But different cultures group colors differently. This chart based on research by Gibson and Conway shows the difficulty of communicating a color. The colors to the left are easiest to communicate since they are most distinct (white and red in English). 2/n theconversation.com/languages-dont…
But the emotional associations with colors are remarkably similar across cultures. 3/n
You can test your own ability to differentiate among colors by sight with this puzzle game. 4/n kuku-kube.com
The rest of the thread describes real colors, but this image can generate impossible-to-render colors too:
🔵Stygian blue: a blue both totally blue & impossibly black
🔴Self-luminous red: a red that is brighter than white
🟠Hyperbolic orange: more orange than 100% orange color 5/
And there is always, always an appropriate xkcd, in this case a survey determining consensus viewsof what name to give each color rendered on a screen. blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/col…
Colors can have a big influence on how we feel about the world. Here’s an example of how much choosing the right color matters, even where you wouldn’t expect it. 👇
What is most powerful economic knowledge for individuals to understand to improve their lives? This paper surveyed every economist in Sweden and found the overwhelming choice was... opportunity cost. The paper: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
So here is a thread on opportunity cost....
Opportunity cost is what you give up when you make a choice. Not just what you didn't buy with the 💰 you spent, but also what you could have done with that 💰 if you saved it for the future. Since you must have chosen the best option, opportunity cost is your next best choice. 2
Except that it often isn't! A lot of research has shown that people neglect opportunity cost when making choices. This leads to consumers falling prey to bad marketing, policy makers making short-sighted decisions, etc. @danariely summarizes this in his interview with Reuters. 3
Thing to never do again: open offices. In addition to being terrible places to work, (they actually lower communication!) they are 🦠parties . Sick days are 62% higher than individual offices. Even group offices are better, six person rooms have 30% less sick days than open plans
Maybe you don't care about getting sick, because you just want to talk to people. But open offices also kill socialization! Face-to-face communication among office workers actually drops by 70%(!!) in open plan offices, since people hide away from others. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.109…
Also, lets talk noise. Open office noise is a really subtle thing. In surveys, people think that they can concentrate in open office environments, but study after study shows that they are much worse at concentrating than they think. And noise cancelling headphones don't help...
Ever wonder why Monopoly feels unfair? It was supposed to teach why capitalism as bad! The original game started similarly, but any two players could vote to switch to progressive rules that nationalized the utilities & railroad and switched the "Jail” space to“Free College" 1/
The game was invented by feminist & polymath Elizabeth Magie, who patented it in 1903. But variants spread quickly, and it was even used in Wharton economics classes to "to show the antisocial nature of monopoly,” before being co-opted by the Parker Bros. simulations.wharton.upenn.edu/2016/03/10/mon…
Also the original names of the properties: “Lord Blueblood’s Estate,” “The Soakum Lighting Co.,” and “Hogg’s Game Preserve” are much better then the Atlantic City streets we ended up with.
Here’s a super useful paper: we spend 15% of work in meetings (managers spend 50%!) & post-COVID meetings are up 14%. But we spend too little time trying to make meetings better, even though there’s lots of research on the topic! Here’s a review of it all: researchgate.net/publication/32…
Here’s an emoji filled summary of best practices. Before the meeting:
✅only meet if needed
👯♀️make sure to only invite people who need to be there.
🎯set clear goals & outcomes
📄have an agenda that all review in advance
⏰make it short & relevant to all invited
During the meeting...
⏱arrive on time
📋follow the agenda
🙋♀️🙋♂️everyone participates
💻📱never multitask
⚔️intervene if mood turns negative
🤪humor helps performance
🙅♀️leave time for objections
🗳Let everyone help decision-making. If a decision is made, tell everyone
A thread on an important topic that not enough people know about: the s-curve. It shows us how technologies develop, and it helps explain a lot about how and when certain technologies win, and when startups should enter a market. I'll illustrate with the history of the ebook! 1/n
The S-curve shows you how a technology's capabilities change over time and investment. But I want to start with a caveat: when and why this happens is complex. If you want to know more about those complexities, this article is a good place to start. 2/ hbs.edu/ris/Publicatio…
Technologies usually begin with an "Era of Ferment" where everyone knows a new tech is coming, but companies experiment with possible forms. In the case of e-books, there were lots of options: In-bookstore printing! Serials you paid for by the chapter! The Sony Data Discman! 3/
A tweet is about 1kb of memory*. All of the pictured things can store one tweet:
Two Babbage Analytical Engines
37 punch cards
A Russian woven electronic core memory module
This hard drive built inside Minecraft
*280 characters of up to 4 eight byte octets each in UTF-8.
For reference, the Apollo Guidance Computer, which got humans to the moon, did so with an amount of memory equivalent to 8 tweets.
Scientists have also successfully built logic gates by using swarms of soldier crabs. It takes about 80 🦀 to operate a logic gate, and there are 8 logic gates in a byte, so 640,000 crabs can be used to store a single tweet. Which seems kind of horrifying. 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀