, and gave me a great excuse to post it below:

Overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don't throw out information. If something is confusing, don't blame your victim—the audience—instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers

Edward Tufte in The AdAgeStat Q&A

The structure of the roman capital letter is simple, and beautiful. It uses clear geometric elements: the half-circle, vertical, diagonal, horizontal. It is based on a grid of square, half-square, quarter-square … it’s like a continuous rhythm of very simple form elements, and that gives the coherence.

Inge Druckrey in Teaching to See at 12:25

Gospel Oak, London.

Related: A History of Art in Three Colours: Blue

I realize that we live in a TL;DR culture … But it's really not ok to act functionally illiterate when you're not actually illiterate, when an advanced society that once put a man on the moon worked so hard to educate you.

Emin Gün Sirer

Related and well worth a read: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

The Feynman lectures (3 volumes) write about all of physics in 1800 pages, using only 2 levels of hierarchical headings: chapters and A-level heads in the text. It also uses the methodology of sentences which then cumulate sequentially into paragraphs, rather than the grunts of bullet points. Undergraduate Caltech physics is very complicated material, but it didn't require an elaborate hierarchy to organize. A useful decision rule in thinking and showing is "What would Feynman do?"

Edward Tufte